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Starvecrow Farm

by Stanley John Weyman · English · Gutenberg #39138 · 666,817 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Starvecrow Farm

Author: Stanley John Weyman


        
Release date: March 14, 2012 [eBook #39138]
                Most recently updated: June 15, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39138

Credits: Charles Bowen


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STARVECROW FARM ***




STARVECROW FARM

By STANLEY J. WEYMAN.


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New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.




STARVECROW
FARM

BY

STANLEY J. WEYMAN

_Author of “A Gentleman of France” “The Abbess of Vlaye,”
“Count Hannibal,” “The Castle Inn,” “The Red
Cockade,” “Under the Red Robe,” etc., etc_.

_ILLUSTRATED_

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON AND BOMBAY
1905

Copyright, 1904, by

STANLEY J. WEYMAN


_All rights reserved_




Contents


 CHAPTER I. Across the Quicksands.
 CHAPTER II. A Red Waistcoat.
 CHAPTER III. A Wedding Morning.
 CHAPTER IV. Two to One.
 CHAPTER V. A Jezebel.
 CHAPTER VI. The Inquiry.
 CHAPTER VII. Captain Anthony Clyne.
 CHAPTER VIII. Starvecrow Farm.
 CHAPTER IX. Punishment.
 CHAPTER X. Henrietta in Naxos.
 CHAPTER XI. Captain Clyne’s Plan.
 CHAPTER XII. The Old Love.
 CHAPTER XIII. A Jealous Woman.
 CHAPTER XIV. The Letter.
 CHAPTER XV. The Answer.
 CHAPTER XVI. A Night Adventure.
 CHAPTER XVII. The Edge of the Storm.
 CHAPTER XVIII. Mr. Joseph Nadin.
 CHAPTER XIX. At the Farm.
 CHAPTER XX. Proof Positive.
 CHAPTER XXI. Cousin Meets Cousin.
 CHAPTER XXII. Mr. Sutton’s New Rôle.
 CHAPTER XXIII. In Kendal Gaol.
 CHAPTER XXIV. The Rôle Continued.
 CHAPTER XXV. Prison Experiences.
 CHAPTER XXVI. A Reconciliation.
 CHAPTER XXVII. Bishop Caught Napping.
 CHAPTER XXVIII. The Golden Ship.
 CHAPTER XXIX. The Dark Maid.
 CHAPTER XXX. Bess’s Triumph.
 CHAPTER XXXI. A Strange Bedroom.
 CHAPTER XXXII. The Search.
 CHAPTER XXXIII. The Smugglers’ Oven.
 CHAPTER XXXIV. In Tyson’s Kitchen.
 CHAPTER XXXV. Through The Wood.
 CHAPTER XXXVI. Two of a Race.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


They paid off the Guide under the walls of the old Priory Church at
Cartmel.

“I give you a last chance,” he said.

He neither cared nor saw who it was whom he had jostled.

The face was Stewart’s!

... he touched his brow with his whip handle.

... every head was uncovered as Clyne . . . rode to the door.

In ten minutes the road twinkled with lights.

She was leaning against the side of the window.




STARVECROW FARM




CHAPTER I
ACROSS THE QUICKSANDS


A head appeared at either window of the postchaise. Henrietta looked
forward. Her lover looked back.

The postchaise had nearly cleared the sands. Behind it the low line of
Lancashire coast was fading from sight. Before it the long green hill
of Cartmel had risen so high and drawn so near as to hide the Furness
fells. On the left, seaward, a waste of sullen shallows and quaking
sands still stretched to infinity—a thing to shudder at. But the savage
head of Warton Crag, that for a full hour had guarded the travellers’
right, had given place to the gentler outlines of Armside Knot. The
dreaded Lancashire Channels had been passed in safety, and the mounted
guide, whose task it was to lead wayfarers over these syrtes, and who
enjoyed as guerdon the life-rent of a snug farm under Cark, no longer
eyed the west with anxiety, but plashed in stolid silence towards his
evening meal.

And all was well. But the margin of safety had not been large—the
postboys’ boots still dripped, and the floor of the carriage was damp.
Seaward the pale line of the tide, which would presently sweep in one
foaming wave across the flat, and in an instant cover it half a foot
deep, was fretting abreast the point. Ten minutes later had been too
late; and the face of Henrietta’s lover, whom a few hours and a Scotch
minister were to make her husband, betrayed his knowledge of the fact.
He looked backward and westward over the dreary flat; and fascinated,
seized, possessed by the scene, he shuddered—perhaps at his own
thoughts. He would fain have bidden the postboys hasten, but he was
ashamed to give the order before her. Halfway across he had set down
the uneasiness he could not hide to the fear of pursuit, to the fear of
separation. But he could no longer do this; for it was plain to a child
that neither horse nor man would cross Cartmel sands until the tide
that was beginning to run had ebbed again.

And Henrietta looked forward. The dull grey line of coast, quickly
passing into the invisible, on which she turned her back, stood for her
past; the sun-kissed peaks and blue distances of Furness, which her
fancy still mirrored, though the Cartmel shore now hid them, stood for
the future. To those heights, beautified by haze and distance, her
heart went out, finding in them the true image of the coming life, the
true foretype of those joys, tender and mysterious, to which she was
hastening. The past, which she was abandoning, she knew: a cold home in
the house of an unfeeling sister-in-law and a brother who when he was
not hunting was tipsy—that, and the prospect of an unlovely marriage
with a man who—horror!—had had one wife already, stood for the past.
The future she did not know; but hope painted it from her brightest
palette, and the girl’s eyes filled, her lips quivered, her heart
strained towards the sympathy and love that were henceforth to be
hers—towards the happiness which she had set out to seek, and that now
for certain could not escape her. As the postchaise lumbered heavily up
the rough-paved groyne that led from the sands she shook from head to
foot. At last her feet were set upon the land beautiful. And save for
the compact which her self-respect had imposed upon her companion, she
must have given way, she must have opened all her heart, thrown herself
upon his breast and wept tears of tender anticipation.

She controlled herself. As it happened, they drew in their heads at the
same time, and his eyes—they were handsome eyes—met hers.

“Dearest!” he said.

“We are safe now?”

“Safe from pursuit. But I am not safe.”

“Not safe?”

“From your cruelty.”

His voice was velvet; and he sought to take her hand.

But she withheld it.

“No, sir,” she said, though her look was tender. “Remember our compact.
You are quite sure that they will pursue us along the great road?”

“Yes, as far as Kendal. There they will learn that we are not before
them—that we have somewhere turned aside. And they will turn back.”

“But suppose that they drive on to Carlisle—where we rejoin the north
road.”

“They will not,” he replied confidently. He had regained the plausible
air which he had lost while the terror of the sands was upon him. “And
if you fear that,” he continued, “there is the other plan, and I think
the better one. To-morrow at noon the packet leaves Whitehaven for
Scotland, The wind is fair, and by six in the afternoon we may be
ashore, and an hour later you will be mine!” And again he sought to
draw her into his arms.

But she repelled him.

“In either case,” she said, her brow slightly puckered, “we must halt
to-night at the inn of which you spoke.”

“The inn on Windermere—yes. And we can decide there, sweet, whether we
go by land or sea; whether we will rejoin the north road at Carlisle or
cross from Whitehaven to”—he hesitated an instant—“to Dumfries.”

She was romantic to the pitch of a day which valued sensibility more
highly than sense, and which had begun to read the poetry of Byron
without ceasing to read the _Mysteries of Udolpho_; and she was
courageous to the point of folly. Even now laughter gleamed under her
long lashes, and the bubblings of irresponsible youth were never very
far from her lips. Still, with much folly, with vast recklessness and
an infinitude of ignorance, she was yet no fool—though a hundred times
a day she said foolish things. In the present circumstances respect for
herself rather than distrust of her lover taught her that she stood on
slippery ways and instilled a measure of sobriety.

“At the inn,” she said, “you will put me in charge of the landlady.”
And looking through the window, she carolled a verse of a song as
irrelevant as snow in summer.

“But——” he paused.

“There is a landlady, I suppose?”

“Yes, but——”

“You will do what I say to-day,” she replied firmly—and now the fine
curves of her lips were pressed together, and she hummed no more—“if
you wish me to obey you to-morrow.”

“Dearest, you know——”

But she cut him short. “Please to say that it shall be so,” she said.

He swore that he would obey her then and always. And bursting again
into song as the carriage climbed the hill, she flung from her the mood
that had for a moment possessed her, and was a child again. She made
gay faces at him, each more tantalising than the other; gave him look
for look, each more tender than the other; and with the tips of her
dainty fingers blew him kisses in exchange for his. Her helmet-shaped
bonnet, with its huge plume of feathers, lay in her lap. The heavy
coils of her fair, almost flaxen, hair were given to view, and under
the fire of his flatteries the delicacy of colouring—for pallor it
could scarcely be called—which so often accompanies very light hair,
and was the sole defect of her beauty, gave place to blushes that fired
his blood.

But he knew something of her spirit. He knew that she had it in her to
turn back even now. He knew that he might cajole, but could never
browbeat her. And he restrained himself the more easily, as, in spite
of the passion and eloquence—some called it vapouring—which made him a
hero where thousands listened, he gave her credit for the stronger
nature. He held her childishness, her frivolity, her _naïveté_, in
contempt. Yet he could not shake off his fear of what she might do—when
she knew.


[Illustration: ] They paid off the Guide under the walls of the old
Priory Church at Cartmel


They paid off the guide under the walls of the old priory church at
Cartmel, with the children of the village crowding about the doors of
the chaise; then with a fresh team they started up the valley that
leads to the foot of Windermere lake. But now the November day was
beginning to draw in. The fell on their right took gloomier shape; on
their left a brook sopped its way through low marsh-covered fields; and
here and there the leafless limbs of trees pointed to the grey. And
first one and then the other, with the shrill cries of moor-birds in
their ears, and the fading landscape before their eyes, fell silent.
Then, had they been as other lovers, had she stood more safely, or he
been single-hearted, he had taken her in his arms and held her close,
and comforted her, and the dusk within had been but the frame and
set-off to their love.

But as it was he feared to make overtures, and they sat each in a
corner until, in sheer dread of the effect which reflection might have
on her, he asked her if she feared pursuit; adding, “Depend upon it,
darling, you need not; Sir Charles will not give a thought to this
road.”

She drummed thoughtfully with her fingers on the pane.

“I am not afraid of my brother,” she said.

“Then of whom?”

“Of Anthony,” she answered, and corrected herself hurriedly—“of Captain
Clyne, I mean. He will think of this road.”

“But he will not have had the news before noon,” Stewart answered. “It
is eighteen miles from your brother’s to the Old Hall. And besides, I
thought that he did not love you.”

“He does not,” she rejoined, “but he loves himself. He loves his pride.
And this will hit both—hard! I am not quite sure,” she continued very
slowly and thoughtfully, “that I am not a little sorry for him. He made
so certain, you see. He thought all arranged. A week to-day was the day
fixed, and—yes,” impetuously, “I am sorry for him, though I hated him
yesterday.”

Stewart was silent a moment.

“I hate him to-day,” he said.

“Why?”

His eyes sparkled.

“I hate all his kind,” he said. “They are hard as stones, stiff as
oaks, cruel as—as their own laws! A man is no man to them, unless he is
of”—he paused almost imperceptibly—“our class! A law is no law to them
unless they administer it! They see men die of starvation at their
gates, but all is right, all is just, all is for the best, as long as
they govern!”

“I don’t think you know him,” she said, somewhat stiffly.

“Oh, I know him!”

“But——”

“Oh, I know him!” he repeated, the faint note of protest in her voice
serving to excite him. “He was at Manchester. There were a hundred
thousand men out of work—starving, seeing their wives starve, seeing
their children starve. And they came to Manchester and met. And he was
there, and he was one of those who signed the order for the soldiers to
ride them down—men, women, and children, without arms, and packed so
closely that they could not flee!”

“Well,” she said pertly, “you would not have us all murdered in our
beds?”

He opened his mouth, and he shut it again. He knew that he had been a
fool. He knew that he had gone near to betraying himself. She was
nineteen, and thoughtless; she had been bred in the class he hated; she
had never heard any political doctrines save those which that class,
the governing class, held; and though twice or thrice he had essayed
faintly to imbue her with his notions of liberty and equality and
fraternity, and had pictured her with the red cap of freedom perched on
her flaxen head, the only liberty in which he had been able to interest
her had been her own!

By-and-by, in different conditions, she might be more amenable, should
he then think it worth while to convert her. For the present his
eloquence was stayed in midstream. Yet he could not be altogether
silent, for he was a man to whom words were very dear.

“Well,” he said in a lower tone, “there is something in that, sweet.
But I know worse of him than that. You may think it right to transport
a man for seven years for poaching a hare——”

“They should not poach,” she said lightly, “and they would not be
transported!”

“But you will think differently of flogging a man to death!”

Her face flushed.

“I don’t believe it!” she cried.

“On his ship in Plymouth Harbour they will tell you differently.”

“I don’t believe it!” she replied, with passion. And then, “How horrid
you are!” she continued. “And it is nearly dark! Why do you talk of
such things? You are jealous of him—that is what you are!”

He saw the wisdom of sliding back into their old relations, and he
seized the opportunity her words offered.

“Yes,” he murmured, “I am jealous of him. And why not? I am jealous of
the wind that caresses your cheek, of the carpet that feels your tread,
of the star that peeps in at your window! I am jealous of all who come
near you, or speak to you, or look at you!”

“Are you really?”—in a tone of childish delight. “As jealous as that?”

He swore it with many phrases.

“And you will be so always?” she sighed softly, leaning towards him.
“Always—Alan?”

“To eternity!” he answered. And emboldened by her melting mood, he
would have taken her hand, and perhaps more than her hand, but at that
moment the lights of the inn at Newby Bridge flashed on them suddenly,
the roar of the water as it rushed over the weirs surprised their ears,
the postboys cracked their whips, and the carriage bounded and rattled
over the steep pitch of the narrow bridge. A second or two later it
came to a stand before the inn amid a crowd of helpers and stable lads,
whose lanthorns dazzled the travellers’ eyes.

They stayed only to change horses, then were away again. But the halt
sufficed to cool his courage; and as they pounded on monotonously
through the night, the darkness and the dim distances of river and
lake—for they were approaching the shores of Windermere—produced their
natural effect on Henrietta’s feelings. She had been travelling since
early morning cooped and cramped within the narrow chaise; she had
spent the previous night in a fever of suspense and restlessness. Now,
though slowly, the gloom, the dark outlines of the woods, and that
sense of loneliness which seizes upon all who are flung for the first
time among strange surroundings, began to tell upon the spirits even of
nineteen. She did not admit the fact to herself—she would have died
before she confessed it to another; but disillusion had begun its
subtle task.

Here were all the things for which she had panted—the dear, delightful
things of which she had dreamed: the whirl of the postchaise through
the night, the crack of the whips, the cries of the postboys, the
lighted inns, the dripping woods, the fear of pursuit, the presence of
her lover! And already they were growing flat. Already the savour was
escaping from them. There were tears in her heart, tears very near her
eyes.

He could have taken her hand then, and more than her hand. For suddenly
she recognised, with a feeling nearer terror than her flighty nature
had ever experienced before, her complete dependence on him. Henceforth
love, comfort, kindness, companionship—all must come from him. She had
flung from her every stay but his, every hand but his. He was become
her all, her world. And could she trust him? Not only with her
honour—she never dreamed of doubting that—but could she trust him
afterwards? To be kind to her, to be good to her, to be generous to
her? Thoughtless, inexperienced, giddy as she was, Henrietta trembled.
A pitiful sob rose in her throat. It needed but little, very little,
and she had cast herself in abandonment on her lover’s breast and there
wept out her fears and her doubts.

But he had also his anxieties, and he let the moment pass by him
unmarked. He had reasons, other and more urgent than those he had given
her, for taking this road and for staying the night in a place whence
Whitehaven and Carlisle were equally accessible; and those reasons had
seemed good enough in the day when the fear of pursuit had swayed him.
They seemed less pertinent now. He began to wish that he had taken
another road, pursued another course. And he was deep in a brown study,
in which love had no part, when an exclamation, at once of surprise and
admiration, recalled him to the present.

They had topped a bare shoulder and come suddenly in sight of Lake
Windermere. The moon had not long risen above the hills on their right,
the water lay on their left; below them stretched a long pale mirror,
whose borrowed light, passing over the dark woods which framed it,
faintly lit and explored the stupendous fells and mountains that rose
beyond. To Stewart it was no unfamiliar or noteworthy sight; and his
eyes, after a passing glance of approval, turned to the road below them
and marked with secret anxiety the spot where two or three lights
indicated their halting-place.

But to Henrietta the sight, as unexpected as it was beautiful, appealed
in a manner never to be forgotten. She held her breath, and slowly her
eyes filled. Half subdued by fatigue and darkness, half awake to the
dangers and possibilities of her situation, she was in the mood most
fit to be moved by the tender melancholy of the scene. She was feeling
a craving for something—for something to comfort her, for something to
reassure her, for something on which to lean in the absence of all the
common things of life: and there broke on her the mystic beauty of this
moonlit lake, and it melted her. Her heart, hitherto untouched, awoke.
The compact which she had made with her lover stood for naught. The
tears running down her face, she turned to him, she held out her hands
to him.

“Kiss me!” she murmured. “And say—say you will be good to me! I have
only you now!—only you!—only you!”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her rapturously; and the embrace
was ardent enough to send the scarlet surging to her temples, to set
her heart throbbing. But the chaise was in the very act of drawing up
at the door of the inn; and it may be doubted if he tasted the full
sweetness of the occasion. A face looked in at the carriage window, on
the side farther from the lake appeared a bowing landlord, a voice
inquired, “Horses on?” The postchaise stopped.




CHAPTER II
A RED WAISTCOAT


Cheerful lights shining from the open doorway and the red-curtained
windows of the inn, illumined the road immediately before it; and if
these and the change in all the surroundings did not at once dispel the
loneliness at Henrietta’s heart, at least they drove the tears from her
eyes and the blushes from her cheeks. The cold moonlight, the
unchanging face of nature, had sobered and frightened her; the warmth
of fire and candle, the sound of voices, and the low, homely front of
the house, with its two projecting gables, reassured her. The forlorn
child who had flung herself into her lover’s arms not forty seconds
before was not to be recognised in the girl who alighted slowly and
with gay self-possession, took in the scene at a glance, and won the
hearts of ostler and stableboy by her ease and her fresh young beauty.
She was bare-headed, and her high-dressed hair, a little disordered by
the journey, gleamed in the lanthorn-light. Her eyes were like stars.
The landlord of the inn—known for twenty miles round as “Long Tom
Gilson”—saw at a glance that the missus’s tongue would run on her. He
wished that he might not be credited with his hundred-and-thirty-first
conquest!

The thought, however, did not stand between him and his duty. “Sharp,
Sam,” he cried briskly. “Fire in Mr. Rogers’s room.” Then to his
guests: “Late? No, sir, not at all. This way, ma’am. All will be ready
in a twinkling.”

But Henrietta stood smiling.

“Thank you,” she answered pleasantly, her clear young voice slightly
raised. “But I wished to be placed in the landlady’s charge. Is she
here?”

Gilson turned toward the doorway, which his wife’s portly form fitted
pretty tightly.

“Here, missus,” he cried, “the young lady wants you.”

But Mrs. Gilson was a woman who was not wont to be hurried and before
she reached the side of the carriage Stewart interposed; more roughly
and more hurriedly than seemed discreet in the circumstances.

“Let us go in, and settle that afterwards,” he said.

“No.”

“Yes,” he retorted. And he grasped the girl’s arm tightly. His voice
was low, but insistent. “Let us go in.”

But the girl only vouchsafed him a look, half wondering, half
indignant. She turned to the landlady.

“I am tired, and need no supper,” she said. “Will you take me into a
room, if you please, where I can rest at once, as we go on early
to-morrow.”

“Certainly,” the landlady answered. She was a burly, red-faced,
heavy-browed woman. “But you have come some way, ma’am. Will you not
take supper with the gentleman?”

“No.”

He interposed.

“At least let us go in!” he repeated pettishly. And there was an
agitation in his tone and manner not easy to explain, except on the
supposition that in some way she had thwarted him. “We do not want to
spend the night on the road, I suppose?”

She did not reply. But none the less, as she followed Mrs. Gilson to
the door, was she wondering what ailed him. She was unsuspicious by
nature, and she would not entertain the thought that he wished her to
act otherwise than she was acting. What was it then? Save for a burly
man in a red waistcoat who stood in a lighted doorway farther along the
front of the inn, and seemed to be watching their movements with lazy
interest, there were only the people of the inn present. And the
red-waistcoated man could hardly be in pursuit of them, for, for
certain, he was a stranger. Then what was it?

She might have turned and asked her lover; but she was offended and she
would not stoop. And before she thought better of it—or worse—she had
crossed the threshold. A warmer air, an odour of spices and lemons and
old rum, met her. On the left of the low-browed passage a half-open
door offered a glimpse of shining glass and ruddy firelight; there was
Mrs. Gilson’s snuggery, sometimes called the coach office. On the right
a room with a long table spoke of coaching meals and a groaning board.
From beyond these, from the penetralia of kitchen and pantry, came
faint indications of plenty and the spit.

A chambermaid was waiting at the foot of the narrow staircase to go
before them with lights; but the landlady took the candles herself, and
dismissed the woman with a single turn of the eye. A habit of obedience
to Mrs. Gilson was the one habit of the inn, the one common ground on
which all, from Tom Gilson to the smallest strapper in the stable, came
together.

