It wanted two hours of midnight on a fine night when we two rode over
London Bridge, and through a gap in the houses saw the river flowing
below, a ripple of silver framed in blackness, and so cold to the eye
that involuntarily I shivered; feeling a return of all the vague fears
and apprehensions which, originally awakened by the prospect of the
journey, had been set at rest for the time by the awe in which I held
my companion. I began to recall a dozen stories of footpads and
highwaymen, outrage and robbery, which I had read, and found but cold
comfort in the reflection that the Kent Road, from the amount of
traffic that used it, was accounted one of the safest in England. It
was not wonderful, that with nerves so disordered, I went in front of
danger; or that when--opposite the Marshalsea, where the chain crosses
the road, near the entrance to White Horse Yard--a man came suddenly
out of a passage and caught hold of my companion's rein, I cried out,
and all but turned my horse to fly.
Smith himself appeared to be taken off his guard; for, after bidding
me beware what I did, he called with the same harshness to the man to
release the rein, or take the consequences.
"Oh, I am all right," the fellow answered roughly, peering at him
through the darkness. "You are Mr. Smith?"
"Well?"
"Fairholt sent me--to stop you."
"Fairholt!"
"Ay, he is here."
"Here?" my companion cried, in a tone of rage and surprise. "What
the----! Why, he should be--you know where, by this time!"
"Ay, but his horse threw him this morning, and he is lying at the
White Horse here, with a broken leg!"
Smith cursed the absent man for a fool. "I wish he had broken his
neck!" he said savagely. And then, after an interval, "Has he sent
anybody?"
"He has had something else to think about," the man answered drily.
"And so would you, master, with his leg!"
Smith swore again, and sat gloomily silent.
"He says if you can stead it off for twenty-four hours," the man
continued, "he will arrange that----"
"No names," Smith cried sharply, interrupting him.
"Well, that--someone shall take his place and do the job."
Smith did not answer for a time, but at length in a curt, incisive
tone, "Tell him, yes," he said. "I will see to it. And you--keep a
still tongue, will you? You were going with him, I suppose?"
"Ay."
"And you will come with the other?"
"May be. And if not I shall not blab."
Smith by a nod showed that the man had taken his meaning; after which,
bidding him good-night, he pricked up his horse. "Come on," he said,
addressing me with impatience. "I thought to have had companions, and
so ridden more securely. But we must make the best of it."
Heaven knows that I too would have liked companions, and took the road
again dolefully enough. Nor was that the worst of it; Smith, in
speaking to the stranger, had mentioned Fairholt. Now, I knew the
name, and knew the man to be one of the messengers attached to the
Secretary's office, one whose business it was to execute warrants and
arrest political prisoners. But what had Smith, riding to a secret
interview with a man outlawed and in hiding, to do with messengers?
With Fairholt?
And then, as if this were not enough to disturb me with a view of
treachery, black as gulf seen by traveller through a rift in the
mist--if this glimpse, I say, were not enough, how was I going to
reconcile Smith's statement that he had expected companions with his
first cry, uttered in wrath and surprise--that Fairholt ought to be by
this time--well, at some distant point?
In fine, I was so far from being persuaded that Smith had expected
company, that I gravely suspected that he had made quite other
arrangements; arrangements of the most perfidious character. And as
the horses' hoofs rang monotonously on the hard road, and we rose and
fell in the saddle, and I peered forward into the gloom, fearing all
things and doubting all things, for certain I feared and doubted
nothing so much as I did the dark and secret man beside me; whose
scheming brain, spinning plot within plot, each darker and more
involved than the other, kept all my ingenuity at a stretch to
overtake the final end and purpose he had at heart.
Indeed, I despair of conveying to others how gravely this sombre
companionship and more sombre uncertainty aggravated the terrors of a
journey, that at the best of times must have been little to my taste.
To the common risks of the road, deserted at that hour by all save
cutpurses and rogues, was added a suspicion, as much more harassing
than these, as unseen dangers ever surpass the known. It was in vain
that I strove to divert my mind from the figure by my side; neither
the bleak heath above Greenwich--whence we looked back at the reddish
haze that canopied London, and forward to where the Thames marshes
stretched eastward under night--nor the gibbet on Dartford Brent,
where a body hung in chains, poisoning the air, nor the light that
shone dim and solitary, far to the left, across the river, and puzzled
me until he told me that it was Tilbury--neither of these things, I
say, though they occupied my thoughts by turns and for a moment, had
power to drive him from my mind, or divert my fears to dangers more
apparent. And in this mood, now glancing askance at him, and now
moving uneasily under his gaze, I might have ridden to Rochester if my
ear had not caught--I think when we were two or three miles short of
the city--the sound of a horse trotting fast on the road behind us.
At first it followed so faintly on the breeze that I doubted, thinking
it might be either the echo of our hoofs, or a pulse beating in my
ears. Then, on a hard piece of ground, it declared itself
unmistakably; and again as suddenly it died away.
At that I spoke involuntarily. "He has stopped," I said.
Smith laughed in his teeth. "He is crossing the wet bottom, fool--by
the creek," he said.
And before I could answer him the dull sound of a horse galloping
fast, but moving on the turf that ran alongside the road, proved him
to be right. "Draw up!" he whispered in something of a hurry, and
then, as I hesitated, "Do you hear?" he continued, sharply seizing my
rein. "What do you fear? Do you think that night birds prey on night
birds?"
Whatever I feared, I feared him more: and turning my horse, I sat
shivering. For notwithstanding his confident words I saw that he was
handling his holster; and I knew that he was drawing a pistol; and it
was well the suspense was short. Before I had time for many qualms,
the horseman, a dark figure, lurched on us through the gloom, pulled
his horse on to its haunches, and, with raised hand, cried to us to
deliver.
"And no nonsense!" he added sharply. "Or a brace of balls will
soon----"
Smith laughed. "Box it about!" he cried.
"Hallo!" the stranger answered, taking a lower tone; and he
peered at us, bending down over his horse's neck. "Who are you, in
fly-by-night?"
"A box-it-about!" my companion answered with tartness. "That is enough
for you. So good-night. And I wish you better luck next time."
"But----"
"St!" Smith answered, cutting him short. "I am going to my father, and
the less said about it the better."
"So? Well, give him my love, then." And backing his horse, the
stranger bade us good-night, and with a curse on his bad fortune
turned and rode off. Smith saw him go, and then wheeling we took the
road again.
Safely, however, as we had emerged from this encounter, and far as it
went towards proving that we bore a talisman against the ordinary
perils of travellers, it was not of a kind to reassure a law-abiding
man. To be hung as the accomplice of footpads and high-tobys was a
scarcely better fate than to be robbed and wounded by them, and I was
heartily glad when we found ourselves in the outskirts of Rochester,
and stopping at a house of call outside the sleeping city, roused a
drowsy hostler, and late as the hour was, gained entrance and a
welcome.
I confess, that safe in these comfortable quarters, on a sanded
hearth, before a rekindled fire, with lights, and food, and ale at my
elbow, and a bed in prospect, I found my apprehensions and misgivings
less hard to bear than on the dark road above Tilbury flats. I began
to think less of the body creaking in its irons on the gibbet above
Dartford, and more of the chances of ultimate safety. And Smith
growing civil, if not genial, I went on to count the hours that must
elapse, before, our miserable mission accomplished, I should see
London again. After all, why should I not see London again? What was
to prevent me? Where lay the hindrance? In three days, in three days
we should be back. So I told myself; and looking up quickly met
Smith's eyes brooding gloomily on me.