The landlady went ponderously up before her guest and opened the door
of a dimity-hung chamber. It was small and simple, but of the cleanest.
Hid in it were rosemary and lavender; and the leafless branches of a
rose-tree whipped the diamond panes of the low, broad window. Mrs.
Gilson lighted the two wax candles—“waxes” in those days formed part of
every bill but the bagman’s. Then she turned and looked at the girl
with deliberate disapproval.

“You will take nothing, ma’am, to eat?” she said.

“No, thank you,” Henrietta answered. And then, resenting the woman’s
look, “I may as well tell you,” she continued, holding her head high,
“that we have eloped, and are going to be married to-morrow. That is
why I wished to be put in your charge.”

The landlady, with her great face frowning, continued to look at the
girl, and for a moment did not answer.

At length, “You’ve run away,” she said, “from your friends?”

Henrietta nodded loftily.

“From a distance, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Mrs. Gilson rejoined, her face continuing to express growing
disapproval, “there’s a stock of fools near and far. And if I did my
duty, young lady, there’d be one who would likely be thankful all her
life.” She took the snuffers and slowly and carefully snuffed the two
candles. “If I did my duty, I’d lock you up and keep you safe till your
friends came for you.”

“You are insolent,” the girl cried, flaming up.

“That depends,” Mrs. Gilson retorted, with the utmost coolness. “Fine
feathers make fine birds. You may be my lady, or my lady’s maid. Men
are such fools—all’s of the best that’s red and white. But I’m not so
easy.”

Henrietta raised her chin a little higher.

“Be good enough to leave the room!” she said.

But the stout woman held her ground.

“Not before I’ve said what I have to say,” she answered. “It is one
thing, and one thing only, hinders me doing what I ought to do, and
what if you were my girl I’d wish another to do. And that is—your
friends may not want you back. And then, to be married tomorrow is like
enough the best you can do for yourself! And the sooner the better!”

Henrietta’s face turned scarlet, and she stamped on the floor.

“You are a wicked, insolent woman!” she said. “You do not know your
place, nor mine. How dare you say such things to me? How dare you? Did
you hear me bid you leave the room?”

“Hoity-toity!”

“Yes, at once!”

“Very good,” Mrs. Gilson replied ponderously—“very good! But you may
find worse friends than me. And maybe one of them is downstairs now.”

“You hateful woman!” the girl cried; and had a glimpse of the
landlady’s red, frowning face as the woman turned for a last look in
the doorway. Then the door closed, and she was left alone—alone with
her thoughts.

Her face burned, her neck tingled. She was very, very angry, and a
little frightened. This was a scene in her elopement which anticipation
had not pictured. It humiliated her—and scared her. To-morrow, no
doubt, all would be well; all would be cheerfulness, tenderness,
sunshine; all would be on the right basis. But in the meantime the
sense of forlornness which had attacked her in the chaise returned on
her as her anger cooled, and with renewed strength. Her world, the
world of her whole life up to daybreak of this day, was gone forever.
In its place she had only this bare room with its small-paned casement
and its dimity hangings and its clean scent. Of course _he_ was below,
and he was the world to her, and would make up a hundredfold what she
had resigned for him. But he was below, he was absent; and meantime her
ear and her heart ached for a tender word, a kind voice, a look of
love. At least, she thought, he might have come under her window, and
whistled the air that had been the dear signal for their meetings. Or
he might have stood a while and chatted with her, and shown her that he
was not offended. The severest prude, even that dreadful woman who had
insulted her, could not object to that!

But he did not come. Of course he was supping—what things men were! And
then, out of sheer loneliness, her eyes filled, and her thoughts of him
grew tender and more humble. She dwelt on him no longer as her
conquest, her admirer, the prize of her bow and spear, subject to her
lightest whim and her most foolish caprice; but as her all, the one to
whom she must cling and on whom she must depend. She thought of him as
for a brief while she had thought of him in the chaise. And she
wondered with a chill of fear if she would be left after marriage as
she was left now. She had heard of such things, but in the pride of her
beauty, and his subjection, she had not thought that they could happen
to her. Now—— But instead of dwelling on a possibility which frightened
her, she vowed to be very good to him—good and tender and loyal, and a
true wife. They were resolutions that a trifling temptation, an hour’s
neglect or a cross word, might have overcome. But they were honest,
they were sincere, they were made in the soberest moment that her young
life had ever known; and they marked a step in development, a point in
that progress from girlhood to womanhood which so few hours might see
complete.

Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson had returned to her snuggery, wearing a face
that, had the lemons and other comforts about her included cream, must
have turned it sour. That snuggery, it may be, still exists in the
older part of the Low Wood Inn. In that event it should have a value.
For to it Mr. Samuel Rogers, the rich London banker, would sometimes
condescend from his apartments in the south gable; and with him Mr.
Kirkpatrick Sharp, a particular gentleman who sniffed a little at the
rum; or Sir James Mackintosh, who, rumour had it, enjoyed some
reputation in London as a writer. At times, too, Mr. Southey, Poet
Laureate elsewhere, but here Squire of Greta Hall, would stop on his
way to visit his neighbour at Storrs—no such shorthorns in the world as
Mr. Bolton’s at Storrs; and not seldom he brought with him a London
gentleman, Mr. Brougham, whose vanity in opposing the Lowther interest
at the late election had almost petrified Mrs. Gilson. Mr. Brougham
called himself a Whig, but Mrs. Gilson held him little better than a
Radical—a kind of cattle seldom seen in those days outside the dock of
an assize court. Or sometimes the visitor was that queer,
half-moithered Mr. Wordsworth at Rydal; or Mr. Wilson of Elleray with
his great voice and his homespun jacket. He had a sort of name too; but
if he did anything better than he fished, the head ostler was a
Dutchman!

The visits of these great people, however—not that Mrs. Gilson blenched
before them, she blenched before nobody short of Lord Lonsdale—had
place in the summer. To-night the landlady’s sanctum, instead of its
complement of favourite guests gathered to stare at Mr. Southey’s last
order for “Horses on!” boasted but a single tenant. Even he sat where
the landlady did not at once see him; and it was not until she had cast
a log on the dogs with a violence which betrayed her feelings that he
announced his presence by a cough.

“There’s the sign of a good house,” he said with approval. “Never
unprepared!—never unprepared! Come late, come early—coach, chaise, or
gig—it is all one to a good house.”

“Umph!”

“It is a pleasure to sit by”—he waved his pipe with unction—“and to see
a thing done properly!”

“Ay, it’s a pleasure to many to sit by,” the landlady answered with
withering sarcasm. “It’s an easy way of making a living—especially if
you are waiting for what doesn’t come. Put a red waistcoat on old Sam
the postboy, and he’d sit by and see as well as another!”

The man in the red waistcoat chuckled.

“I’m glad they don’t take you into council at Bow Street, ma’am!” he
said.

“They might do worse.”

“They might do better,” he rejoined. “They might take you into the
force! I warrant”—with a look of respectful admiration—“if they did
there’s little would escape you. Now that young lady?” He indicated the
upper regions with his pipe. “Postboys say she came from Lancaster. But
from where before that?”

“Wherever she’s from, she did not tell me!” Mrs. Gilson snapped.

“Ah!”

“And what is more, if she had, I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Oh, come, come, ma’am!” Mr. Bishop was mildly shocked. “Oh, come,
ma’am! That is not like you. Think of the King and his royal
prerogative!”

“Fiddlesticks!”

Mr. Bishop looked quite staggered.

“You don’t mean it,” he said—“you don’t indeed. You would not have the
Radicals and Jacobins ramping over the country, shooting honest men in
their shops and burning and ravaging, and—and generally playing the
devil?”

“I suppose you think it is you that stops them?”

“No, ma’am, no,” with a modest smile. “I don’t stop them. I leave that
to the yeomanry—old England’s bulwark and their country’s pride! But
when the yeomanry ’ve done their part, I take them, and the law passes
upon them. And when they have been hung or transported and an example
made, then you sleep comfortably in your beds. That is what I do. And I
think I may say that next to Mr. Nadin of Manchester, who is the
greatest man in our line out of London, I have done as much in that way
as another.”

Mrs. Gilson sniffed contemptuously.

“Well,” she said, “if you have never done more than you’ve done since
you’ve been here, it’s a wonder the roof’s on! Though what you expected
to do, except keep a whole skin, passes me! There’s the _Chronicle_ in
today, and such talks of riots at Glasgow and Paisley, and such
meetings here and alarms there, it is a wonder to me”—with
sarcasm—“they can do without you! To judge by what I hear, Lancashire
way is just a kettle of troubles and boiling over, and bread that price
everybody is wanting to take the old King’s crown off his head.”

“And his head off his body, ma’am!” Mr. Bishop added solemnly.

“So that it’s little good you and your yeomanry seem to have done at
Manchester, except get yourselves abused!”

“Ma’am, the King’s crown is on his head,” Mr. Bishop retorted, “and his
head is on his body!”

“Well? Not that his head is much good to him, poor mad gentleman!”

“And King Louis, ma’am, years ago—what of him? The King of France,
ma’am? Crown gone, head gone—all gone! And why? Because there was not a
good blow struck in time, ma’am! Because, poor, foolish foreigner, he
had no yeomanry and no Bow Street, ma’am! But the Government, the
British Government, is wiser. They are brave men—brave noblemen, I
should say,” Mr. Bishop amended with respect,—“but with treason and
misprision of treason stalking the land, with the lower orders, that
should behave themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters,
turned to ramping, roaring Jacobins seeking whom they may devour, and
whose machine they may break, my lords would not sleep in their
beds—no, not they, brave men as they are—if it were not for the
yeomanry and the runners.” He had to pause for breath.

Mrs. Gilson coughed dryly.

“Leather’s a fine thing,” she said, “if you believe the cobbler.”

“Well,” Mr. Bishop answered, nodding his head confidently, “it’s so far
true you’d do ill without it.”

But Mrs. Gilson was equal to the situation.

“Ay, underfoot,” she said. “But everything in its place. My man, he be
mad upon tod-hunting; but I never knew him go to Manchester ’Change to
seek one.”

“No?” Mr. Bishop held his pipe at arm’s length, and smiled at it
mysteriously. “Yet I’ve seen one there,” he continued, “or in such
another place.”

“Where?”

“Common Garden, London.”

“It was in a box, then.”

“It was, ma’am,” Mr. Bishop replied, with smiling emphasis. “It was in
a box—‘safe bind, safe find,’ ma’am. That’s the motto of my line, and
that was it precisely! More by token it’s not outside the bounds of
possibility you may see”—he glanced towards the door as he knocked his
pipe against his top-boot—“one of my tods in a box before morning.”

Mrs. Gilson shot out her underlip and looked at him darkly. She never
stooped to express surprise; but she was surprised. There was no
mistaking the ring of triumph in the runner’s tone; yet of all the
unlikely things within the landlady’s range none seemed more unlikely
than that he should flush his game there. She had asked herself more
than once why he was there; and why no coach stopped, no chaise changed
horses, no rider passed or bagman halted, without running the gauntlet
of his eye. For in that country of lake and mountain were neither riots
nor meetings; and though Lancashire lay near, the echoes of strife
sounded but weakly and fitfully across Cartmel Sands. Mills might be
burning in Cheadle and Preston, men might be drilling in Bolland and
Whitewell, sedition might be preaching in Manchester, all England might
be in a flame with dear bread and no work, Corbett’s Twopenny Register
and Orator Hunt’s declamations—but neither the glare nor the noise had
much effect on Windermere. Mr. Bishop’s presence there seemed
superfluous therefore; seemed—— But before she could come to the end of
her logic, her staid waiting-maid appeared, demanding four pennyworth
of old Geneva for the gentleman in Mr. Rogers’s room; and when she was
serving, Mrs. Gilson took refuge in incredulity.

“A man must talk if he can’t do,” she said—“if he’s to live.”

Mr. Bishop smiled, and patted his buckskin breeches with confidence.

“You’ll believe ma’am,” he said, “when you see him walk into the coach
with the handcuffs on his wrists.”

“Ay, I shall!”

The innuendo in the landlady’s tone was so plain that her husband, who
had entered while she was rinsing the noggin in which she had measured
the gin, chuckled audibly. She turned an awful stare on him, and he
collapsed. The Bow Street runner was less amenable to discipline.

“You sent the lad, Tom?” he asked.

The landlord nodded, with an apprehensive eye on his wife.

“He should be back”—Mr. Bishop consulted a huge silver watch—“by
eleven.”

“Ay, sure.”

“Where has he gone?” Mrs. Gilson asked, with an ominous face.

She seldom interfered in stable matters; but if she chose, it was
understood that no department was outside her survey.

“Only to Kendal with a message for me,” Bishop answered.

“At this time of the night?”

“Ma’am”—Mr. Bishop rose and tapped his red waistcoat with meaning,
almost with dignity—“the King has need of him. The King—God bless and
restore him to health—will pay, and handsomely. For the why and the
wherefore he has gone, his majesty’s gracious prerogative is to say
nothing”—with a smile. “That is the rule in Bow Street, and for this
time we’ll make it the rule under Bow Fell, if you please. Moreover,
what he took I wrote, ma’am, and as he cannot read and I sent it to one
who will give it to another, his majesty will enjoy his prerogative as
he should!”

There was a spark in Mrs. Gilson’s eye. Fortunately the runner saw it,
and before she could retort he slipped out, leaving the storm to break
about her husband’s head. Some who had known Mr. Gilson in old days
wondered how he bore his life, and why he did not hang himself—Mrs.
Gilson’s tongue was so famous. And more said he had reason to hang
himself. Only a few, and they the wisest, noted that he who had once
been Long Tom Gilson grew fat and rosy; and these quoted a proverb
about the wind and the shorn lamb. One—it was Bishop himself, but he
had known them no more than three weeks—said nothing when the question
was raised, but tapped his nose and winked, and looked at Long Tom as
if he did not pity him overmuch.




CHAPTER III
A WEDDING MORNING


In one particular at least the Bow Street runner was right. The
Government which ruled England in that year, 1819, was made up of brave
men; whether they were wise men or great men, or far-seeing men, is
another question. The peace which followed Waterloo had been welcomed
with enthusiasm. Men supposed that it would put an end to the enormous
taxation and the strain which the nation had borne so gallantly during
twenty years of war. The goddess of prosperity, with her wings of
silver and her feathers of gold, was to bless a people which had long
known only paper money. In a twinkling every trade was to flourish,
every class to be more comfortable, every man to have work and wage,
plenty and no taxes.

Instead, there ensued a period of want and misery almost without a
parallel. During the war the country had been self-supporting, wheat
had risen, land suitable and unsuitable had been enclosed and tilled.
Bread had been dear but work had been plentiful. Now, at the prospect
of open ports, wheat fell, land was left derelict, farmers were ruined,
labourers in thousands went on the rates. Nor among the whirling looms
of Lancashire or the furnaces of Staffordshire were things better.
Government orders ceased with the war, while the exhausted Continent
was too poor to buy. Here also thousands were cast out of work.

The cause of the country’s misfortunes might be this or that. Whatever
it was, the working classes suffered greater hardships than at any time
during the war; and finding no anxiety to sympathise in a Parliament
which represented their betters, began to form—ominous sign—clubs, and
clubs within clubs, and to seek redress by unlawful means. An open
rising broke out in the Fen country, and there was fighting at
Littleport and Ely. There were riots at Spa Fields in London, where
murder was committed; and there were riots again, which almost amounted
to a rebellion, in Derbyshire. At Stock-port and in Birmingham immense
mob meetings took place. In the northern counties the sky was reddened
night after night by incendiary fires. In the Midlands looms were
broken and furnaces extinguished. In Lancashire and Yorkshire the air
was sullen with strikes and secret plottings, and spies, and cold and
famine.

In the year 1819 things came to a kind of head. There was a meeting at
Manchester in August. It was such a meeting as had never been seen in
England. There were sixty thousand at it, there were eighty thousand,
there were ninety thousand—some said one, some said the other. It was
so large, at any rate, that it was difficult to say that it was not
dangerous; and beyond doubt many there would have snatched at the least
chance of rapine. Be that as it may, the magistrates, in the face of so
great a concourse, lost their heads. They ordered a small force of
yeomanry to disperse the gathering. The yeomanry became entangled—a
second charge was needful: the multitude fled every way. In ten minutes
the ground was clear; but six lives were lost and seventy persons were
injured.

At once all England was cleft into parties—that which upheld the
charge, and that which condemned it. Feelings which had been confined
to the lower orders spread to the upper; and while from this date the
section which was to pass the Reform Bill took new shape, underground
more desperate enterprises were breeding. Undismayed the people met at
Paisley and at Glasgow, and at each place there were collisions with
the soldiery.

Mr. Bishop had grounds, therefore, for his opinion of the Government of
which he shared the favour with the yeomanry—their country’s bulwark
and its pride. But it is a far cry to Windermere, and no offset from
the storm which was convulsing Lancashire stirred the face of the lake
when Henrietta opened her window next morning and looked out on the day
which was to change all for her. The air was still, the water grey and
smooth, no gleam of sun showed. Yet the general aspect was mild; and
would have been cheerful, if the more distant prospect which for the
first time broke upon Henrietta’s eyes had not raised it and her
thoughts to the sublime. Beyond the water, above the green slopes and
wooded knobs which fringed the lake, rose, ridge behind ridge, a wall
of mountains. It stretched from the Peak of Coniston on the left, by
the long snow-flecked screes of Bow Fell, to the icy points of the
Langdales on the right—a new world, remote, clear, beautiful, and
still: so still, so remote, that it seemed to preach a sermon—to calm
the hurry of her morning thoughts, and the tumult of youth within her.
She stood awhile in awe. But her hair was about her shoulders, she was
only half-dressed; and by-and-by, when her first surprise waned, she
bethought herself that _he_ might be below, and she drew back from the
window with a blush. What more likely, what more loverlike, than that
he should be below? Waiting—on this morning which was to crown his
hopes—for the first sight of her face, the first opening of her
lattice, the gleam of her white arm on the sill? Had it been summer,
and had the rose-tree which framed the window been in bloom, what joy
to drop with trembling fingers a bud to him, and to know that he would
treasure it all his life—her last maiden gift! And he? Surely he would
have sent her an armful to await her rising, that as she dressed she
might plunge her face into their perfume, and silently plighting her
troth to him, renew the pure resolves which she had made in the night
hours!

But when she peeped out shyly, telling herself that she was foolish to
blush, and that the time for blushing was past, she failed to discover
him. There was a girl—handsome after a dark fashion—seated on a low
wall on the farther side of the road; and a group of four or five men
were standing in front of the inn door, talking in excited tones.
Conceivably he might be one of the men, for she could hear them better
than she could see them—the door being a good deal to one side. But
when she had cautiously opened her window and put out her head—her hair
by this time being dressed—he was not among them.

She was drawing in her head, uncertain whether to pout or not, when her
eyes met those of the young woman on the wall; and the latter smiled.
Possibly she had noted the direction of Henrietta’s glance, and drawn
her inference. At any rate, her smile was so marked and so malicious
that Henrietta felt her cheek grow hot, and lost no time in drawing
back and closing the window.

“What a horrid girl!” she exclaimed.

Still, after the first flush of annoyance, she would have thought no
more of it—would indeed have laughed at herself for her fancy—if Mrs.
Gilson’s strident voice had not at that moment brought the girl to her
feet.

“Bess! Bess Hinkson!” the landlady cried, apparently from the doorway.
“Hast come with the milk? Then come right in and let me have it? What
are you gaping at there, you gaby? What has’t to do with thee? I do
think”—with venom—“the world is full of fools!”

The girl with a sullen air took up a milk-pail that stood beside her;
she wore the short linsey petticoat of the rustic of that day, and a
homespun bodice. Her hair, brilliantly black, and as thick as a horse’s
mane, was covered only by a handkerchief knotted under her chin.

“Bess Hinkson? What a horrid name!” Henrietta muttered as she watched
her cross the road. She did not dream that she would ever see the girl
again: the more as the men’s voices—she was nearly ready to
descend—fixed her attention next. She caught a word, then listened.

“The devil’s in it if he’s not gone Whitehaven way!” one said. “That’s
how he’s gone! Through Carlisle, say you? Not he!”

“But without a horse? He’d no horse.”

“And what if he’d not?” the first speaker retorted, with the impatience
of superior intellect. “It’s Tuesday, the day of the Man packet-boat,
and he’d be away in her.”

“But the packet don’t leave Whitehaven till noon,” a third struck in.
“And they’ll be there and nab him before that. S’help me, he has not
gone Whitehaven way!”

“Maybe he’d take a boat?”

“He’d lack the time”—with scorn.

“He’s took a boat here,” another maintained. “That’s what he has done.
He’s took a boat here and gone down in the dark to Newby Bridge.”

“But there’s not a boat gone!” another speaker retorted in triumph.
“What do you say to that?”

So far Henrietta’s ear followed the argument; but her mind lagged at
the point where the matter touched her.

“The Man packet-boat?” she thought, as she tied the last ribbon at her
neck and looked sideways at her appearance in the squat, filmy mirror.
“That must be the boat to the Isle of Man. It leaves Whitehaven the
same day as the Scotch boat, then. Perhaps there is but one, and it
goes on to the Isle of Man. And I shall go by it. And then—and then——”

A knock at the door severed the thread, and drove the unwonted languor
from her eyes. She cast a last look at her reflection in the glass, and
turned herself about that she might review her back-hair. Then she
swept the table with her eye, and began to stuff this and that into her
bandbox. The knock was repeated.

“I am coming,” she cried. She cast one very last look round the room,
and, certain that she had left nothing, took up her bonnet and a shawl
which she had used for a wrap over her riding-dress. She crossed the
room towards the door. As she raised her hand to the latch, a smile
lurked in the dimples of her cheeks. There was a gleam of fun in her
eyes; the lighter side of her was uppermost again.

It was not her lover, however, who stood waiting outside, but Modest
Ann—she went commonly by that name—the waiting-maid of the inn, who was
said to mould herself on her mistress and to be only a trifle less
formidable when roused. The two were something alike, for the maid was
buxom and florid; and fame told of battles between them whence no
ordinary woman, no ordinary tongue, no mortal save Mrs. Gilson, could
have issued victorious. Fame had it also that Modest Ann remained after
her defeat only by reason of an attachment, held by most to be
hopeless, to the head ostler. And for certain, severe as she was, she
permitted some liberty of speech on the subject.

Henrietta, however, did not know that here was another slave of love;
and her face fell.

“Is Mr. Stewart waiting?” she asked.

“No, miss,” the woman answered, civilly enough, but staring as if she
could never see enough of her. “But Mrs. Gilson will be glad if you’ll
speak to her.”

Henrietta raised her eyebrows. It was on the tip of her tongue to
answer, “Then let her come to me!” But she remembered that these people
did not know who she was—knew indeed nothing of her. And she answered
instead: “I will come. Where is she?”

“This way, miss. I’ll show you the way.”

Henrietta wondered, as the woman conducted her along several low-ceiled
passages, and up and down odd stairs, and past windows which disclosed
the hill rising immediately at the back of the house, what the landlady
wanted.

“She is an odious woman!” she thought, with impatience. “How horrid she
was to me last night! If ever there was a bully, she is one! And this
creature looks not much better!”

Modest Ann, turning her head at the moment, belied the ill opinion by
pointing out a step in a dark corner.

“There is a stair here, miss,” she said. “Take care.”

“Thank you,” Henrietta answered in her clear, girlish voice. “Is Mr.
Stewart with Mrs.—— What’s her name?”

“Mrs. Gilson? No, miss.”

And pausing, the woman opened a door, and made way for Henrietta to
enter.

At that instant—and strange to say, not before—a dreadful suspicion
leapt up in the girl’s brain. What if her brother had followed her, and
was there? Or worse still, Captain Clyne? What if she were summoned to
be confronted with them and to be taken home in shameful durance, after
the fashion of a naughty child that had behaved badly and was in
disgrace? The fire sprang to her eyes, her cheeks burnt. It was too
late to retreat; but her pretty head went up in the air, and her look
as she entered spoke flat rebellion. She swept the room with a glance
of flame.

However, there was no one to be burned up: no brother, no slighted,
abandoned suitor. In the room, a good-sized, pleasant room, looking on
the lake, were only Mrs. Gilson, who stood beside the table, which was
laid for breakfast, and a strange man. The man was gazing from the
window, but he turned abruptly, disclosing a red waistcoat, as her eye
fell on him. She looked from one to the other in great surprise, in
growing surprise. What did the man there?

“Where is Mr. Stewart?” she asked, her frigid tone expressing her
feelings. “Is he not here?”

Mrs. Gilson seemed about to answer, but the man forestalled her.

“No, miss,” he said, “he is not.”

“Where is he?”

She asked the question with undisguised sharpness.

Mr. Bishop nodded like a man well pleased.

“That is the point, miss,” he answered—“precisely. Where is he?”




CHAPTER IV
TWO TO ONE


Henrietta, high-spirited and thoughtless, was more prone to anger than
to fear, to resentment than to patience. But all find something
formidable in the unknown; and the presence of this man who spoke with
so much aplomb, and referred to her lover as if he had some concern in
him, was enough to inspire her with fear and set her on her guard.
Nevertheless, she could not quite check the first impulse to
resentment; the man’s very presence was a liberty, and her tone when
she spoke betrayed her sense of this.

“I have no doubt,” she said, “that Mr. Stewart can be found if you wish
to see him.” She turned to Mrs. Gilson. “Be good enough,” she said, “to
send some one in search of him.”

“I have done that already,” the man Bishop answered.

The landlady, who did not move, seemed tongue-tied. But she did not
take her eyes off the girl.

Henrietta frowned. She threw her bonnet and shawl on a side-table.

“Be good enough to send again, then,” she said, turning and speaking in
the indifferent tone of one who was wont to have her orders obeyed. “He
is probably within call. The chaise is ordered for ten.”

Bishop advanced a step and tapped the palm of one hand with the fingers
of the other.

“That is the point, miss!” he said impressively. “You’ve hit it. The
chaise is ordered for ten. It is nine now, within a minute—and the
gentleman cannot be found.”

“Cannot be found?” she echoed, in astonishment at his familiarity.
“Cannot be found?” She turned imperiously to Mrs. Gilson. “What does
this person mean?” she said. And her tone was brave. But the colour
came and went in her cheeks, and the first flutter of alarm darkened
her eyes.

The landlady found her voice.

“He means,” she said bluntly, “that he did not sleep in his bed last
night.”

“Mr. Stewart?”

“The gentleman who came with you.”

“Oh, but,” Henrietta cried, “you must be jesting?” She would not, she
could not, give way to the doubt that assailed her.

“It is no jest,” Bishop answered gravely, and with something like pity
in his voice. For the girl looked very fair and very young, and wore
her dignity prettily. “It is no jest, miss, believe me. But perhaps we
could read the riddle—we should know more, at any rate—if you were to
tell us from what part you came yesterday.”

But she had her wits about her, and she was not going to tell them
that! No, no! Moreover, on the instant she had a thought—that this was
no jest, but a trick, a cruel, cowardly trick, to draw from her the
knowledge which they wanted, and which she must not give! Beyond doubt
that was it; she snatched thankfully at the notion. This odious woman,
taking advantage of Stewart’s momentary absence, had called in the man,
and thought to bully her, a young girl in a strange place, out of the
information which she had wished to get the night before.

The impertinents! But she would be a match for them.

“That is my affair,” she said.

“But——”

“And will remain so!” she continued warmly. “For the rest, I am
inclined to think that this is a trap of some sort! If so, you may be
sure that Mr. Stewart will know how to resent it, and any impertinence
offered to me. You”—she turned suddenly upon Mrs. Gilson—“you ought to
be ashamed of yourself!”

Mrs. Gilson nodded oracularly.

“I am ashamed of somebody,” she said.

The girl thought that she was gaining the advantage.

“Then at once,” she said, “let Mr. Stewart know that I am waiting for
him. Do you hear, madam?” she stamped the floor with her foot, and
looked the pretty fury to the life. “And see that this person leaves
the room. Good-morning, sir. You will hear from Mr. Stewart what I
think of your intrusion.”

Bishop opened his mouth to reply. But he caught Mrs. Gilson’s eye; and
by a look, such a look as appalled even the Bow Street runner’s stout
heart, she indicated the door. After a second of hesitation he passed
out meekly.

When he was gone, “Very good, miss,” the landlady said in the tone of
one who restrained her temper with difficulty—“very good. But if you’re
to be ready you’d best eat your breakfast—if, that is, it is good
enough for you!” she added. And with a very grim face she swept from
the room and left Henrietta in possession of the field.

The girl sprang to the window and looked up and down the road. She had
the same view of the mild autumn morning, of the grey lake and distant
range of hills which had calmed her thoughts an hour earlier. But the
beauty of the scene availed nothing now. She was flushed with
vexation—impatient, resentful. Where was he? He was not in sight. Then
where could he be? And why did he leave her? Did he think that he need
no longer press his suit, that the need for _pettis soins_ and
attentions was over? Oh, but she would show him! And in a moment all
the feelings of the petted, spoiled girl were up in arms.

“They are horrid!” she cried, angry tears in her eyes. “It’s an
outrage—a perfect outrage! And he is no better. How dare he leave me,
this morning of all mornings?”

On which there might have stolen into her mind—so monstrous did his
neglect seem—a doubt, a suspicion; the doubt and the suspicion which
she repelled a few minutes earlier. But, as she turned, her eyes fell
on the breakfast-table; and vexation was not proof against a healthy
appetite.

“I will show him,” she thought resentfully, “that I am not so dependent
on him as he thinks. I shall not wait—I shall take my breakfast. That
odious woman was right for once.”

And she sat down in the seat placed for her. But as quickly she was up
again, and at the oval glass over the mantel—where Samuel Rogers had
often viewed his cadaverous face—to inspect herself and be sure that
she was looking her best, so that _his_ despair, when he came and found
her cold and distant, would be the deeper. Soon satisfied, she
returned, smiling dangerously, to her seat; and this time she fell-to
upon the eggs and girdle-cakes, and the home-cured ham, and the tea at
ten shillings a pound. The room had a window to the lake and a second
window which looked to the south and was not far from the first. Though
low-ceiled, it was of a fair size, with a sunk cupboard, with glazed
upper doors, on each side of the fireplace, and cushioned seats in the
window-places. In a recess near the door—the room was full of
corners—were book-shelves; and on the other side of the door stood a
tall clock with a very pale face. The furniture was covered with some
warm red stuff, well worn; and an air of that snug comfort which was
valued by Englishmen of the day pervaded all, and went well with the
scent of the China tea.

But neither tea nor comfort, nor the cheerful blaze on the hearth,
could long hold Henrietta’s thoughts; nor resentment repress her
anxiety. Presently she began to listen after every mouthful: her fork
was as often suspended as at work. Her pretty face grew troubled and
her brow more deeply puckered, until her wandering eye fell on the
clock, and she saw that the slowly jerking hand was on the verge of the
half-hour.

Then she sprang up, honestly frightened. She flew to the window that
looked on the lake and peered out anxiously; thence to the side window,
but she got no glimpse of him. She came back distracted to the table
and stood pressing her hands to her eyes. What if they were right, and
he had not slept in his bed? What if something had happened to him? But
that was impossible! Impossible! Things did not happen on such mornings
as this! On wedding mornings! Yet if that were the case, and they had
sent for her that they might break it to her—and then their hearts,
even that woman’s heart, had failed them? What—what then?

She was trying to repel the thought when she fancied that she heard a
sound at the door, and with a gasp of relief she looked up. If he had
entered at that moment, she would have flung herself into his arms and
forgiven all and forgotten all. But he did not enter, and her heart
sank again, and lower. She went slowly to the door and listened, and
found that the sound which she had heard was caused by the whispering
of persons outside.

She summoned her pride to her aid then. She opened the door to its full
extent and walked back to the table, and turning, waited haughtily for
them to enter. But to speak, to command her voice, was harder, and it
was all she could do to murmur,

“Something has happened to him”—her lip fluttered ominously—“and you
have come to tell me?”

“Nothing that I know of,” Bishop answered cheerfully. He and the
landlady had walked in and closed the door behind them. “Nothing at
all.”

“No?” She could hardly believe him.

“Not the least thing in life, miss,” he repeated. “He’s alive and well
for what I know—alive and well!”

She sat down on a chair that stood beside her, and the colour flowed
back to her cheeks. She laughed weakly.

“I was afraid that something had happened,” she murmured.

“No,” Mr. Bishop answered, more seriously, “it’s not that. It’s not
that, miss. But all the same it’s trouble. Now if you were to tell me,”
he continued, leaning forward persuasively, “where you come from, I
need have hardly a word with you. I can see you’re a lady; your friends
will come; and, s’help me, in six months you’ll have your matie again,
and not know it happened!

“I shall not tell you,” she said.

The officer shook his head, surprised by her firmness.

“Come now, miss—be advised,” he urged. “Be reasonable. Just think for
once that others may know better than you, and save me the
trouble—that’s a good young lady.”

But the wheedling appeal, the familiar tone, grated on her. Her
fingers, tapping on the table, betrayed impatience as well as alarm.

“I do not understand you,” she said, with some return of her former
distance. “If nothing has happened to Mr. Stewart, I do not understand
what you can have to say to me, nor why you are here.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, miss,” he said, “if you must have it, you must. I’m bound to say
you are not a young lady to take a hint.”

That frightened her.

“If nothing has happened to him——” she murmured, and looked from one to
the other; from Mr. Bishop’s smug face to the landlady’s stolid visage.

“It’s not what has happened to him,” the runner answered bluntly. “It
is what is likely to happen to him.”

He drew from his pocket as he spoke a large leather case, unstrapped
it, and put the strap, which would have handily spliced a cart-trace of
these days, between his teeth. Then he carefully selected from the mass
of papers which the case contained a single letter. It was written, as
the letters of that day were written, on three sides of a square sheet
of coarsish paper. The fourth side served for envelope—that is, it bore
the address and seal. But Bishop was careful to fold the letter in such
a way that these and the greater part of the writing were hidden. He
proffered the paper, so arranged, to Henrietta.

“D’you know the handwriting,” he asked, “of that letter, miss?”

She had watched his actions with fascinated eyes, and could not think,
could not imagine, whither they tended. She was really frightened now.
But her mettle was high; she had the nerves of youth, and she hid her
dismay. The hand with which she took the letter was steady as a rock,
the manner with which she looked at it composed; but no sooner had her
eyes fallen on the writing than she uttered an exclamation, and the
colour rose to her cheeks.

“How did you get this?” she cried.

“No, miss, no,” the runner answered. “One at a time. The question is,
Do you know the fist? The handwriting, I mean. But I see you do.”

“It is Mr. Stewart’s,” she answered.

He glanced at Mrs. Gilson as if to bespeak her attention.

“Just so,” he said. “It is Mr. Stewart’s. And I warrant you have others
like it, and could prove the fact if it were needed. No—don’t read it,
miss, if you please,” he continued. “You can tell me without that
whether the gentleman has any friends in these parts.”

“None.”

“That you know of?”

“I never heard of any,” she answered. Her astonishment was so great
that she did not now think of refusing to answer. And besides, here was
his handwriting. And why did he not come? The clock was on the point of
striking; at this hour, at this minute, they should have been leaving
the door of the inn.

“No, miss,” Bishop answered, exchanging a look with the landlady. “Just
so, you’ve never heard of any. Then one more question, if you please.
You are going north, to Scotland, to be married to-day? Now which way,
I wonder?”

She frowned at him in silence. She began to see his drift.

“By Keswick and Carlisle?” he continued, watching her face. “Or by
Kendal and Penrith? Or by Cockermouth and Whitehaven? But no. There’s
only the Isle of Man packet out of Whitehaven.”

“It goes on to Dumfries,” she said. The words escaped her in spite of
herself.

He smiled as he shook his head.

“No,” he said; “it’d be a very long way round if it did. But Mr.
Stewart told you that, did he? I see he did. Well, you’ve had an
escape, miss. That’s all I can say.”

The colour rose to her very brow, but her eyes met his boldly.

“How?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“How?” he repeated. “If you knew, miss, who the man was—your Mr.
Stewart—you’d know how—and what you have escaped!”

“Who he was?” she muttered.

“Ay, who he was!” he retorted. “I can tell you this at least, young
lady,” he added bluntly, “he’s the man that’s very badly
wanted—uncommonly badly wanted!”—with a grin—“in more places than one,
but nowhere more than where he came from.”

“Wanted?” she said, the colour fading in her cheek. “For what? What do
you mean?”

“For what?”

“That is what I asked.”

His face was a picture of importance and solemnity. He looked at the
landlady as much as to say, “See how I will prostrate her!” But nothing
indicated his sense of the avowal he was going to make so much as the
fact that instead of raising his voice he lowered it.

“You shall have the answer, miss, though I thought to spare you,” he
said. “He’s wanted for being an uncommon desperate villain, I am sorry
to say. For treason, and misprision of treason, and conspiracy. Ay, but
that’s the man you’ve come away with,” shaking his head solemnly. “He’s
wanted for bloody conspiracy—ay, it is so indeed—equal to any Guy
Fawkes, against my lord the King, his crown and dignity! Seven
indictments—and not mere counts, miss—have been found against him, and
those who were with him, and him the worst! And when he’s taken, as
he’s sure to be taken by-and-by, he’ll suffer!” And Mr. Bishop nodded
portentously.

Her face was quite white now.

“Mr. Stewart?” she gasped.

“You call him Stewart,” the runner replied coolly. “I call him
Walterson—Walterson the younger. But he has passed by a capful of
names. Anyway, he’s wanted for the business in Spa Fields in ’16, and
half a dozen things besides!”

The colour returned to Henrietta’s cheeks with a rush. Her fine eyes
glowed, her lips parted.

“A conspirator!” she murmured. “A conspirator!” She fondled the word as
if it had been “love” or “kisses.” “I suppose, then,” she continued,
with a sidelong look at Bishop, “if he were taken he would lose his
life?”

“Sure as eggs!”

Henrietta drew a deep breath; and with the same sidelong look:

“He would be beheaded—in the Tower?”

The runner laughed with much enjoyment.

“Lord save your innocent heart, miss,” he said—“no! He would just hang
outside Newgate.”

She shuddered violently at that. The glow of eye and cheek faded, and
tears rose instead. She walked to a window, and with her back to them
dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. Then she turned.

“Is that all?” she said.

“Good God!” Bishop cried. He stared, nonplussed. “Is that all?” he
said. “Would you have more?”

“Neither more nor less,” she answered—between tears and smiles, if his
astonished eyes did not deceive him. “For now I know—I know why he left
me, why he is not here.”

“Good lord!”

“If you thought, sir,” she continued, drawing herself up and speaking
with indignation, “that because he was in danger, because he was
proscribed, because a price was set on his head, I should desert him,
and betray him, and sell his secrets to you—I, his wife—you were indeed
mistaken!”

“But damme!” Mr. Bishop cried in amazement almost too great for words,
“you are not his wife!”

“In the sight of Heaven,” she answered firmly, “I am!” She was shaking
with excitement. “In the sight of Heaven I am!” she repeated solemnly.
And so real was the feeling that she forgot for the moment the
situation in which her lover’s flight had left her. She forgot herself,
forgot all but the danger that menaced him, and the resolution that
never, never, never should it part her from him.

Mr. Bishop would fain have answered fittingly, and to that end sought
words. But he found none strong enough.

“Well, I am dashed!” was all he could find to say. “I _am_ dashed!”
Then—the thing was too much for one—he sought support in Mrs. Gilson’s
eye. “There, ma’am,” he said vehemently, extending one hand, “I ask
you! You are a woman of sense! I ask you! Did you ever? Did you ever,
out of London or in London?”

The landlady’s answer was as downright as it was unwelcome.

“I never see such a fool!” she said, “if that’s what you mean. And
you”—with scorn—“to call yourself a Bow Street man! Bow Street? Bah!”

Mr. Bishop opened his mouth.

“A parish constable’s a Solomon to you!” she continued, before he could
speak.

His face was purple, his surprise ludicrous.

“To me?” he ejaculated incredulously. “S’help me, ma’am, you are mad,
or I am! What have I done?”

“It’s not what you’ve done!” Mrs. Gilson answered grimly. “It’s what
you’ve left undone! Oh, you gaby!” she continued, with unction. “You
poor creature! You bag of goose-feathers! D’you know no more of women
than that? Why, I’ve kept my mouth shut the last ten blessed minutes
for nothing else but to see what a fool you’d make of yourself! And for
certain it was not for nothing!”

Henrietta tapped the table.

“Perhaps when you’ve done,” she said, with tragic dignity, “you will
both be good enough to leave the room. I desire to be alone.”

Her eyes were like stars. In her voice was an odd mixture of elation
and alarm.

Mrs. Gilson turned on the instant and engaged her.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” she said. “Desire to be alone indeed! You
deserve to be alone, miss, with bread and water, and the lock on the
door! Oh, you may stare! But do you do now what he should have made you
do a half-hour ago! And then you’ll feel a little less like a play
actress! Alone indeed! Read that letter and tell me then what you think
of yourself!”

Henrietta’s eyes sparkled with anger, but she fought hard for her
dignity.

“I am not used to impertinence,” she said. “You forget yourself!”

“Read,” Mrs. Gilson retorted, “and say what you like then. You’ll have
little stomach for saying anything,” she added in an undertone, “or I’m
a Dutchman!”

Henrietta saw nothing for it but to read under protest, and she did so
with a smile of contempt. In the circumstances it seemed the easier
course. But alas! as she read, her pretty, angry face changed. She had
that extreme delicacy of complexion which betrays the least ebb and
flow of feeling: and in turn perplexity, wonder, resentment, all were
painted there, and vividly. She looked up.

“To whom was this written?” she asked, her voice unsteady.

Mrs. Gilson was pitiless.

“Look at the beginning!” she answered.

The girl turned back mechanically, and read that which she had read
before. But then with surprise; now with dread.

“Who is—Sally?” she muttered.

Despite herself, her voice seemed to fail her on the word. And she
dared not meet their eyes.

“Who’s Sally?” Mrs. Gilson repeated briskly. “Why, his wife, to be
sure! Who should she be?”




CHAPTER V
A JEZEBEL


There was a loud drumming in Henrietta’s ears, and a dimness before her
eyes. In the midst of this a voice, which she would not have known for
her own, cried loudly and clearly, “No!” And again, more violently,
“No!”

“But it is ‘Yes’!” the landlady answered coolly. “Why not? D’you
think”—with rough contempt—“he’s the first man that’s lied to a woman?
or you’re the first woman that’s believed a rascal? She’s his wife
right enough, my girl”—comfortably. “Don’t he ask after his children?
If you’ll turn to the bottom of the second page you’ll see for
yourself! Oh, quite the family man, he is!”

The girl’s hand shook like ash-leaves in a light breeze; the paper
rustled in her grasp. But she had regained command of herself—she came
of a stiff, proud stock, and the very brusqueness of the landlady
helped her; and she read word after word and line after line of the
letter. She passed from the bottom of the second sheet to the head of
the third, and so to the end. But so slowly, so laboriously that it was
plain that her mind was busy reading between the lines—was busy
comparing, sifting, remembering.

To Bishop’s credit be it said, he kept his eyes off the girl. But at
last he spoke.

“I’d that letter from his wife’s hand,” he said. “They are married
right enough—in Hounslow Church, miss. She lives there, two doors from
the ‘George’ posting-house, where folks change horses between London
and Windsor. She was a waiting-maid in the coffee-room, and ’twas a
rise for her. But she’s not seen him for three years—reason, he’s been
in hiding—nor had a penny from him. Now she’s got it he’s taken up with
some woman hereabouts, and she put me on the scent. He’s a fine gift of
the gab, but for all that his father’s naught but a little apothecary,
and as smooth a rogue and as big a Radical, one as the other! I wish to
goodness,” the runner continued, suddenly reminded of his loss, “I’d
took him last night when he came in! But——”

“That’ll do!” Mrs. Gilson said, cutting him short, as if he were a tap
she had turned on for her own purposes. “You can go now!”

“But——”

“Did you hear me, man? Go!” the landlady thundered. And a glance of her
eye was sufficient to bring the runner to heel like a scolded hound.
“Go, and shut the door after you,” she continued, with sharpness. “I’ll
have no eavesdropping in my house, prerogative or no prerogative!”

When he was gone she showed a single spark of mercy. She went to the
fire and proceeded to mend it noisily, as if it were the one thing in
the world to be attended to. She put on wood, and swept the hearth, and
made a to-do with it. True, the respite was short; a minute or two at
most. But when the landlady had done, and turned her attention to the
girl, Henrietta had moved to the window, so that only her back was
visible. Even then, for quite a long minute Mrs. Gilson stood, with
arms akimbo and pursed lips, reading the lines of the girl’s figure and
considering her, as if even her rugged bosom knew pity. And in the end
it was Henrietta who spoke—humbly, alas! now, and in a voice almost
inaudible.

“Will you leave me, please?” she said.

“I will,” Mrs. Gilson answered gruffly. “But on one understanding,
miss—and I’ll have it plain. It must be all over. If you are satisfied
he is a rascal—he has four children—well and good. But I’ll have no
goings on with such in my house, and no making two bites of a cherry!
Here’s a bit of paper I’ll put on the table.”

“I am satisfied,” Henrietta whispered.

Under the woman’s blunt words she shook as under blows.

But Mrs. Gilson seemed to pay little heed to her feelings.

“Very good, very good!” she answered. “But I’ll leave the paper all the
same. It’s but a bit of a handbill that fool of a runner brought with
him, but ’twill show you what kind of a poor thing your Joe was. Just a
spouter, that got drunk on his own words and shot a poor inoffensive
gentleman in a shop! Shame on him for a little dirty murder, if ever
there was one.”

“Oh, please go! please go!” Henrietta wailed.

“Very well. But there’s the paper. And do you begin to think”—removing
with housewifely hand a half-eaten dish of eggs from the table, and
deftly poising on the same arm a large ham—“do you begin to think like
a grown, sensible woman what you’d best do. The shortest folly’s
soonest over! That’s my opinion.”

And with that she opened the door, and, heavily laden, made her way
downstairs.

The girl turned and stood looking at the room, and her face was wofully
changed. It was white and pinched, and full of strained wonder, as if
she asked herself if she were indeed herself, and if it could really be
to her that this thing had happened. She looked older by years, she
looked almost plain. But in her eyes was a latent fierceness. An
observer might have guessed that her pride suffered more sharply than
her heart. Possibly she had never loved the man with half the fervour
with which she now hated him.

And that was true, though the change was sudden; ay, and though
Henrietta did not know it, nor would have admitted it. She suffered
notwithstanding, and horribly. For, besides pride, there were other
things that lay wounded and bleeding: her happy-go-lucky nature that
had trusted lightly, and would be slow to trust again; her girlish
hopes and dreams; and the foolish fancy that had passed for love, and
in a single day, an hour, a minute, might have become love. And one
other thing—the bloom of her innocence. For though she had escaped, she
had come too near the fire not to fear it henceforth, and bear with her
the smell of singeing.

As she thought of that, of her peril and her narrow escape, and
reflected how near she had come to utter shipwreck, her face lost its
piteous look, and grew harder, and sharper, and sterner; so that the
wealth of bright hair, that was her glory, crowned it only too
brilliantly, only too youthfully. She saw how he had fooled her to the
top of her bent; how he had played on her romantic tastes and her silly
desire for secrecy. A low-born creature, an agitator, hiding from the
consequences of a cowardly crime, he had happened upon her in his
twilight walks, desired her—for an amusement, turned her head with
inflated phrases, dazzled her inexperience with hints of the world and
his greatness in it. And she—she had thought herself wiser than all
about her, as she had thought him preferable to the legitimate lover
assigned to her by her family. And she had brought herself to this!
This was the end!

Or no, not the end. The game, for what it was worth, was over. But the
candle-money remained to be paid. Goldsmith’s stanzas had still their
vogue; mothers quoted them to their daughters. Henrietta knew that when
lovely woman stoops to folly, even to folly of a lighter dye—when she
learns, though not too late, that men betray, there is a penalty to be
paid. The world is censorious, was censorious then, and apt to draw
from very small evidence a very dark inference. Henrietta’s face,
flaming suddenly from brow to neck, proved her vivid remembrance of
this. Had she not called herself—the words burned her—“his wife in the
sight of Heaven”? And now she must go back—if they would receive her—go
back and face those whom she had left so lightly, face the lover whom
she had flouted and betrayed, meet the smirks of the men and the sneers
of the women, and the thoughts of both! Go back to blush before the
servants, and hear from the lips of that grim prude, her sister-in-law,
many things, both true and untrue!

The loss of the tender future, of the rosy anticipations in which she
had lived for weeks as in a fairy palace—she could bear this! And the
rough awakening from the maiden dream which she had taken for love—she
must bear that too, though it left her world cold as the sheet of grey
water before her, and repellent as the bald, rugged screes that frowned
above it. She would bear the heartsickness, the loneliness, the pain
that treachery inflicts on innocence; but the shame of the
home-coming—if they would receive her, which she doubted—the coarse
taunts and stinging innuendoes, the nods, the shrugs, the winks—these
she could not face. Anything, anything were better, if anything she
could find—deserted, flung aside, homeless as she was.

* * * * *


Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson, descending with a sour face, had come upon a
couple of maids listening at the foot of the stairs. She had made sharp
work of them, sending them packing with fleas in their ears. But they
proved to be only the _avant-couriers_ of scandal. Below were the
Troutbeck apothecary and a dozen gossips, whom the news had brought
over the hill; and hangers-on without number. All, however, had no
better fate with Mrs. Gilson; not the parish constable of Bowness,
whose staff went for little, nor even Mr. Bishop, that great man out of
doors, at whose slightest nod ostlers ran and helpers bowed; he smiled
superior, indeed, but he had the wisdom to withdraw. In two minutes, in
truth, there remained of the buzzing crowd only the old curate of
Troutbeck supping small beer with a toast in it. And he, it was said,
knew better than any the length of the landlady’s foot.

But this was merely to move the centre of ferment to the inn-yard. Here
the news that the house had sheltered a man for whose capture the
Government offered six hundred guineas, bred wild excitement. He had
vanished, it was true, like a child of the mist. But he might be found
again. Meantime the rustics gaped on the runner with saucer eyes, or
flew hither and thither at his beck. And Radicals being at a discount
in the Lowther country, and six hundred guineas a sum for which old
Hinkson the miser would have bartered his soul, some spat on their
hands and swore what they would do if they met the devil; while others,
who were not apt at thinking, retired into corners and with knitted
brows and hands plunged into breeches pockets conjured up a map of the
world about Windermere.

It should be borne in mind that at this time police were
unknown—outside London. There were parish constables; but where these
were not cobblers, which was strangely often the case, they were men
past work, appointed to save the rates. If a man’s pocket were picked,
therefore, or his stack fired, his daughter abducted, or his mare
stolen, he had only himself and his friends to look to. He must follow
the offender, confront him, seize him, carry him to the gaol. He must
do all himself. Naturally, if he were a timid man or unpopular, the
rogue went free; and sometimes went free again and again until he
became the terror of the country-side. A fact which enables us to
understand the terrors of lonely houses in those days, and explains the
repugnance to life in solitary places which is traditional in some
parts of England.

On the other hand, where the crime was known and outrageous, it became
every man’s business. It was every man’s duty to join the hue and cry:
if he did not take part in it he was a bad neighbour. Mr. Bishop,
therefore, did not lack helpers. On the first discovery of Walterson’s
flight, which the officer had made a little after daybreak, he had sent
horsemen to Whitehaven, Keswick, and Kendal, and a boat to Newby
Bridge. The nearer shore and the woods on the point below the bishop’s
house—some called it Landoff House—were well beaten, and the alarm was
given in Bowness on the one hand and in Ambleside on the other. The
general voice had it that the man had got away early in the night to
Whitehaven. But some stated that a pedlar had met him, on foot and
alone, crossing the Kirkstone Pass at daybreak; and others, that he had
been viewed skulking under a haystack near Troutbeck Bridge. That a
beautiful girl, his companion, had been seized, and was under lock and
key in the house, was whispered by some, but denied by more.
Nevertheless, the report won its way, so that there were few moments
when the chatterers who buzzed about the runner had not an eye on the
upper windows and a voice ready to proclaim their discoveries.

Even those who believed the story, however, were far from having a true
picture of poor Henrietta. With some she passed for a London Jezebel;
locked up, it was whispered, with a bottle of gin to keep her quiet
until the chaise was ready to take her to gaol. Others pictured her as
the frenzied leader of one of the women’s clubs which had lately sprung
up in Lancashire, and of which the principal aim, according to the
Tories, was to copy the French fish-fags and march one day to Windsor
to drag the old king, blind and mad as he was, to the scaffold. Others
spoke of a casual light-o’-love picked up at Lancaster, but a rare
piece of goods for looks; which seemed a pity, and one of those
tragedies of the law that were beginning to prick men’s
consciences—since there was little doubt that the baggage, poor lass,
would hang with her tempter.

A word or two of these whisperings reached Mrs. Gilson’s ears. But she
only sniffed her contempt, or, showing herself for a moment at the
door, chilled by the coldness of her eye the general enthusiasm. Then,
woe betide the servant whom she chanced to espy among the idlers. If a
man, he was glad to hide himself in the stable; if a woman, she was
very likely to go back to her work with a smarting cheek. Even the
Troutbeck apothecary, a roistering blade who was making a day of it,
kept a wary eye on the door, and, if he could, slipped round the corner
when she appeared.

But Juno herself had her moments of failure, and no mortals are exempt
from them. About four in the afternoon Mrs. Gilson got a shock. Modest
Ann, her face redder than usual, came to her and whispered in her ear.
In five seconds the landlady’s face was also redder than usual, and her
frown was something to see. She rose.

“I don’t believe it!” she answered. “You are daft, woman, to think of
such a thing!”

“It’s true, missus, as I stand here!” Ann declared.

“To Kendal gaol? To-night!”

“That very thing! And her”—with angry fervour—“scarce more than a
child, as you may say!”

“Old enough to make a fool of herself!” Mrs. Gilson retorted
spitefully. “But I don’t believe it!” she added. “You’ve heard amiss,
my girl!”

“Well, you’ll see,” the woman answered. “’Twill be soon settled. The
justice is crossing the road now, and that Bishop with him; and that
little wizened chap of a clerk that makes up the Salutation books. And
the man that keeps the gaol at Appleby: they’ve been waiting for
him—he’s to take her. And there’s a chaise ordered to be ready if it’s
wanted. It’s true, as I stand here!”

Mrs. Gilson’s form swelled until it was a wonder the whalebone stood.
But in those days things were of good British make.

“A chaise?” she said.

“Yes.”

“There’s no chaise,” the landlady answered firmly, “goes from here on
that errand!”

Modest Ann knew that when her mistress spoke in that tone the thing was
as good as done. But the waiting-maid, whose heart, for all her temper,
was softer than her features, at which Jim the ostler was supposed to
boggle, was not greatly comforted.

“They’ll only send to the Salutation,” she said despondently.

“Let them send!” the landlady replied. And taking off her apron, she
prepared to face the enemy. “They’ll talk to me before they do!”

But Ann, great as was her belief in her mistress, shook her head.

“What can you do against the law?” she muttered. “I wish that Bishop
may never eat another morsel of hot victuals as long as he lives! Gravy
with the joint? Never while I am serving!”




CHAPTER VI
THE INQUIRY


“Who is there?”

Henrietta lifted her tear-stained face from the pillow and awaited the
answer. Three hours earlier, her head aching, her heart full, uncertain
what to do or what would follow, she had fled from the commotion below,
and, locking herself in her bedroom, had lain down with her misery. It
was something to find in the apathy of prostration a brief respite; it
was something to close her eyes and lie quite still. For a while she
might keep her door locked, might nurse her wretchedness, might evade
rude looks and curious questions, might postpone decision.

For the pride that had sustained her in the morning had failed, as the
day wore on. Solitude and the lack of food—she had refused to eat at
midday—had worn down her spirit. At last tears had come, and
plentifully—and repentance. She did not say that the fault was her own,
but she knew it, she admitted it. The man had behaved to her wickedly,
treacherously, horribly; but she had brought it on herself. He had laid
the snare in vain had she not stooped to deceit—had she not consented
to mislead her friends, to meet him secretly, to listen to him with as
little heed of propriety as if she had been Sue at the forge, or Bess
in the still-room. Her own vanity, her own folly, had brought her to
the very verge of ruin; and with shame she owned that there was more in
the old saws with which her sister-in-law had deafened her than her
inexperience had imagined. But the discovery came late. She was
smirched. And what—what was she to do? Where could she go to avoid the
full penalty—the taunts, the shame, the disgrace that awaited her in
the old home?—even if the old home were still open to her.

Meanwhile she got no answer. And “Who is there?” she repeated wearily.

The reply came muffled through the door.

“You are wanted downstairs, lady.”

She rose languidly. Perhaps the time was come. Perhaps her brother was
here, had followed, traced, and found her. For the moment she was all
but indifferent. To-morrow she would suffer, and sorely; but to-day she
had fallen too low. She went slowly to the door and opened it.

Ann stood in the passage.

“They want you downstairs, miss,” she said.

The girl saw that the woman looked queerly at her, but she was prepared
for such looks. Unconsciously she had steeled herself to bear them.
“Very well,” she returned, and did not ask who wanted her. But she went
back to her table, dabbed her eyes with cold water, and smoothed her
hair and her neck-ribbon—she had pride enough for that. Then she went
to the door. The woman was still outside, still staring.

“I did not know that you were waiting,” Henrietta said, faintly
surprised. “I know my way down.”

“I was to come with you, miss.”

“Where are they, then?”

“They are where you were this morning,” the woman answered. “This way,
if you please.”

Henrietta followed listlessly, and fancied in the sullenness of her
apathy that she was proof against aught that could happen. But when she
had descended the stairs and neared the door of Mr. Rogers’s room—which
was in a dusky passage—she found herself, to her astonishment, brushing
past a row of people, who flattened themselves against the wall to let
her pass. Their eyes and their hard breathing—perhaps because she was
amongst them before she saw them—impressed her so disagreeably that her
heart fluttered, and she paused. For an imperceptible instant she was
on the point of turning and going back. But, fortunately, at that
moment the door opened wide, Ann stood aside, and Mrs. Gilson showed
herself. She beckoned to the girl to enter.

“Come in, miss,” she said gruffly, as Henrietta complied. “Here’s some
gentlemen want to ask you a question or two.”

Henrietta saw two persons with their faces turned towards her seated
behind a table, which bore ink and paper and one or two calf-bound
books. Behind these were three or four other persons standing; and
beside the door close to her were as many more, also on their feet. But
nowhere could she see the dreaded face of her brother, or, indeed, any
face that she knew. And after advancing firmly enough into the room,
she stopped, and, turning, looked uncertainly at Mrs. Gilson.

“There must be some mistake,” she murmured. “I have come into the——”

“Wrong room, miss?”—the speaker was Bishop, who was one of the three or
four who stood behind the two at the table. “No, there’s no mistake,
miss,” he continued, with exaggerated cheerfulness. “It’s just a
formality. Only just a formality. These gentlemen wish to ask you one
or two questions.”

The colour rose to her cheeks.

“To ask me?” she repeated, with a slight ring of hauteur in her voice.

“Just so,” Bishop answered. “It will be all right, I am sure. But
attend to this gentleman, if you please, and answer his questions.”

He indicated with his finger the one seated before him.

The girl, half angry, half frightened, lowered her eyes and met those
of the person at the table. Apparently her aspect had checked the
exordium he had prepared; for instead of addressing her in the tones
which were wont to fill the justice-room at Ambleside, Mr. Hornyold,
rector and magistrate, sat back in his chair, and stared at her in
silence. It was evident that his astonishment was great. He was a
portly man, and tall, about forty years old, and, after his fashion,
handsome. He had well-formed features and a mobile smile; but his face
was masterful—overmasterful, some thought; and his eyes were hard, when
a sly look did not soften, without much improving, their expression.
The girl before him was young, adorably fresh, above all, beautiful;
and the smile of the man peeped from under the mask of the justice. He
stared at her, and she at him, and perhaps of the two he was the more
taken aback. At any rate, it was Henrietta who broke the silence.

“I do not understand,” she said, with ill-suppressed indignation, “why
I am here. Are you sure that there is no mistake?”

He found his voice then.

“Quite sure,” he said drily. And he laid down the pen with which he had
been toying while he stared at her. He sat a little more erect in his
chair. “There is no mistake,” he continued, “though for your sake,
young woman, I wish I could think there was. I wish I could think there
was,” he repeated in a more indulgent tone, “since you seem, at any
rate, a more respectable person than I expected to see.”

“Sir!”

The girl’s eyes opened wide. Her face was scarlet.

He leaned forward.

“Come, my girl,” he said—and his familiar tone struck her, as it were,
in the face,—never had such a tone been used to her before! “Let us
have no nonsense. You will not improve your case that way. Let me tell
you, we are accustomed to all sorts here. You must speak when you are
told to speak, and be silent when you are bid, and in the meantime
listen to me! Listen to me, I say!” staying by an imperious nod the
angry remonstrance that was on her lips. “And remember where you are,
if you wish to be well treated. If you are sensible and tell the truth,
some other course will be found than that which, it is to be feared,
must end this business.”

“But by what right,” Henrietta cried, striving to command both her rage
and her fear—“by what right——”

“Am I about to question you?”—with a smirk of humour and a glance at
the audience. “By the right of the law, young woman, which I would have
you know is of some account here, however it may stand in Lancashire.”

“The law?” she stammered. And she looked round terrified. “Why? Why?
What have I done?” she cried pathetically.

For a moment all was dark before her.

He laughed slyly.

“That’s to be seen,” he said. “No hanging matter,” he continued
humorously, “I hope. And as it’s good law that everybody’s
innocent—that’s so, Mr. Dobbie, is it not?”—he addressed the
clerk—“until he’s found to be guilty, let somebody set the young woman
a chair.”

“I can stand!” she cried.

“Nay, you sit down!” muttered a gruff voice in her ear. And a hand—it
was Mrs. Gilson’s—pressed her down in the chair. “And you answer
straight out,” the woman continued coolly, in defiance of the
scandalised look which Mr. Dobbie, the clerk, cast upon her, “and
there’s not one of ’em can do you any harm.”

The magistrate nodded.

“That’s true,” he said tolerantly, “always supposing that you’ve done
no wrong, my girl—no wrong beyond getting into bad company, as I trust
will turn out to be the case. Now, Mr. Dobbie, take down her answers.
What’s your name, my girl, first?”

Henrietta looked at him steadily; she was trying to place herself in
these new conditions. Something like composure was coming back to her
flushed and frightened face. She reflected; and having reflected, she
was silent.

He fancied that she had not heard, or did not understand.

“Your name, young woman,” he repeated, “and your last place of abode?
Speak up! And don’t be afraid.”

But she did not answer.

He frowned.

“Come, come,” he said. “Did you hear me? Where is your home, and what
do you call yourself? You are not the man’s wife, I know. We know as
much as that, you see, so you may as well be frank.”

“What is the charge against me?” She spoke slowly, and her face was now
set and stubborn. “Of what am I accused?”

Mr. Hornyold’s face turned a brick red. He did not rule three parishes
through three curates, reserving to himself only the disciplinary
powers he was now exercising, to be thwarted by a run-the-country girl;
who, in spite of her looks, was, ten to one, no better than the
imprudent wenches the overseers were continually bringing before him.
He knew at least the company she kept. He raised his voice.

“I am not here to answer your questions!” he said, bending his brows.
“But you mine! You mine!” he repeated, rapping the table sharply. “Do
you hear? Now, you will at once tell me——”

He broke off. The clerk had touched his sleeve and was whispering in
his ear. He frowned impatiently, but listened. And after a moment he
shrugged his shoulders.

“Very well,” he said. “Tell her!”

The clerk, a shabby man with a scratch wig and a little glass
ink-bottle at his buttonhole, raised his eyes, and looking at her over
his glasses, spoke:

“You are not yet charged,” he said; “but if you cannot give a
satisfactory account of yourself you will be charged with receiving,
harbouring, and assisting one William Walterson the younger, otherwise
Stewart, otherwise Malins, against whom indictments for various
felonies and treason felonies have been found. And with aiding and
abetting the escape of the said William Walterson, in whose company you
have been found. And with being accessory after the fact to various
felonies——”

“To murder!” said Mr. Hornyold, cutting him short emphatically. “To
murder! amongst other things. That is the charge, if you must know it.
So now”—he rapped the table sharply—“answer at once, and the truth.
What is your name? And where was your last place of abode?”

But Henrietta, if she were willing to answer, could not. At the sound
of that dreadful word “murder!”—they hanged lightly, so lightly in
those days!—the colour had fled from her face. The darkness that had
confused her a while before hid all. She kept her seat, she even
retained her erect posture; but the hands which she raised before her
as if to ward off something groped idly in the air.

Murder! No wonder that she lost consciousness for a moment, or that
Hornyold, secretly relishing her beauty, thought that he had found the
weapon that would soon bring her to her knees! or that the little
audience by the door, listening awestruck, held their breath. The
wonder was that only one of them judged from the girl’s gesture that
she was fainting. Only one acted. Mrs. Gilson stepped forward and shook
her roughly by the shoulder.

“Words break no bones!” the landlady said without ceremony—and not
without an angry look at the clerk, who raised his pen as if he would
interpose. “Don’t you make a fool of yourself. But do you tell them
what they want to know. And your friends will settle with them. Murder,
indeed! Pack of boddles!”

“Very good advice,” said the magistrate, smiling indulgently. “But——”

“But you must not interfere!” snapped the clerk—who kept the books of
the Salutation in Ambleside and not of the Low Wood Inn.

“Haven’t you sense to see the girl is fainting?” the landlady replied
wrathfully.

“Oh, well——”

“I am better now,” Henrietta said bravely. And she drew a deep breath.
A little colour—induced perhaps by Hornyold’s unsparing gaze—was coming
back to her cheeks. “Would you—can I have a glass of water?” she
murmured.

Mrs. Gilson was bustling to the door to give the order when it opened,
and Mr. Bishop, who had gone to it a moment before, took in a glass of
wine, and, secretly pleased that he had anticipated the need, handed it
to her. Mrs. Gilson took it with a grunt of distrust, and made the girl
swallow it; while the magistrate waited and watched, and thought that
he had never seen a young woman who was so handsome, pale or red,
fainting or fierce. And so fresh! so admirably, astonishingly fresh for
the companion of such a man. A good many thoughts of various kinds
flitted through his mind as he watched her, marking now the luxuriance
of her fair hair, now the white chin, small but firm, and now the
faint, faint freckles that, like clots in cream, only added to the
delicacy of her complexion. He waited without impatience until the girl
had drunk the wine, and when he spoke it was in a tone approaching the
paternal.

“Now, my dear,” he said, “you are going to be a good girl and sensible,
I am sure. We don’t want to send you to prison to herd with people with
whom, to judge from your appearance, you have not been wont to mix. And
therefore we give you this opportunity—there’s no need we should, you
know—of telling us who you are, and whence you come, and what you know;
that if it appears that you have fallen into this man’s company in
ignorance, and not knowing what manner of man he was, we may prevent
this charge appearing, and instead of committing you to Appleby, place
you here or elsewhere under bond to appear. Which, in a case so serious
as this, is not a course we could adopt were you not so very young,
and,” with a humorous look at the group by the door, “so very
good-looking! So now be a good girl and don’t be afraid, but tell me at
once who you are, and where you joined this man.”

“If I do not,” Henrietta said, looking at him with clear eyes, “must I
go to prison?”

“Appleby gaol,” said the clerk, glancing over his glasses.

“Then you must send me there,” she replied, a little faintly. “For I
cannot tell you.”

“Don’t be a fool!” growled Mrs. Gilson in her ear.

“I cannot tell you,” Henrietta repeated more firmly.

Mr. Hornyold stared. He was growing angry, for he was not accustomed to
be set at naught. After their fashion they all stared.

“Come, come, my dear,” the runner remonstrated smoothly. “If you don’t
tell us, we shall think there’s more behind.”

She did not answer.

“And that being so, it’s only a matter of time to learn what it is,”
the runner continued cunningly. “Tell us now and save time, because we
are sure to get to know. Young women as pretty as you are not hard to
trace.”

But she shook her head. And the face Bishop called pretty was stubborn.
The group by the door, marking for future gossip every particular of
her appearance, the stuff of her riding-habit, the fineness of her
linen, the set of her head, made certain that she was no common
trollope. They wondered what would happen to her, and hoped, the more
tender-hearted, that there would be no scene, and no hysterics to end
it.

The clerk raised his pen in the air. “Understand,” he said, “you will
be remanded to Appleby gaol—it’s no very comfortable place, I can tell
you—and later, you will be brought up again and committed, I’ve very
little doubt, to take your trial on these charges. If the principal
offender be taken, as he is likely to be taken before the day is out,
you’ll be tried with him. But it is not necessary. Now do you
understand?” he continued, speaking slowly. “And are you still
determined to give no evidence—showing how you came to be with this
man?”

Henrietta’s eyes were full of trouble. She shivered.

“Where shall I be tried?” she muttered in an unsteady voice.

“Appleby,” the clerk said curtly. “Or in His Majesty’s Bench at
Westminster! Now think, before it is too late.”

“It is too late,” she answered in a low tone, “I cannot help it now.”

The magistrate leant forward. What a fool the girl was! If she went to
Appleby he would see no more of her, save for an hour or two when she
was brought up again before being committed. Whereas, if she spoke and
they made her a witness, she might be lodged somewhere in the
neighbourhood under surveillance. And she was so handsome and so
young—the little fool!—he would not be sorry to see more of her.


[Illustration: ] “I give you a last chance,” he said.


“I give you a last chance,” he said.

She shook her head.

The magistrate shrugged his shoulders.

“Then make the committal out!” he said. “There’s enough to justify it.”
It was some satisfaction to think that locked up with half a dozen
sluts at Appleby she would soon be sorry for herself. “Make it out!” he
repeated.

If the hysterics did not come now he was very much mistaken if they did
not come later, when the gaol doors were shut on her. She was evidently
of respectable condition; a curate’s daughter, perhaps, figged out by
the man who had deceived her, or a lady’s lady, spoiled by her
mistress, and taught ideas above her station. On such, the gaol, with
its company and its hardships, fell severely. It would soon, he
fancied, bring her to her senses.

The clerk dipped his pen in the ink, and after casting a last glance at
the girl to see if she would still yield, began to write. She watched
him with fascinated eyes, watched him in a kind of stupor. The thought
throbbed loudly and more loudly in her head, “What will become of me?
What will become of me?” Meanwhile the silence was broken only by the
squeaking of the pen and a single angry “Lord’s sakes!” which fell from
the landlady. The others awaited the end with whatever of pity, or
interest, or greedy excitement came natural to them. They were within,
and others were without; and they had a delicious sense of privilege.
They would have much to tell: For one does not every day see a pretty
girl, young, and tenderly nurtured, as this girl seemed to be, and a
lady to the eye, committed to the common gaol on a charge of
murder—murder, and treason felony, was it, they called it? Treason
felony! That meant hanging, drawing, and quartering. Lord’s sakes,
indeed; poor thing, how would she bear it? And though it is likely that
some among them—Mrs. Gilson for one—didn’t think it would come to this,
there was a frown on the landlady’s brow that would have done honour to
the Lord Chancellor Eldon himself.




CHAPTER VII
CAPTAIN ANTHONY CLYNE


Mr. Bishop of Bow Street alone watched the clerk’s pen with a look of
doubt. He had his own views about the girl. But he did not interfere,
and his discontent with the posture of affairs was only made clear when
a knock came at the door. Then he was at the door, and had raised the
latch before those who were nearest could open.

“Have you got him?” he asked eagerly. And he thrust his head into the
passage.

Even Henrietta turned to catch the answer, her lips parting. Her breath
seemed to stop. The clerk held his pen. The magistrate by a gesture
exacted silence.

“No, but——”

“No?” the runner cried in chagrin.

“No!” The voice sounded something peremptory. “Certainly not. But I
want to see—ahem!—yes, Mr. Hornyold. At once!”

Henrietta, at the first word of the answer, had turned again. She had
turned so far that she now had her back full to the door, and her face
to the farthest corner. But it was not the same Henrietta, nor the same
face. She sat rigid, stiff, turned to stone; she was scarlet from hair
to neck-ribbon. Her very eyes burned, her shoulders burned. And her
eyes were wild with insupportable shame. To be found thus! To be found
thus, and by him! Better, far better the gaol, and all it meant!

Meanwhile the magistrate, after a brief demur and a little whispering
and the appearance of a paper with a name on it, rose. He went out. A
moment later his clerk was summoned, and he went out. Bishop had gone
out first of all. Those who were left and who had nothing better to do
than to stare at the girl’s back, whispered together, or bade one
another listen and hear what was afoot outside. Presently these were
joined by one or two of the boldest in the passage, who muttered
hurriedly what they knew, or sought information, or stared with double
power at the girl’s back. But Henrietta sat motionless, with the same
hot blush on her cheeks and the same misery in her eyes.

Presently Mrs. Gilson was summoned, and she went out. The others, freed
from the constraint of her presence, talked a little louder and a
little more freely. And wonder grew. The two village constables, who
remained and who felt themselves responsible, looked important, and one
cried “Silence” a time or two, as if the court were sitting. The other
explained the law, of which he knew as much as a Swedish turnip, on the
subject of treason felony. But mixing it up with the _Habeas Corpus_
which was then suspended, he was tripped up by a neighbour before he
could reach the minutiæ of the punishment. Which otherwise must have
had much interest for the prisoner.

At length the door opened, the other constable cried, “Silence! Silence
in the court!” And there entered—the landlady.

The surprise of the little knot of people at the back of the room was
great but short-lived.

Mrs. Gilson turned about and surveyed them with her arms akimbo and her
lower lip thrust out. “You can all just go!” she said. “And the sooner
the better! And if ever I catch you”—to the more successful of the
constables, on whose feet her eye had that moment alighted—“up my
stairs with those dirty clogs, Peter Harrison, I’ll clout you! Now, off
you go! Do you think I keep carpets for loons like you?”

“But—the prisoner?” gasped Peter, clutching at his fast-departing
glory. “The prisoner, missus?”

“The goose!” the landlady retorted with indescribable scorn. “Go you
down and see what the other ganders think of it. And leave me to mind
my business! I’ll see to the prisoner.” And she saw them all out and
closed the door.

When the room was clear she tapped Henrietta on the shoulder. “There’s
no gaol for you,” she said bluntly. “Though it is not yourself you’ve
got to thank for it. They’ve put you in my charge and you’re to stay
here, and I’m to answer for you. So you’ll just say straight out if
you’ll stay, or if you’ll run.”

Had the girl burst into tears the landlady had found it reasonable.
Instead, “Where is he?” Henrietta whispered. She did not even turn her
head.

“Didn’t you hear,” Mrs. Gilson retorted, “that he had not been taken?”

“I mean—I mean——”

“Ah!” Mrs. Gilson exclaimed, a little enlightened. “You mean the
gentleman that was here, and spoke for you? Yes, you are right, it’s
him you’ve to thank. Well, he’s gone to Whitehaven, but he’ll see you
tomorrow.”

Henrietta sighed.

“In the meantime,” Mrs. Gilson continued, “you’ll give me your word
you’ll not run. Gilson is bound for you in fifty pounds to show you
when you’re wanted. And as fifty pounds is fifty pounds, and a mint of
money, I’d as soon turn the key on you as not. Girls that run once, run
easy,” the landlady added severely.

“I will not run away,” Henrietta said meekly—more meekly perhaps than
she had ever spoken in her life. “And—and I am much obliged to you, and
thankful to you,” in a very small voice. “Will you please to let me go
to my room, and you can lock me in?”

She had risen from her seat, and though she did not turn to the
landlady, she stole, shamed and askance, a look at her. Her lip
trembled, her head hung. And Mrs. Gilson, on her side, seemed for a
moment on the verge of some unwonted demonstration; she stood awkward
and large, and perhaps from sheer clumsiness avoided even while she
appeared to invite the other’s look. But nothing happened until the two
passed out, Henrietta first, like a prisoner, and Mrs. Gilson stiffly
following.

Then there were half a dozen persons waiting to stare in the passage,
and the way Mrs. Gilson’s tongue fell loose was a warning. In two
seconds, only one held her ground: the same dark girl with the
gipsy-like features whose mocking smile had annoyed Henrietta as she
dressed that morning. Ah, me! what ages ago that morning seemed!

To judge from Mrs. Gilson’s indignation, this girl was the last who
should have stood.

“Don’t you black-look me!” the landlady cried. “But pack! D’you hear,
impudence, pack! Or not one drop of milk do I take from your old
skinflint of a father! And he’ll drub you finely, if he’s not too old
and silly—till you smile on the other side of your face! I’d like to
know what’s taken you to-day to push yourself among your betters!”

“No harm,” the girl muttered. She had retreated, scowling, half-way
down the stairs.

“And no good, either!” the landlady retorted. “Get you gone, or I’ll
make your ears ring after another fashion!”

Henrietta heard no more. She had shrunk from the uproar and fled
quickly to her room. With a bursting heart and a new humility she drew
the key from the wards of the lock and set it on the outside,
hoping—though the hope was slender—to avoid further words with the
landlady. The hope came nearer fulfilment, however, than she expected;
for Mrs. Gilson, after panting upstairs, only cried through the door
that she would send her up supper, and then went down again—perhaps
with a view to catching Bess Hinkson in a fresh trespass.

Bess was gone, however. But adventures are for the brave, and not ten
minutes passed before the landlady was at issue with a fresh adversary.
She found the coach-office full, so full that it overflowed into the
hall. Modest Ann, called this way and that, had need of four hands to
meet the demands made upon her; so furious were the calls for the
lemons and rum and Old Geneva, the grateful perfume of which greeted
Mrs. Gilson as she descended. Alas, something else greeted her: and
that was a voice, never a favourite with her, but now raised in accents
particularly distasteful. Tyson, the Troutbeck apothecary—a flashy,
hard-faced young man in pepper-and-salt, and Bedford cords—had seized
the command and the ear of the company in the coach-office, and was
roasting Long Tom Gilson upon his own hearth.

“Not know who she is?” he was saying in the bullying tone which made
him hated of the pauper class. “You don’t ask me to believe that, Tom?
Come! Come!”

“It’s what I say,” Gilson answered.

He sat opposite the other, his hands on his knees, his face red and
sulky. He did not like to be baited.

“And you go bail for her?” Tyson cried. “You have gone bail for her?”

“Well?”

“And don’t know her name?”

“Well—no.”

The doctor sat back in his chair, his glass in his hand, and looked
round for approbation.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “what do you think of that for a dalesman?”

“Well, it wasn’t long-headed, Tom,” said one unwillingly. “Not to call
long-headed, so to speak,” with north-country caution. “I’d not go bail
myself, not for nobody I’d not know.”

“No,” several agreed. “No, no!”

“No, but——”

“But what, Tom, what?” the doctor asked, waiting in his positive
fashion for the other to plunge deeper into the mire.

“Captain Clyne, that I do know,” Gilson continued, “it was he said ‘Do
it!’ And he said something to the Rector, I don’t doubt, for he was
agreeable.”

“But he did not go bail for her?” the apothecary suggested maliciously.

“No,” Tom answered, breathing hard. “But for reason she was not there,
but here. Anyway,” he continued, somewhat anxious to shift the subject,
“he said it and I done it, and I’d do it again for Captain Clyne. I
tell you he’s not a man as it’s easy to say ‘No’ to, Mr. Tyson. As
these Radicals i’ Lancashire ha’ found out, ’od rot ’em! He’s that
active among ’em, he’s never a letter, I’m told, but has a coffin drawn
on it, and yeomanry in his house down beyond both day and night, I
hear!”

“I heard,” said one, “in Cartmel market, he was to be married next
week.”

“Ay,” said the doctor jocosely, “but not to the young lady as Tom is
bail for! I tell you, Tom, he’s been making a fool of you just to keep
this bit of evidence against the Radicals in his hands.”

“Why not send her to Appleby gaol, then?” Tom retorted, with a fair
show of sense.

“Because he knows you’ll cosset her here, and he thinks to loose her
tongue that way! They can gaol her after, if this don’t answer.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“Ay, while you run the risk! If it’s not that, what’s he doing here?”

“Why should he not be here?” Gilson asked slowly. “Hasn’t he the old
house in Furness, not two miles from Newby Bridge! And his mother a
Furness woman. I do hear that the boy’s to be brought there for safety
till the shires are quieter. And maybe it’s that brings Captain Anthony
here.”

“But what has that to do with the young woman you’re going bail for?”
the doctor retorted. “Go bail, Tom, for a wench you don’t know, and
that’ll jump the moon one of these fine nights! I tell you, man, I
never heard the like! Never! Go bail for a girl you don’t know!”

“And I tell you,” cried a voice that made the glasses ring, “I have
heard the like! And I’ll give you the man, my lad!” And Mrs. Gilson,
putting aside the two who blocked the doorway, confronted the offending
Tyson with a look comparable only to that of Dr. Keats of Eaton when he
rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll give you the name, my lad!” she repeated.

“Well,” the doctor answered, though he was manifestly taken aback, “you
must confess, Mrs. Gilson——”

“Nay, I’ll confess nothing!” the landlady retorted. “What need, when
you’re the man? Not give bail for a woman you don’t know? Much you knew
of Madge Peters when you made her your wife! And wasn’t that going bail
for her? Ay, and bail that you’ll find it hard to get out of, my man,
though you may wish to! For the matter of that, it’s small blame to
her, whatever comes of it!” Mrs. Gilson continued, setting her arms
akimbo. “If all I hear of your goings-on is true! What do you think
she’s doing, ill and sick at home, while you’re hanging about old
Hinkson’s? Ay, you may look black, but tell me what Bess Hinkson’s
doing about my place all this day? I never saw her here twice in a day
in all my life before, and——”

“What do you mean?” Tyson cried violently. To hear a thing which he
thought no one suspected brought up thus before a roomful of men! He
looked black as thunder at his accuser.

“I mean no harm of your wife,” the terrible landlady answered;
something—perhaps this roasting of her husband on his own hearth—had
roused her beyond the ordinary. “None, my gentleman, and I know none.
But if you want no harm said of her, show yourself a bit less at
Hinkson’s. And a bit less in my house. And a bit more in your own! And
the harm will be less likely to happen!”

“I’ll never cross your doorstep again!” Tyson roared.


[Illustration: ] He neither cared nor saw who it was whom he had
jostled


And stumbling to his feet he cast off one or two who in their well
meaning would have stayed him. He made for the door. But he was not to
escape without further collision. On the threshold he ran plump against
a person who was entering, cursed the newcomer heartily, and without a
look pushed violently by him and was gone.

He neither cared nor saw who it was whom he had jostled. But the
company saw, and some rose to their feet in consternation, while
others, carried their hands to their heads. There was an involuntary
movement of respect which the new comer acknowledged by touching his
hat. He had the air of one who knew how to behave to his inferiors; but
the air, also, of one who never forgot that they were his inferiors.

“Your friend seems in a hurry,” he said. His face was not a face that
easily betrayed emotion, but he looked tired.

“Beg your honour’s pardon, I am sure,” Gilson answered. “Something’s
put him out, and he did not see you, sir.”

Mrs. Gilson muttered that a pig could have seen. But her words were
lost in the respectful murmur which made the company sharers in the
landlord’s apology.

Not that for the most part they knew the strange gentleman. But there
is a habit of authority which once gained becomes a part of the man.
And Anthony Clyne had this. He retained wherever he went some shadow of
the quarter-deck manner. He had served under Nelson, and under Exmouth;
but he had resisted, as a glance at his neat, trim figure proved, that
coarsening influence which spoiled for Pall Mall too many of the
sea-dogs of the great war. Like his famous leader, he had left an arm
in the cockpit; and the empty sleeve which he wore pinned to the lappel
of his coat added, if possible, to the dignity of the upright carriage
and the lean, shaven face. The death of his elder brother had given him
the family place, a seat in the House, a chair at White’s, and an
income handsome for his day. And he looked all this and more; so that
such a company as now eyed him with respect judged him a very perfect
gentleman, if a little distant.

But from Clyne Old Hall, where he lived, he could see on the horizon
the smoke of toiling cities; and in those cities there were hundreds
who hated his cold proud face, and thousands who cursed his name. Not
that he was a bad man or a tyrant, or himself ground the faces of the
poor. But discipline was his watchword, and reform his bugbear. To
palter with reform, to listen to a word about the rights of the masses,
was to his mind to parley with anarchy. That governors and governed
could be the same appeared to his mind as absurd as that His Majesty’s
ships could be commanded from the forecastle. All for the people and
nothing by the people was his political maxim, and one amply meeting,
as he believed, all eventualities. Lately he had had it carved on a
mantel-piece, and the prattle of his only child, as the club-footed boy
spelled it out syllable by syllable, was music to his ears.

Whoever wavered, therefore, whoever gave to the violence of those
times, he stood firm. And he made others stand. It was his honest
belief that a little timely severity—in other words, a whiff of
grape-shot—would have nipped the French Revolution in the bud; and
while he owned that the lower orders were suffering and times were bad,
that bread was dear and work wanting, he was for quelling the least
disorder with the utmost rigour of the law.

Such was the man who accepted with a curt nod Tom Gilson’s apology.
Then “Have you a room ready?” he asked.

“The fire is still burning in Mr. Rogers’s room,” Mrs. Gilson answered,
smoothing at once her apron and her brow. “And it’ll not be used again
to-night. But I thought that you had gone on, sir, to Whitehaven.”

“I shall go on to-morrow,” he answered, frowning slightly.

“I’ll show your honour the way,” Tom Gilson said.

“Very good,” he answered. “And dinner, ma’am, as soon as possible.”

“To be sure, sir.” And “This way, your honour.” And taking two candles
Gilson went out before Captain Clyne, and with greater ceremony than
would be used in these days, lighted him along the passage and up the
stairs to Mr. Rogers’s room in the south wing.

The fire had sunk somewhat low, but the room which had witnessed so
many emotions in the last twenty-four hours made no sign. The table had
been cleared. The glass fronts of the cupboards shone dully; only a
chair or two stood here or there out of place. That was all. But had
Henrietta, when she descended to breakfast that morning, foreseen who
would fill her chair before night, who would dine at her table and
brood with stern unseeing eyes on the black-framed prints, for whom the
pale-faced clock would tick off depressing seconds, what—what would she
have thought? And how would she have faced her future?




CHAPTER VIII
STARVECROW FARM


The company at Mrs. Gilson’s, impressed by the appearance of a
gentleman of Captain Clyne’s position, scarce gave a second thought to
the doctor’s retreat. But to Tyson, striding homewards through the mud
and darkness, the insult he had suffered and the feeble part he had
played filled the world. For him the inn-parlour still cackled at his
expense. He saw himself the butt of the evening, the butt of many
evenings. He was a vain, ill-conditioned man, who among choice spirits
would have boasted of his philandering. But not the less he hated to be
brought to book before those whom he deemed his inferiors. He could not
deny that the landlady had trounced him, and black bile whelmed all his
better feelings as he climbed the steep track behind the inn. “D——d
shrew!” he growled, “D——d shrew!” and breathing hard, as much in rage
as with exertion, he stood an instant to look back and shake his fist
before he plunged into the darkness of the wooded dell through which
the path ascended.

Two or three faint lights marked the position of the inn a couple of
fields below him. Beyond it the pale surface of the lake reflected a
dim radiance, bestowed on it through some rift in the clouds invisible
from where he stood. A far-away dog barked, a curlew screamed on the
hill above him, the steady fall of a pair of oars in the rowlocks rose
from the lake. The immensity of the night closed all in; and on the
thoughtful might have laid a burden of melancholy.

But Tyson thought of his wrongs, not of the night, and with a curse he
turned and plunged into the wood, following a path impossible for a
stranger. As it was he stumbled over roots, the saplings whipped him
smartly, a low bough struck off his hat, and when he came to the stream
which whirled through the bottom of the dingle he had much ado to find
the plank bridge. But at length he emerged from the wood, gained the
road, and mounted the steep shoulder that divided the Low Wood hamlet
from the vale of Troutbeck.

Where his road topped the ridge the gaunt outline of a tall, narrow
building rose in the gloom. It resembled a sentry-box commanding either
valley. It was set back some twenty paces from the road with half a
dozen ragged fir trees intervening; and on its lower side—but the night
hid them—some mean farm-buildings clung to the steep. With the wind
soughing among the firs and rustling through the scanty grass, the
place on that bleak shoulder seemed lonely even at night. But in the
day its ugliness and barrenness were a proverb. They called it
“Starvecrow Farm.”

Nevertheless, Tyson paused at the gate, and with an irresolute oath
looked over it.

“Cursed shrew!” he said, for the third time. “What business is it of
hers if I choose to amuse myself?”

And with his heart hardened, he flung the gate wide, and entered. He
had not gone two paces before he leapt back, startled by the fierce
snarl of a dog, that, unseen, flung itself to the end of its chain.
Disappointed in its spring, it began to bay.

The doctor’s fright was only momentary.

“What, Turk!” he cried. “What are you doing here? What the blazes are
you doing here? Down, you brute, down!”

The dog knew his voice, ceased to bark, and began to whimper. Tyson
entered, and assured that the watchdog knew him, kicked it brutally
from his path. Then he groped his way between the trees, stumbled down
three broken steps at the corner of the house, and passing round the
building reached the door which was on the further side from the road.
He tried it, but it was fastened. He knocked on it.

A slip-shod foot dragged across a stone floor. A high cracked voice
asked, “Who’s there?”

“I! Tyson!” the doctor answered impatiently. “Who should it be at this
hour?”

“Is’t you, doctor?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Who’s wi’ ye?”

“No one, you old fool! Who should there be?”

A key creaked in the lock, and the great bar was withdrawn; but slowly,
as it seemed to the apothecary, and reluctantly. He entered and the
door was barred behind him.

“Where’s Bess?” he asked.

The bent creeping figure that had admitted him replied that she was
“somewheres about, somewheres about.” After which, strangely clad in a
kind of bedgown and nightcap, it trailed back to the settle beside the
turf and wood fire, which furnished both light and warmth. The fire,
indeed, was the one generous thing the room contained. All else was
sordid and pinched and mean. The once-whitened walls were stained, the
rafters were smoked in a dozen places, the long dresser—for the room
was large, though low—was cracked and ill-furnished, a brick supported
one leg of the table. Even in the deep hearth-place, where was such
comfort as the place could boast, a couple of logs served for stools
and a frowsy blanket gave a squalid look to the settle.

Tyson stood on the hearth with his back to the fire, and eyed the room
with a scowl of disgust. The old man, bent double over a stick which he
was notching, breathed loudly and laboriously.

“What folly is this about the dog?” Tyson asked contemptuously.

The old man looked up, cunning in his eyes.

“Ask her,” he said.

“Eh?”

The miser bending over his task seemed to be taken with a fit of silent
laughter.

“It’s the still sow sups the brose,” he said. “And I’m still! I’m
still.”

“What are you doing?” Tyson growled.

“Nothing much! Nothing much! You’ve not,” looking up with greed in his
eyes, “an old letter-back to spare?”

Tyson seldom came to the house unfurnished with one. He had long known
that Hinkson belonged to the class of misers who, if they can get a
thing for nothing, are as well pleased with a scrap of paper, a length
of string, or a mouldy crust, as with a crown-piece. The poor land
about the house, which with difficulty supported three or four cows, on
the produce of which the Hinksons lived, might have been made
profitable at the cost of some labour and a little money. But labour
and money were withheld. And Tyson often doubted if the miser’s store
were as large as rumour had it, or even if there were a store at all.

“Not that,” he would add, “large or small, some one won’t cut his
throat for it one day!”

He produced the old letter, and after showing it, held it behind him.

“What of the dog now?” he said.

“Na, na, I’ll not speak for that!”

“Then you won’t have it!”

But the old fellow only cackled superior.

“What’s—what’s—a pound-note a week? Is’t four pound a month?”

“Ay!” the doctor answered. “It is. That’s money, my lad!”

“Ay!”

The old man hugged himself, and rocked to and fro in an ecstasy.

“That’s money! And four pound a month,” he consulted the stick he was
notching, “is forty-eight pound a year?”

“And four to it,” Tyson answered. “Who’s paying you that?”

“Na, na!”

“And what’s it to do with the dog?”

Hinkson looked knavish but frightened.

“Hist!” he said. “Here’s Bess. I’d use to wallop her, but now——”

“She wallops you,” the visitor muttered. “That’s the ticket, I expect.”

The girl entered by the mean staircase door and nodded to him coolly.

“I supposed it was you,” she said slightingly.

And for the hundredth or two-hundredth time he felt with rage that he
was in the presence of a stronger nature than his own. He could treat
the old man, whose greed had survived his other passions, and almost
his faculties, pretty much as he pleased. But though he had sauntered
through the gate a score of times with the intention of treating Bess
as he had treated more than one village girl who pleased him, he had
never re-crossed the threshold without a sense not only of defeat, but
of inferiority. He came to strut, he remained to kneel.

He fought against that feeling now, calling his temper to his aid.

“What folly is this about the dog?” he asked.

“Father thinks,” she replied demurely, “that if thieves come it can be
heard better at the gate.”

“Heard? I should think it could be heard in Bowness!”

“Just so.”

“But your father——”

“Father!” sharply, “go to bed!” And then to the visitor, “Give him a
ha’penny,” she muttered. “He won’t go without!”

“But I don’t care——”

“I don’t care either—which of you goes!” she retorted. “But one of you
goes.”

Sullenly he produced a copper and put it in the old man’s quivering
hand—not for the first time by several. Hinkson gripped it, and closing
his hand upon it as if he feared it would be taken from him, he hobbled
away, and disappeared behind the dingy hangings of the box-bed.

“And now what’s the mystery?” Tyson asked, seating himself on one of
the stools.

“There is none,” she answered, standing before him where the firelight
fell on her dark face and gipsy beauty. “Call it a whim if you like.
Perhaps I don’t want my lads to come in till I’ve raddled my cheeks! Or
perhaps”—flippantly—“Oh, any ‘perhaps’ you like!”

“I know no lad you have but me,” he said.

“I don’t know one,” she answered, seating herself on the settle, and
bending forward with her elbows on her knees and her face between her
hands. It was a common pose with her. “When I’ve a lad I want a man!”
she continued—“a man!”

“Don’t you call me a man?” he answered, his eyes taking their fill of
her face.

“Of a sort.” she rejoined disdainfully. “Of a sort. Good enough for
here. But I shan’t live all my life here! D’you ever think what a
God-forsaken corner this is, Tyson? Why, man, we are like mice in a
dark cupboard, and know as much of the world!”

“What’s the world to us?” he asked. Her words and her ways were often a
little beyond him.

“That’s it!” she answered, in a tone of contemptuous raillery. “What’s
the world to us? We are here and not there. We must curtsey to parson
and bob to curate, and mind our manners with the overseers! We must be
proud if Madam inquires after our conduct, but we must not fancy that
we are the same flesh and blood as she is! Ah, when I meet her,” with
sudden passion, “and she looks at me to see if I am clean, I—do you
know what I think of? Do you know what I dream of? Do you know what I
hope”—she snapped her strong white teeth together—“ay, hope to see?”

“What?”

“What they saw twenty years ago in France—her white neck under the
knife! That was what happened to her and her like there, I am told, and
I wish it could happen here! And I’d knit, as girls knitted there, and
counted the heads that fell into the baskets! When that time comes
Madam won’t look to see if I am clean!”

He looked at her uncomfortably. He did not understand her.

“How the devil do you come to know these things?” he exclaimed. It was
not the first time she had opened to him in this strain—not the first
by several. And the sharp edge was gone from his astonishment. But she
was not the less a riddle to him and a perplexity—a Sphinx, at once
alluring and terrifying. “Who told you of them? What makes you think of
them?” he repeated.

“Do you never think of them?” she retorted, leaning forward and fixing
her eyes on his. “Do you never wonder why all the good things are for a
few, and for the rest—a crust? Why the rector dines at the squire’s
table and you dine in the steward’s room? Why the parson gives you a
finger and thinks he stoops, and his ladies treat you as if you were
dirt—only the apothecary? Why you are in one class and they in another
till the end of time?”

“D——n them!” he muttered, his face a dull red. She knew how to touch
him on the raw.

“Do you never think of those things?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, taking her up sullenly, “if I do?”

She rocked herself back on the settle and looked across at him out of
half-closed eyes.

“Then—if you do think,” she answered slowly, “it is to be seen if you
are a man.”

“A man?”

“Ay, a man! A man! For if you think of these things, if you stand face
to face with them, and do nothing, you are no man! And no lad for me!”
lightly. “You are well matched as it is then. Just a match and no more
for your white-faced, helpless dumpling of a wife!”

“It is all very well,” he muttered, “to talk!”

“Ay, but presently we shall do as well as talk! Out in the world they
are doing now! They are beginning to do. But here—what do you know in
this cupboard? No more than the mice.”

“Fine talk!” he retorted, stung by her contempt. “But you talk without
knowing. There have been parsons and squires from the beginning, and
there will be parsons and squires to the end. You may talk until you
are black in the face, Bess, but you won’t alter that!”

“Ay, talk!” she retorted drily. “You may talk. But if you do—as they
did in France twenty years gone. Where are their squires and parsons
now? The end came quick enough there, when it came.”

“I don’t know much about that,” he growled.

“Ay, but I do.”

“But how the devil do you?” he answered, in some irritation, but more
wonder. “How do you?” And he looked round the bare, sordid kitchen. The
fire, shooting warm tongues up the black cavernous chimney, made the
one spot of comfort that was visible.

“Never you mind!” she answered, with a mysterious and tantalising
smile. “I do. And by-and-by, if we’ve the spirit of a mouse, things
will happen here! Down yonder—I see it all—there are thousands and tens
of thousands starving. And stacks burning. And mobs marching, and men
drilling, and more things happening than you dream of! And all that
means that by-and-by I shall be knitting while Madam and Miss and that
proud-faced, slim-necked chit at the inn, who faced us all down
to-day——”

“Why,” he struck in, in fresh surprise, “what has she done to you now?”

“That’s my business, never you mind! Only, by-and-by, they will all
smile on the wrong side of their face!”

He stared morosely into the fire. And she watched him, her long lashes
veiling a sly and impish amusement. If he dreamed that she loved him,
if he fancied her a victim of his bow and spear, he strangely, most
strangely, misread her. And a sudden turn, a single quick glance should
have informed him. For as the flames by turns lit her face and left it
to darkness, they wrought it to many expressions; but never to
kindness.

“There’s many I’d like to see brought down a piece,” he muttered at
last. “Many, many. And I’m as fond of my share of good things as most.
But it’s all talk, there’s nought to be done! Nor ever will be! There
have been parsons and squires from the beginning.”

“Would you do it,” she asked softly, “if there were anything to be
done?”

“Try me.”

“I doubt it. And that’s why you are no lad for me.”

He rose to his feet in a temper at that. He turned his back on the
fire.

“What’s the use of getting on this every time!” he cried. And he took
up his hat. “I’m weary of it. I’m off. I don’t know that I shall come
back again. What’s the use?” with a side-long glance at her dark,
handsome face and curving figure which the firelight threw into
prominence.

“If there were anything to do,” she asked, as if he had never spoken,
never answered the question, “would you do it?” And she smiled at him,
her head thrown back, her red lips parted, her eyes tempting.

“You know I would if——” He paused.

“There were some one to be won by it?”

He nodded, his eyes kindling.

“Well——”

No more. For as she spoke the word, and he bent forward, something
heavy fell on the floor overhead; and she sat up straight. Her eyes,
grown suddenly hard and small—perhaps with fright—held Tyson’s eyes.

“What’s that?” he cried, frowning suspiciously. “There’s nobody
upstairs?”

“Father’s in bed,” she said. She held up a finger for silence.

“And there’s nobody else in the house?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Who should there be?” she said. “It’s the cat, I suppose.”

“You’d better let me see,” he rejoined. And he took a step towards the
staircase door.

“No need,” she answered listlessly, after listening anew. “I’m not
afraid. The cat is not here; it must have been the cat. I’ll go up when
you are gone, and see.”

“It’s not safe,” he grumbled, still inclined to go. “You two alone
here, and the old man said to be as rich as a lord!”

“Ay, said to be,” she answered, smiling “As you said you were going ten
minutes ago, and you are not gone yet. But——” she rose with a yawn,
partly real and partly forced, “you must go now, my lad.”

“But why?” he answered. “When we were just beginning to understand one
another.”

“Why?” she answered pertly. “Because father wants to sleep. Because
your wife will scratch my eyes out if you don’t. Because I am not going
to say another word to-night—whatever I may say to-morrow. And
because—it’s my will, my lad. That’s all.”

He muttered his discontent, swinging his hat in his hand, and making
eyes at her. But she kept him at arm’s length, and after a moment’s
argument she drove him to the door.

“All the same,” he said, when he stood outside, “you had better let me
look upstairs.”

But she laughed.

“I dare say you’d like it!” she said; and she shut the door in his face
and he heard the great bar that secured it shot into its socket in the
thickness of the wall. In a temper not much better than that in which
he had left the inn, he groped his way round the house, and up the
three steps at the corner of the building. He swore at the dog that it
might know who came, and so he passed into the road. Once he looked
back at the house, but all was dark. The windows looked the other way.




CHAPTER IX
PUNISHMENT


Anthony Clyne came to a stand before her, and lifted his hat.

“I understand,” he said, without letting his eyes meet hers—he was
stiffness itself, but perhaps he too had his emotions—“that you
preferred to see me here rather than indoors?”

“Yes,” Henrietta answered. And the girl thanked heaven that though the
beating of her heart had nearly choked her a moment before, her tone
was as hard and uncompromising as his. He could not guess, he never
should guess, what strain she put on nerve and will that she might not
quail before him; nor how often, with her quivering face hidden in the
pillow, she had told herself, before rising, that it was for once only,
once only, and that then she need never see again the man she had
wronged.

“I do not know,” he continued slowly, “whether you have anything to
say?”

“Nothing,” she answered. They were standing on the Ambleside road, a
short furlong from the inn. Leafless trees climbed the hill-side above
them; and a rough slope, unfenced and strewn with boulders and dying
bracken, ran down from their feet to the lake.

“Then,” he rejoined, with a scarcely perceptible hardening of the
mouth, “I had best say as briefly as possible what I am come to say.”

“If you please,” she said. Hitherto she had faced him regally. Now she
averted her eyes ever so slightly, and placed herself so that she
looked across the water that gleamed pale under the morning mist.

Yet, even with her eyes turned from him, he did not find it easy to say
what he must say. And for a few seconds he was silent. At last “I do
not wish to upbraid you,” he began in a voice somewhat lower in tone.
“You have done a very foolish and a very wicked, wicked thing, and one
which cannot be undone in the eyes of the world. That is for all to
see. You have left your home and your friends and your family under
circumstances——”

She turned her full face to him suddenly.

“Have they,” she said, “empowered you to speak to me?”

“Yes.”

“They do not wish to see me themselves?”

“No.”

“Nor perhaps—wish me to return to them?”

“No.”

She nodded as she looked away again; in sheer defiance, he supposed. He
did not guess that she did it to mask the irrepressible shiver which
the news caused her.

He thought her, on the contrary, utterly unrepentant, and it hardened
him to speak more austerely, to give his feelings freer vent.

“Had you done this thing with a gentleman,” he said, “there had been,
however heartless and foolish the act, some hope that the matter might
be set straight. And some excuse for yourself; since a man of our class
might have dazzled you by the possession of qualities which the person
you chose could not have. But an elopement with a needy adventurer,
without breeding, parts, or honesty—a criminal, and wedded already——”

“If he were not wedded already,” she said, “I had been with him now!”

His face grew a shade more severe, but otherwise he did not heed the
taunt.

“Such an—an act,” he said, “unfits you in your brother’s eyes to return
to his home.” He paused an instant. “Or to the family you have
disgraced. I am bound—I have no option, to tell you this.”

“You say it as from them?”

“I do. I have said indeed less than they bade me say. And not more, I
believe on my honour, than the occasion requires. A young gentlewoman,”
he continued bitterly, “brought up in the country with every care,
sheltered from every temptation, with friends, with home, with every
comfort and luxury, and about to be married to a gentleman in her own
rank in life, meets secretly, clandestinely, shamefully a man, the
lowest of the low, on a par in refinement with her own servants, but
less worthy! She deceives with him her friends, her family, her
relatives! If”—with some emotion—“I have overstated one of these
things, God forgive me!”

“Pray go on!” she said, with her face averted. And thinking that she
was utterly hardened, utterly without heart, thinking that her outward
calm spelled callousness, and that she felt nothing, he did continue.

“Can she,” he said, “who has been so deceitful herself, complain if the
man deceives her? She has chosen a worthless creature before her family
and her friends? Is she not richly served if he treats her after his
own nature and her example? If, after stooping to the lawless level of
such a poor thing, she finds herself involved in his penalties, and her
name a scandal and a shame to her family!”

“Is that all?” she asked. But not a quiver of the voice, not a tremour
of the shoulders, betrayed what she was feeling, what she suffered, how
fiercely the brand was burning into her soul.

“That is all they bade me say,” he replied in a calmer and more gentle
tone. “And that they would make arrangements—such arrangements as may
be possible for your future. But they would not take you back.”

“And now—what on your own account?” she asked, almost flippantly.
“Something, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he said, answering her slowly, and with a steady look of
condemnation. For in all honesty the girl’s attitude shocked and
astonished him. “I have something to say on my own account. Something.
But it is difficult to say it.”

She turned to him and raised her eyebrows.

“Really!” she said. “You seem to speak so easily.”

He did not remark how white, even against the pale shimmer of the lake,
was the face that mocked him; and her heartlessness seemed dreadful to
him.

“I wish,” he said, “to say only one thing on my own account.”

“There is only one thing you must not say,” she retorted, turning on
him without warning and speaking with concentrated passion. “I have
been, it may be, as foolish as you say. I am only nineteen. I may have
been, I don’t know about that, very wicked—as wicked as you say. And
what I have done in my folly and in my—you call it wickedness—may be a
disgrace to my family. But I have done nothing, nothing, sir,”—she
raised her head proudly—“to disgrace myself personally. Do you believe
that?”

And then he did notice how white she was.

“If you tell me that, I do believe it,” he said gravely.

“You must believe it,” she rejoined with sudden vehemence. “Or you
wrong me more cruelly than I have wronged you!”

“I do believe it,” he said, conquered for the time by a new emotion.

“Then now I will hear you,” she answered, her tone sinking again. “I
will hear what you wish to say. Not that it will bend me. I have
injured you. I own it, and am sorry for it on your account. On my own I
am unhappy, but I had been more unhappy had I married you. You have
been frank, let me be frank,” she continued, her eyes alight, her tone
almost imperious. “You sought not a wife, but a mother for your child!
A woman, a little better bred than a nurse, to whom you could entrust
the one being, the only being, you love, with less chance of its
contamination,” she laughed icily, “by the lower orders! If you had any
other motive in choosing me it was that I was your second cousin, of
your own respectable family, and you did not derogate. But you forgot
that I was young and a woman, as you were a man. You said no word of
love to me, you begged for no favour; when you entered a room, you
sought my eye no more than another’s, you had no more softness for me
than for another! If you courted me at all it was before others, and if
you talked to me at all it was from the height of wise dullness, and
about things I did not understand and things I hated! Until,” she
continued viciously, “at last I hated you! What could be more natural?
What did you expect?”

A little colour had stolen into his face under the lash of her
reproaches. He tried to seem indifferent, but he could not. His tone
was forced and constrained when he answered.

“You have strange ideas,” he said.

“And you have but two!” she riposted. “Politics and your boy! I cared,”
with concentrated bitterness, “for neither!”

That stung him to anger and retort.

“I can imagine it,” he said. “Your likings appear to be on a different
plane.”

“They are at least not confined to fifty families!” she rejoined. “I do
not think myself divine,” she continued with feverish irony, “and all
below me clay! I do not think because I and all about me are dull and
stupid that all the world is dull and stupid, talking eternally
about”—and she deliberately mocked his tone—“‘the licence of the
press!’ and ‘the imminence of anarchy!’ To talk,” with supreme scorn,
“of the licence of the press and the imminence of anarchy to a girl of
nineteen! It was at least to make the way very smooth for another!”

He looked at her in silence, frowning. Her frankness was an outrage on
his dignity—and he, of all men, loved his dignity. But it surprised him
at least as much as it shocked him. He remembered the girl sometimes
silly, sometimes demure, to whom he had cast the handkerchief; and he
had not been more astonished if a sheep had stood up and barked at him.
He was here, prepared to meet a frightened, weeping, shamefaced child,
imploring pardon, imploring mediation; and he found this! He was here
to upbraid, and she scolded him. She marked with unerring eye the
joints in his armour, and with her venomous woman’s tongue she planted
darts that he knew would rankle—rankle long after she was gone and he
was alone. And a faint glimpse of the truth broke on him. Was it
possible that he had misread the girl; whom he had deemed
characterless, when she was not shy? Was it possible that he had
under-valued her and slighted her? Was it possible that, while he had
been judging her and talking down to her, she had been judging him and
laughing in her sleeve?

The thought was not pleasant to a proud nature. And there was another
thing he had to weigh. If she were so different in fact from the
conception he had formed of her, the course which had occurred to him
as the best, and which he was going to propose for her, might not be
the best.

But he put that from him. A name for firmness at times compels a man to
obstinacy. It was so now. He set his jaw more stiffly, and—

“Will you hear me now?” he asked.

“If there is anything more to be said,” she replied. She spoke wearily
over her shoulder.

“I think there is,” he rejoined stubbornly, “one thing. It will not
keep you long. It refers to your future. There is a course which I
think may be taken and may be advantageous to you.”

“If,” she cried impetuously, “it is to take me back to those——”

“On the contrary,” he replied. He was not unwilling to wound one who
had shown herself so unexpectedly capable of offence. “That is quite
past,” he continued. “There is no longer any question of that. And even
the course I suggest is not without its disadvantages. It may not, at
first sight, be more acceptable to you than returning to your home. But
I trust you have learnt a lesson, and will now be guided.” After saying
which he coughed and hesitated, and at length, after twice pulling up
his cravat, “I think,” he said—“the matter is somewhat delicate—that I
had better write what I have in my mind.”

Under the dead weight of depression which had succeeded to passion,
curiosity stirred faintly in her. But—

“As you please,” she said.

“The more,” he continued stiffly, “as in the immediate present there is
nothing to be done. And therefore there is no haste. Until this”—he
made a wry face, the thing was so hateful to him—“this inquiry is at an
end, and you are free to leave, nothing but preliminaries can be dealt
with; those settled, however, I think there should be no delay. But you
shall hear from me within the week.”

“Very well.” And after a slight pause, “That is all?”

“That is all, I think.”

Yet he did not go. And she continued to stand with her shoulder turned
towards him. He was a man of strong prejudices, and the habit of
command had rendered him in some degree callous. But he was neither
unkind by nature, nor, in spite of the story Walterson had told of him,
inhuman in practice. To leave a young girl thus, to leave her without a
word of leave-taking or regret, seemed even to him, now it came to the
point, barbarous. The road stretched lonely on either side of them, the
woods were brown and sad and almost leafless, the lake below them
mirrored the unchanging grey above, or lost itself in dreary mist. And
he remembered her in surroundings so different! He remembered how she
had been reared, by whom encircled, amid what plenitude! And though he
did not guess that the slender figure standing thus mute and forlorn
would haunt him by night and by day for weeks to come, and harry and
torment him with dumb reproaches—he still had not the heart to go
without one gentler word.

And so “No, there is one thing,” he said, his voice shaking very
slightly, “I would like to add—I would like you to know. It is that
after next week I shall be at Rysby in Cartmel—Rysby Hall—for about a
month. It is not more than two miles from the foot of the lake, and if
you are still here and need advice——”

“Thank you.”

“——or help, I would like you to know that I am there.”

“That I may apply to you?” she said without turning her head.

He could not tell whether at last there were tears in her voice, or
whether she were merely drawing him on to flout him.

“I meant that,” he said coldly.

“Thank you.”

Certainly there was a queer sound in her voice.

He paused awkwardly.

“There is nothing more, I think?” he said.

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Very well,” he returned. “Then you will hear from me upon the matter I
mentioned—in a day or two. Good-bye.”

He went then—awkwardly, slowly. He felt himself, in spite of his
arguments, in spite of his anger, in spite of the wrong which she had
done him, and the disgrace which she brought on his name,—he felt
himself something of a cur. She was little more than a child, little
more than a child; and he had not understood her! Even now he had no
notion how often that plea would ring in his ears, and harass him and
keep him wakeful. And Henrietta? She had told herself before the
interview that with it the worst would be over. But as she heard his
firm tread pass slowly away, down the road, and grow fainter and
fainter, the pride that had supported her under his eyes sank low. A
sense of her loneliness, so cruel that it wrung her heart, so cruel
that she could have run after him and begged him to punish her, to
punish her as he pleased, if he would not leave her deserted, gripped
her throat and brought salt tears to her eyes. The excitement was over,
the flatness remained; the failure, and the grey skies and leaden water
and dying bracken. And she was alone; alone for always. She had defied
him, she had defied them all, she had told him that whatever happened
she would not go back, she would not be taken back. But she knew now
that she had lied. And she crossed the road, her step unsteady, and
stumbled blindly up the woodland path above the road, until she came to
a place where she knew that she was hidden. There she flung herself
down on her face and cried passionately, stifling her sobs in the green
damp moss. She had done wrong. She had done cruel wrong to him. But she
was only nineteen, and she was being punished! She was being punished!




CHAPTER X
HENRIETTA IN NAXOS


Youth feels, let the adult say what he pleases, more deeply than middle
age. It suffers and enjoys with a poignancy unknown in later life. But
in revenge it is cast down more lightly, and uplifted with less reason.
The mature have seen so many sunny mornings grow to tearful noons, so
many days of stress close in peace, that their moods are not to the
same degree at the mercy of passing accidents. It is with the young, on
the other hand, as with the tender shoots; they raise their heads to
meet the April sun, as naturally they droop in the harsh east wind. And
Henrietta had been more than girl, certainly more than nineteen, if she
had not owned the influence of the scene and the morning that lapped
her about when she next set foot beyond the threshold of the inn.

She had spent in the meantime three days at which memory shuddered.
Alone in her room, shrinking from every eye, turning her back on the
woman who waited on her, she had found her pride insufficient to
support her. Solitude is a medium which exaggerates all objects, and
the longer Henrietta brooded over her past folly and her present
disgrace, the more intolerable these grew to the vision.

Fortunately, if Modest Ann’s heart bled for her, Mrs. Gilson viewed her
misfortunes with a saner and less sensitive eye. She saw that if the
girl were left longer to herself her health would fail. Already, she
remarked, the child looked two years older—looked a woman. So on the
fourth morning Mrs. Gilson burst in on her, found her moping at the
window with her eyes on the lake, and forthwith, after her fashion, she
treated her to a piece of her mind.

“See here, young miss,” she said bluntly, “I’ll have nobody ill in my
house! Much more making themselves ill! In three days Bishop’s to be
back, and they’ll want you, like enough. And a pale, peaking face won’t
help you, but rather the other way with men, such fools as they be! You
get your gear and go out.”

Henrietta said meekly that she would do so.

“There’s a basket I want to send to Tyson’s,” the landlady went on.
“She’s ailing. It’s a flea’s load, but I suppose,” sticking her arms
akimbo and looking straight at the girl, “you’re too much of a lady to
carry it.”

“I’ll take it very willingly,” Henrietta said. And she rose with a
spark of something approaching interest in her eyes.

“Well, I’ve nobody else,” said cunning Mrs. Gilson. “And I don’t
suppose you’ll run from me, ’twixt here and there. And she’s a poor
thing. She’s going to have a babby, and couldn’t be more lonely if she
was in Patterdale.” And she described the way, adding that if Henrietta
kept the road no one would meddle with her at that hour of the morning.

The girl found her head-covering, and, submitting with a good grace to
the basket, she set forth. As she emerged from the inn—for three days
she had not been out—she cast a half-shamed, half-defiant look this way
and that. But only Modest Ann was watching her from a window; and if
ever St. Martin procured for the faithful a summer day, _intempestive_
as the chroniclers have it, this was that day. A warm sun glowed in the
brown hollows of the wood, and turned the dying fern to flame, and
spread the sheen of velvet over green hill-side and grey crag. A mild
west wind enlivened the surface of the lake with the sparkle of
innumerable wavelets, and all that had for days been lead seemed turned
to silver. The air was brisk and clear; in a heaven of their own, very
far off, the great peaks glittered and shone. The higher Henrietta
climbed above the inn-roofs, and the cares that centred there, the
lighter, in spite of herself—how could it be otherwise with that scene
of beauty stretched before her?—rose her heart.

Half a dozen times as she mounted the hill she paused to view the scene
through the tender mist of her own unhappiness. But every time she
stood, the rare fleck of cloud gliding across the blue, or the dancing
ripple of the water below, appealed to her, and caused her thoughts to
wander; and youth and hope spoke more loudly. She was young. Surely at
her age an error was not irreparable. Surely things would take a turn.
For even now she was less unhappy, less ashamed.

When she came to the summit of the shoulder, the bare gauntness of
Hinkson’s farm, which resisted even the beauty of sunshine, caused her
a momentary chill. The dog raved at her from the wind-swept litter of
the yard. The blind gable-end scowled through the firs. Behind lay the
squalid out-buildings, roofless and empty. She hurried by—not without a
backward glance. She crossed the ridge, and almost immediately saw in a
cup of the hills below her—so directly below her that roofs and yards
and pig-styes lay mapped out under her eye—another farm. On three sides
the smooth hill-turf sloped steeply to the walls. On the fourth, where
a stream, which had its source beside the farm, found vent, a wood
choked the descending gorge and hid the vale and the lake below.

Deep-seated in its green bowl, the house was as lonely in position as
the house on the shoulder, but after a warmer and more sheltered
fashion. Conceivably peace and plenty, comfort and happiness might
nestle in it. Yet the nearer Henrietta descended to it, leaving the
world of space and view, the more a sense of stillness and isolation
and almost of danger, pressed upon her. No sound of farm life, no
cheery clank of horse-gear, no human voice broke the silence of the
hills. Only a few hens scratched in the fold-yard.

She struck on the half-open door, and a pair of pattens clanked across
the kitchen flags. A clownish, dull-faced woman with drugget petticoats
showed herself.

“I’ve come to see Mrs. Tyson,” Henrietta said. “She’s in the house?”

“Oh, ay.”

“Can I see her?”

“Oh, ay.”

“Then——”

“She’s on the settle.” As she spoke the woman stood aside, but
continued to stare as if her curiosity grudged the loss of a moment.

The kitchen, or house place—in those days the rough work of a farmhouse
was done in the scullery—was spacious and clean, though sparsely and
massively furnished. The flag floor was outlined in white squares, and
the space about the fire was made more private by a tall settle which
flanked the chimney corner and averted the draught. These appearances
foretold a red-armed bustling house-wife. But they were belied by the
pale plump face framed in untidy hair, which half in fright and half in
bewilderment peered at her over the arm of the settle. It was a face
that had been pretty after a feeble fashion no more than twelve months
back: now it bore the mark of strain and trouble. And when it was not
peevish it was frightened. Certainly it was no longer pretty.

The owner of the face got slowly to her feet “Is it me you want?” she
said, her tone spiritless.

“If you are Mrs. Tyson,” Henrietta answered gently.

“Yes, I am.”

“I have brought you some things Mrs. Gilson of the inn wished to send
you.”

“I am obliged to you,” with stiff shyness.

“And if you do not mind,” Henrietta continued frankly, “I will rest a
little. If I do not trouble you.”

“No, I’m mostly alone,” the young woman answered, slowly and
apathetically. And she bade the servant set a chair for the visitor.
That done, she despatched the woman with the basket to the larder.

Then “I’m mostly alone,” she repeated. And this time her voice
quivered, and her eyes met the other woman’s eyes.

“But,” Henrietta said, smiling, “you have your husband.”

“He’s often away,” wearily. “He’s often away; by day and night. He’s a
doctor.”

“But your servant? You have her?”

“She goes home, nights. And then——” with a spasm of the querulous face
that had been pretty no more than a year before, “the hours are long
when you are alone. You don’t know,” timidly reaching out a hand as if
she would touch Henrietta’s frock—but withdrawing it quickly, “what it
is to be alone, miss, all night in such a house as this.”

“No, and no one should be!” Henrietta answered.

She glanced round the great silent kitchen and tried to fancy what the
house would be like of nights; when darkness settled down on the hollow
in the hills, and the wood cut it off from the world below; and when,
whatever threatened, whatever came, whatever face of terror peered
through the dark-paned window, whatever sound, weird or startling, rent
the silence of the distant rooms, this helpless woman must face it
alone!

She shuddered.

“But you are not alone all night?” she said.

“No, but——” in a whisper, “often until after midnight, miss. And
once—all night.”

Henrietta restrained the words that rose to her lips.

“Ah, well,” she said, “you’ll have your baby by-and-by.”

“Ay, if it lives,” the other woman answered moodily—“if it lives. And,”
she continued in a whisper, with her scared eyes on Henrietta’s face,
and her hand on her wrist, “if I live, miss.”

“Oh, but you must not think of that!” the girl protested cheerfully.
“Of course you will live.”

“I’ve mostly nought to do but think,” Tyson’s wife answered. “And I
think queer things—I think queer things. Sometimes”—tightening her hold
on Henrietta’s arm to stay her shocked remonstrance—“that he does not
wish me to live. He’s at the house on the shoulder—Hinkson’s, the one
you passed—most nights. There’s a girl there. And yesterday he said if
I was lonely she should come and bide here while I laid up, and she’d
be company for me. But”—in a wavering tone that was almost a wail—“I’m
afraid!—I’m afraid.”

“Afraid?” Henrietta repeated, trembling a little in sympathy, and
drawing a little nearer the other. “Of what?”

“Of her!” the woman muttered, averting her eyes that she might watch
the door. “Of Bess. She’s gypsy blood, and it’s blood that sticks at
nothing. And she’d be glad I was gone. She’d have him then. I know! She
made a sign at me one day when my back was turned, but I saw it. And it
was not for good. Besides——”

“Oh, but indeed,” Henrietta protested, “indeed, you must not think of
these things. You are not well, and you have fancies.”

Mrs. Tyson shook her head.

“You’d have fancies,” in a gloomy tone, “if you lived in this house.”

“It is only because you are so much alone in it,” the girl protested.

“That’s not all,” with a shudder. The woman leant forward and spoke low
with her eyes glued to the door. “That’s not all. You don’t know,
nobody knows. Nobody knows—that’s alive! But once, after I came to live
here, when I complained that he was out so much and was not treating me
well, he took and showed me—he took and showed me——”

“What?” Henrietta spoke as lightly as she could. “What did he show
you?” For the woman had broken off, and with her eyes closed seemed to
be on the point of fainting.

“Nothing—nothing,” Mrs. Tyson said, recovering herself with a sudden
gasp. “And here’s the basket, miss. Meg lives down below. Shall she
carry the basket to Mrs. Gilson’s? It is not fitting a young lady like
you should carry it.”

“Oh, no; I will take it,” Henrietta answered, with as careless an air
as she could muster.

And after a moment’s awkward hesitation, under the eyes of the dull
serving-maid, she rose. She would gladly have stayed and heard more;
for her pity and curiosity were alike vividly roused. But it was plain
that for the present she could neither act upon the one nor assuage the
other. She read a plea for silence in the eyes of the weak, frightened
woman; and having said that probably Mrs. Gilson would be sending her
that way again before long, she took her leave.

Wondering much. For the low-ceiled kitchen, with its shadowy
chimney-corner and its low-browed windows, had another look for her
now; and the stillness of the house another meaning. All might be the
fancy of a nervous, brooding woman. And yet there was something. And,
something or nothing, there were unhappiness and fear and cruelty in
this quiet work. As she climbed the track that led again to the lip of
the basin, and to sunshine and brisk air and freedom, she had less pity
for herself, she thought less of herself. She might have lain at the
mercy of a careless, faithless husband, who played on her fears and
mocked her appeals. She, when in her early unbroken days she
complained, might have been taken and scared by—heaven knew what!

She was still thinking with indignation of the woman’s plight when she
gained the road. A hundred paces brought her to Hinkson’s. And there,
standing under the firs at the corner of the house, and looking over
her shoulder as if she had turned, in the act of entering, to see who
passed, was the dark girl; the same whose insolent smile had annoyed
her on the morning of her arrival, before she knew what was in store
for her.

Their eyes met. Again Henrietta’s face, to her intense vexation,
flamed. Then the dog sprang up and raved at her, and she passed on down
the road. But she was troubled. She was vexed with herself for losing
countenance, and still more angry with the girl whose mocking smile had
so strange a power to wound her.

“That must be the creature we have been discussing,” she thought. “Odd
that I should meet her, and still more odd that I should have seen her
before! I don’t wonder that the woman fears her! But why does she look
at me, of all people, after that fashion?”

She told herself that it was her fancy, and trying to forget the
matter, she tripped on down the road. Presently, before her cheeks or
her temper were quite cool, she saw that she was going to meet some
one—a man who was slowly mounting the hill on horseback. A moment later
she made out that the rider who was approaching was Mr. Hornyold, and
her face grew hot again. The meeting was humiliating. She wished
herself anywhere else. But at the worst she could bow coldly and pass
by.

She reckoned without the justice, who was wont to say that when he wore
a cassock he was a parson, and when he wore his top-boots he was a
gentleman. He recognised her with a subdued “View halloa!” and pulled
up as she drew near. He slid from his saddle—with an agility his bulk
did not promise—and barred the way.

With a grin and an over-gallant salute, “Dear, dear, dear,” he said.
“Isn’t this out of bounds, young lady? Outside the rules of the bench,
eh? What’d Mother Gilson be saying if she saw you here?”

“I have been on an errand for her,” Henrietta replied, in her coldest
tone.

But she had to stop. The road was narrow, and he had, as by accident,
put his horse across it.

“An errand?” he said, smiling more broadly, “as far as this? She is
very trusting! More trusting than I should be with a young lady of your
appearance, who twist all the men round your finger.”

Henrietta’s eyes sparkled.

“I am returning to her,” she said, “and I am late. Please to let me
pass.”

“To be sure I will,” he said. But instead of moving aside he drew a
pace nearer; so that between himself, the horse, and the bank, she was
hemmed in. “To be sure, young lady!” he continued. “But that is not
quite the tone to take with the powers that be! We are gentle as
sucking doves—to pretty young women—while we are pleased; and ready to
stretch a point, as we did the other day, for our friend Clyne, who was
so deuced mysterious about the matter. But we must have our _quid pro
quo_, eh? Come, a kiss! Just one. There are only the birds to see and
the hedges to tell, and I’ll warrant”—the leer more plain in his
eyes—“you are not always so particular.”

Henrietta was not frightened, but she was angry and savage.

“Do you know who I am?” she cried, for the moment forgetting herself in
her passion.

“No!” he answered, before she could say more. “That is just what I
don’t know, my girl. I have taken you on trust and you are pretty
enough! But I know Clyne, and he is interested in you. And his taste is
good enough for me!”

“Let me pass!” she cried.

He tried to seize her, but she evaded his grasp, slipped fearlessly
behind the horse’s heels and stood free. Hornyold wheeled about, and
with an oath:

“You sly baggage!” he cried. “You are not going to escape so easily!
You——”

There he stopped. Not twenty yards from him and less than that distance
beyond her, was a stranger. The sight was so little to be expected in
that solitary place, he had been so sure that they were alone and the
girl at the mercy of his rudeness, that he broke off, staring. The
stranger came slowly on, and when almost abreast of Henrietta raised
his hat and paused, dividing his regards between the scowling
magistrate and the indignant girl.

“Good morning,” he said, addressing her. “If I am not inopportune, I
have a letter for you from Captain Clyne.”

“Then be good enough,” she answered, “first to take me out of the
company of this person.” And she turned her shoulder on the justice,
and taking the stranger with her—almost in his own despite—she sailed
off; and, a very picture of outraged dignity, swept down the road.

Mr. Hornyold glared after her, his bridle on his arm. And his face was
red with fury. Seldom had he been so served.

“A parson, by heaven!” he said. “A regular Methody, too, by his
niminy-piminy get-up! Who is he, I wonder, and what in the name of
mischief brought him here just at that moment? Ten to one she was
looking to meet him, and that was why she played the prude, the little
cat! To be sure. But I’ll be even with her—in Appleby gaol or out! As
for him, I’ve never set eyes on him. And I’ve a good notion to have him
taken up and lodged in the lock-up. Any way, I’ll set the runners on
him. Not much spirit in him by the look of him! But she’s a spit-fire!”

Mr. Hornyold had been so long accustomed to consider the girls of the
village fair sport, that he was considerably put out. True, Henrietta
was not a village girl. She was something more, and a mystery; nor
least a mystery in her relations with Captain Clyne, a man whom the
justice admitted to be more important than himself. But she was in
trouble, she was under a cloud, she was smirched with suspicion; she
was certainly no better than she should be. And not experience only,
but all the coarser instincts of the man forbade him to believe in such
a woman’s “No.”




CHAPTER XI
CAPTAIN CLYNE’S PLAN


For a full hundred yards Henrietta walked on with her head in the air,
too angry to accost or even to look at her companion; who, on his part,
tripped meekly beside her. Then a sense of the absurdity of the
position—of his position rather than her own, for she had whirled him
off whether he would or no—overcame her. And she laughed.

“Was ever anything so ridiculous?” she cried. And she looked at him
askance and something ashamed. The quick movement which had enabled her
to escape had loosened the thick mass of her fair hair, and this, with
her flushed cheeks and kindled eyes, showed her so handsome that it was
well the impetuous justice was no longer with her.

The stranger was apparently less impressionable.

“I am glad,” he said primly, “that my coming was so opportune.”

“Oh! I was not afraid of him,” Henrietta answered, tossing her head.

“No?” he rejoined. “Indeed. Still, I am glad that I came so
opportunely.”

He was a neat, trim man in black, of a pale complexion, and with the
small features and the sharp nose that indicate at once timidity and
obstinacy; the nose that in the case of the late Right Honourable
William Pitt, whom he was proud to resemble, meant something more. But
for a pair of bright eyes he had been wholly mean, and wholly
insignificant; and Henrietta saw nothing in him either formidable or
attractive. She had a notion that she had seen him somewhere; but it
was a vague notion, and how he came to be here or commissioned to her
she could no more conjecture than if he had risen from the ground.

“You are a stranger here?” she said at last, after more than one
side-long glance.

“Yes, I descended from the coach an hour ago.”

“And came in search of me?”

“Precisely,” he replied. “Being empowered to do so,” he continued, with
a slight but formal bow, “by Captain Anthony Clyne, to whom I have the
honour—my name is Sutton—of being related in the capacity of chaplain.”

She coloured more violently with shame than before with anger: and all
her troubles came back to her. Probably this man knew all; knew what
she had done and what had happened to her. It was cruel—oh, it was
cruel to send him! For a moment she could not collect her thoughts or
master her voice. But at last,

“Oh!” she said confusedly. “I see. A lovely view from here, is it not?”

“Yes, to be sure,” he replied, with the same precision with which he
had spoken before. “I ought to have noticed it.”

“And you bring me a letter?”

“It was Captain Clyne’s wish that I——” he hesitated, and was plainly
embarrassed—“that I should, in fact, offer my company for a day or two.
While you are under the care of the good woman at the inn.”

She turned her face towards him, and regarded him with a mixture of
surprise and distaste. Then,

“Indeed?” she said coldly. “In what capacity, if you please?”

But the words said, she felt her cheeks grow hot. They thought so ill
of her, she had so misbehaved herself, that a duenna was not enough; a
clergyman must be sent to lecture her. By-and-by he would talk
goody-goody to her, such as they talked to Lucy in _The Fairchild
Family!_ Save that she was grown up and Lucy was not!

“But it does not matter,” she continued hurriedly, and before he could
answer, “I am obliged to you, but Mrs. Gilson is quite able to take
care of me.”

“And yet I came very opportunely—just now,” he said. “I am glad I came
so opportunely.”

Reminded of the insolence to which her loneliness had exposed her,
Henrietta felt her cheek grow hot again.

“Oh,” she said, “I did not need you! But I thought you said you brought
a letter?”

“I have a letter. But I beg leave—to postpone its delivery for a day or
two.”

“How?” in astonishment. “If it is for me?”

“By Captain Clyne’s directions,” he answered.

She stopped short and faced him, rebellion in her eyes.

“Then why,” she said proudly, “seek me out now if this letter is not to
be delivered at once?”

“That, too, is by his order,” Mr. Sutton explained in the same tone.
“And pardon me for saying,” he continued, with a meaning cough, “that I
have seen enough to be assured of Captain Clyne’s forethought. Apart
from which, in Lancashire, at any rate, the times are so troubled, the
roads so unsafe, the common people so outrageous, that for a young lady
to walk out alone is not safe.”

“He should have sent a servant, then!” she answered sharply.

A faint colour rose to the chaplain’s cheeks.

“He thought me more trustworthy, perhaps,” he said meekly. “And it is
possible he was under the impression that my company might be more
acceptable.”

“If I may be plain,” she answered tartly, “I am in no mood for a
stranger’s company.”

“And yet,” he said, with a gleam of appeal in his eyes, “I would fain
hope to make myself acceptable.”

She gave him no direct answer; only,

“I cannot understand, I really cannot understand,” she said, “of what
he was thinking. You had better give me the letter now, sir. I may find
something in that which may explain.”

But he only cast down his eyes.

“I am afraid,” he said, “that I must not disobey the directions which
Captain Clyne laid upon me.”

“Very good,” she retorted; “that is as you please. Only—our paths
separate here. The road we are on will take you to the inn—you cannot
miss it. My path lies this way.”

And with a stiff little bow she laid her hand on the gate which gave
entrance to the field-path; the same path that led down through the
coppice to the back of the Low Wood inn. She passed through.

He hesitated an instant, then he also turned in at the gate. And as she
halted, eyeing him in displeasure—

“I really cannot let you stray from the high-road alone,” he said. “You
will pardon me, I am sure, if I seem intrusive. But it is not safe. I
have seen enough,” with a smirk, “to know that—that beauty unattended
goes in danger amid these lovely”—he waved his hand in kindly patronage
of the lake—“these lovely, but wild surroundings.”

“You mean,” she answered, with a dangerous light in her eyes, “that you
will force your company on me, sir? Whether I will or no?”

“Not force, no! No! No! But I must, I can only do as I am ordered. I
should not presume of myself,” he continued, with a touch of real
humility—“even to offer my company. I should not look so high. I should
think such an honour above me. But I was led to believe——”

“By Captain Clyne?”

“Yes, that—that, in fact, you were willing to make what amends you
could for the injury done to him. And that, if only for that reason, I
might expect a more favourable reception at your hands.”

“But why, sir?—why?” she cried, cut to the quick. To suffer this man,
this stranger, to talk to her of making amends!” What good will it do
to Captain Clyne if I receive you ever so favourably?”

He looked at her humbly, with appeal in his eyes.

“If you would deign to wait,” he said, and he wiped his forehead, “I
think I could make that more clear to you afterwards.”

But very naturally his persistence offended her. That word amends, too,
stuck in her throat. Her pride, made restive by her encounter with
Hornyold, was up in arms.

“I shall not wait a moment,” she said. “Not a moment! Understand, sir,
that if you accompany me against my will, my first act on reaching the
inn will be to complain to the landlady, and seek her protection.”

“Surely not against Captain Clyne’s pleni—plenipotentiary?” he murmured
abjectly. “Surely not!”

“I do not know what a pleni-plenipotentiary is,” she retorted. “But if
you follow me, you follow at your peril!”

And she turned her back on him, and plunged downwards through the wood.
She did not deign to look behind; but her ears told her that he was not
following. For the rest, all the beauty of the wood, shot through with
golden lights, all the cool loveliness of the dell, with its emerald
mosses and flash of jewelled wings, were lost upon her now, so sore was
she and so profoundly humiliated. Twice in one morning she had been
insulted. Twice in one hour had a man shown her that he held her fair
game. Were they right, then, who preached that outside the sanctum of
home no girl was safe? Or was it her story, her conduct, her disgrace,
known to all for miles round, that robbed her of the right to respect?

Either way she was unhappy, frightened, nay, shocked; and she longed to
be within doors, where she need not restrain herself. Too proud to
confide in Mrs. Gilson, she longed none the less for some one to whom
she could unburden herself. Was she to go through the world exposed to
such scenes? Must she be daily and hourly on her guard against rude
insult, or more odious gallantries? And if these things befell her in
this quiet spot, what must she expect in the world, deserted as she was
by all those who would once have protected her?

She looked to gain her room without further unpleasantness; for the
path she followed led her to the back door, and she could enter that
way. But she was not to be so fortunate. In the yard, awaiting her with
his hat in his hand and the flush of haste on his pallid face, was Mr.
Sutton.

Poor Henrietta! she ground her small teeth together in her rage, and
her face was scarlet. But her mind was made up. If Mr. Sutton counted
on her being worse than her word she would show him his mistake.

“I shall send for the landlady,” she said; and beckoning to a
stable-help who was crossing the yard with a bucket, “Fetch Mrs.
Gilson,” she said. “Tell her——”

“One moment!” Mr. Sutton interposed with meek firmness. “I am going to
give you the letter. It will explain all, and I hope justify my
conduct, which I cannot believe to have been offensive.”

“That is a matter of opinion,” Henrietta said loftily. She held out her
hand. “The letter, sir, if you please.”

“One favour, I beg,” he said, with a gesture that deprecated her
impatience. He waved the groom out of hearing. “This is not a fit place
for you or”—with a return of dignity—“for the business on which I am
here. Do me the favour of seeing me within or of walking a few yards
with me. There is a seat by the lake, if you will not admit me to your
apartments.”

She frowned at him. But she saw the wisdom of concluding the matter,
and she led the way into the road and turned to the right. Immediately,
however, she remembered that the Ambleside road would lead her to the
spot where Captain Clyne had taken leave of her, and she turned and
walked the other way until she came to the place where the Troutbeck
lane diverged. There she stood.

“The letter, if you please,” she said. She spoke with the contemptuous
hardness which youth, seldom considerate of others’ feelings, is prone
to display.

He held it an instant in his hand as if he could not bear to part with
it. But at last, with a dismal look and an abject sentence or two, he
gave it up.

“I beg you, I implore you,” he muttered as she took it, “to announce no
hasty decision. To believe that I am something more and better than you
think me now. And that ill as I have set myself before you, I would
fain labour to show myself more—more worthy!”

The words were so strange, his manner was so puzzling, that they
pierced the armour of her dislike. She paused, staring at him.

“Worthy!” she exclaimed. “Worthy of what?”

“The letter——”

“Yes, the letter will tell me.”

And with a haughty air she broke the seal. As she read she turned
herself from him, so that he saw little more of her face than her
firmly moulded chin. But when she had carried her eyes some way down
the sheet he noticed that her hands began to shake.

“Henrietta,” so Captain Clyne began,—“for to add any term of endearment
were either too little or too much—I have thought long and painfully,
as becomes one who expected to be by this time your husband, on the
situation in which you have placed yourself by an escapade, the
consequences of which, whatever action be taken, must be permanently
detrimental. Of these, as they touch myself, I say nothing, the object
of these lines being to indicate a way by which I trust your honour and
character may be redeemed. The bearer, whom I know for a man of merit
and respectability, saw you by chance on the occasion of your visit to
my house, and, as I learned by a word indiscreetly dropped, admired
you. He has been admitted to the secret of your adventure, and is
willing, without more and upon my representation of the facts of the
case, to make you his wife and to give you the shelter of his name.
After long thought I can devise no better course, whereby, innocent of
aught but folly, as I believe you to be, the honour of the family can
be preserved. Still, I would not suggest or advise the step were I not
sure that Mr. Sutton, though beneath us by extraction, is a person of
parts and worth in whose hands your future will be safe, while his
material prosperity shall be my care. I have advised him to take such
opportunities as offer of commending himself to you before delivering
this note. Gladly would I counsel you to take the advice of your
brother and his wife were I not aware how bitter is their resentment
and how complete their estrangement. I, on the other hand, whose right
to advise you may question—— But it were idle to say more than that I
forgive you, as I hope to be forgiven. Nor will your interests ever be
indifferent to

“Your kinsman,

“Anthony Clyne.”

Mr. Sutton noted the growing tremour of the hands which held the
paper—he could hear it rustle. And his face, usually so pallid,
flushed. Into the greyness of a life that had been happier if the
chaplain had possessed less of those parts for which Captain Clyne
commended him, had burst this vision of a bride, young, beautiful, and
brilliant; a daughter of that world which thought him honoured by the
temporary possession of a single finger, or the gift of a careless nod.
Who could blame him if he succumbed? Aladdin, on the point of marriage
with the daughter of the Sultan, bent to no greater temptation; nor any
barber or calendar of them all, when on the verge of a like match. He
had seen Henrietta once only, he had viewed her then as a thing of
grace and refinement meet only for his master. At the prospect of
possessing her, such scruples as rose in his mind faded quickly. He
told himself that he would be foolish indeed if he did not carry the
matter through with a bold face; or if for fear of a few hard words, or
a pouting beauty, he yielded up the opportunity of a life.

On the hill he had proved himself equal to the call. Not so now. He had
pictured the girl taking the news in many ways, in scorn, in anger,
with shallow coquetry, or in dull resignation. But he had never
anticipated the way in which she did take it. When she had read the
letter to the end she turned her back on him and bent her head.

“Oh!” she cried; and broke into weeping—not passionate nor bitter, he
was prepared for that—but the soft and helpless weeping of a broken
thing.

That they, that Anthony Clyne, above all, should do this to her! That
he should think of her as a chattel to be handed from one to another, a
girl so light that all men were the same to her, if they were men! That
they, that he should hold her so cheap, deem her so smirched by what
had passed, misread her so vilely as to think that she had fallen to
this! That with indifference she would give herself to any man, no
matter to whom, if she could that way keep her name and hold up her
head!

It hurt her horribly. Nay, for the time it broke her down. The mid-day
coach swept by to the inn door, and the parson, standing beside her,
ashamed of himself and conscious of the passengers’ curious glances,
wished himself anywhere else. But she was wounded too sorely to care
who saw or who heard; and she wept openly though quietly until the
first sharpness of the pain was blunted. Then he thought, as her
sobbing grew less vehement, that his time was come, that he might yet
be heard. And he murmured that he was grieved, he was sorely grieved.

“So am I!” she said, dabbing her eyes with her wet handkerchief. She
sobbed out the words so humbly, so weakly, that he was encouraged.

“Then may I—may I return presently?” he murmured, with a nervous cough.
“You must stand in need of advice? And—and by some one near you? When
you are more composed perhaps? Yes. Not that there is any hurry,” he
added quickly, frightened by a movement of her shoulders. “Not at all.
I’ll not say another word now! By-and-by, by-and-by, dear young lady,
you will be more composed. To-morrow, if you prefer it, or even the
next day. I shall wait, and I shall be here.”

She gave her eyes a last dab and turned.

“I do not blame you,” she said, her voice broken by a sob. “You did not
know me. But you must go back—you must go back to him at once and tell
him that I—that he has punished me as sharply as he could wish.” She
dabbed her face again. “I do not know what I shall think of him
presently, but I—— Oh, oh!” with a fresh burst of tears, “that he
should do this to me!—that he should do this!”

He did not know her, as she said; and, small blame to him, he misread
her. Because she neither stormed nor sneered, but only wept in this
heart-broken fashion, like a child cowed by a beating, he fancied that
the task before him was not above his powers. He thought her plastic, a
creature easily moulded; and that already she was bending herself to
the fate proposed for her. And in soothing tones, for he was genuinely
sorry for her, “There, there, my dear young lady,” he said, “I know it
is something hard. It is hard. But in a little while, a very little
while, I trust, it will seem less hard. And there is time before us.
Time to become acquainted, time to gain knowledge of one another.
Plenty of time! There is no hurry.”

She lowered her handkerchief from her eyes and looked at him, over it,
as if, without understanding, she thanked him for his sympathy. With
her tear-washed eyelashes and rumpled hair and neck-ribbon she looked
more childish, she seemed to him less formidable. He took heart of
grace to go on.

“Captain Clyne shall be told what you feel about it,” he said, thinking
to soothe and humour her. “He shall be told all in good time. And
everything I can say and anything I can do to lighten the burden and
meet your wishes——”

“You?”

“——I shall do, be sure!”

He was beginning to feel his feet, and he spoke earnestly. He spoke, to
do him justice, with feeling.

“Your happiness,” he said, “will be the one, at any rate the first, and
main object of my life. As time goes on I hope and believe that you
will find a recompense in the service and devotion of a life, although
a humble life; and always I will be patient. I will wait, my dear young
lady, in good hope.”

“Of what?”

The tone of the two words shook Mr. Sutton unpleasantly. He reddened.
But with an effort,

“In what hope?” he answered, embarrassed by the sudden rigidity of her
face. “In the hope,” with a feeble smile, “that in no long time—I am
presumptuous, I know—you will see some merit in me, my dear young lady.
And will assent to my wishes, my humble, ardent wishes, and those of my
too-generous patron.”

There were no tears in her eyes now. She seemed to tower above him in
her indignation.

“Your wishes, you miserable little man?” she cried, with a look which
pierced his vanity to the quick. “They are nothing to me! Go back to
your master!”

And before he could rally his forces or speak, she was gone from him
into the house. He heard a snigger behind the hedge, but by the time he
had climbed the bank—with a crimson face—there was no one to be seen.

He stood an instant, brooding, with his eyes on the road.

“A common man would give up,” he muttered. “But I shall not! I am no
common man. I shall not give up.”




CHAPTER XII
THE OLD LOVE


Mr. Sutton was a vain man and sensitive, and though he clung to hope,
Henrietta’s words hurt him to the quick. The name of Chaplain was
growing obsolete at this time; it was beginning to import unpleasant
things. With this chaplain in particular his dependence on a patron was
a sore point; for with some capacity, he lacked, and knew that he
lacked, that strength of mind which enables a man to hold his own, be
his position what it may. For an hour, writhing under the reflection
that even the yokels about him were aware of his discomfiture, he was
cast down to the very ground. He was inclined to withdraw his hand and
let the dazzling vision pass.

Then he rallied his forces. He bethought him how abnormal was the
chance, how celestial the dream, how sweet the rapture of possessing
the charms that now flouted him. And he took heart of grace. He raised
his head, he enlisted in the cause all the doggedness of his nature. He
recalled stories, inaccurately remembered, of Swift and Voltaire and
Rousseau, all dependants who had loved, and all men of no greater
capacity, it was possible, than himself. What slights had they not
encountered, what scornful looks, and biting gibes! But they had
persisted, having less in their favour than he had; and he would
persist. And he would triumph as they had triumphed. What matter a
trifling loss of countenance as he passed by the coach-office, or a
burning sensation down the spine when those whom he had left tittered
behind him? He laughed best who laughed last.

For such a chance would never, could never fall to him again. The
Caliph of Bagdad was dead, and princesses wedded no longer with
calendars. Was he to toss away the one ticket which the lottery of life
had dropped in his lap? Surely not. And for scruples—he felt them no
longer. The girl’s stinging words, her scornful taunt, had silenced the
small voice that on his way hither had pleaded for her; urging him to
spare her loneliness, to take no advantage of her defenceless position.
Bah! If that were all, she could defend herself well.

So Henrietta, when she came downstairs, a little paler and a little
prouder, and with the devil, that is in all proud women, a little
nearer to urging her on something, no matter what, that might close a
humiliating scene, was not long in discovering a humble black presence
that by turns followed and evaded her. Mr. Sutton did not venture to
address her directly. To put himself forward was not his _rôle_. But he
sought to commend himself by self-effacement; or at the most by such
meek services as opening the door for her without lifting his eyes
above the hem of her skirt, or placing a thing within reach before she
learned her need of it. Nevertheless, whenever she left her room she
caught sight of him; and the consciousness that he was watching her,
that his eyes were on her back, that if her gown caught in a nail of
the floor he would be at hand to release it, wore on her nerves. She
tried to disregard him, she tried to be indifferent to him. But there
he always was, pale, obstinate, cringing, and waiting. And so great is
the power of persistence, that she began to fear him.

Between his insidious court and the dread of Mr. Hornyold’s gallantries
she was uncomfortable as well as wretchedly unhappy. The position
shamed her. She felt that it was her own conduct which she had to thank
for their pursuit; and for Anthony Clyne’s more cruel insult, which she
swore she would never forgive. She knew that in the old life, within
the fence where she had been reared, no one had ever dared to take a
liberty with her or dreamed of venturing on a freedom. Now it was so
different. So different! And she was so lonely! She stood fair game for
all. Presently even the village louts would nudge one another when she
passed, or follow her in the hope of they knew not what.

Already, indeed, if she passed the threshold she had a third follower;
whose motives were scarcely less offensive than the motives of the
other two. Mr. Bishop had been away for nearly a week scouring the
roads between Cockermouth and Whitehaven, and Maryport and Carlisle. He
had drawn, as he hoped, a net round the quarry—if it had not already
escaped. In particular, he had made sure that trusty men—and by trusty
men Mr. Bishop meant men who would not refuse to share the reward with
their superiors—watched the most likely places. These arrangements had
taken his brown tops and sturdy figure far afield: so that scarce a

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