She opened her eyes widely. "Why, of course! What else should we do?
Is not the country being scoured for him? My father is most anxious
that he should be captured. Justice and the weal of the State demand
that such a wretch should be punished." She paused and looked at him
gravely as he walked beside her with a clouded face. "You say nothing!
This man is guilty, guilty of a dreadful crime. Surely you do not wish
to shield him, to let him escape?"
"Not so, madam," said Landless in desperation. "But--but--"
"But what?" she asked as he stopped in confusion.
He recovered himself. "Nothing, madam. You are right, of course. But
I would not speak before reaching Verney Manor."
"Very well."
Landless walked on, bitterly perplexed and chagrined. The strife and
danger of the night, the intoxicating sweetness of the morning hours
when he knew himself believed in and pitied by the woman beside him, had
driven certain things into oblivion. He had been dreaming, and now he
had been plucked from a fool's paradise, and dashed rudely to the
ground. Yesterday and the life and thoughts of yesterday, which had but
now seemed so far away, pressed upon him remorselessly. And to-morrow!
He did not want Roach to be taken. Always there would have been danger
to himself and his associates in the capture of the murderer, but now
when the vindictive wretch would assuredly attribute his disaster to the
man to whom the lightning flash had revealed his presence on the shores
of the bay, the danger was trebled. And it was imminent. He had little
doubt that another night would see Roach in custody, and he had no doubt
at all that the scoundrel would make a desperate effort to save his neck
by betraying what he knew of the conspiracy--and thanks to Godwyn's
lists he knew a great deal--to Governor and Council.
Patricia began to speak again. "It imports much that men should see
that there is no weakness in the arm the law stretches out to seize and
punish offenders. My father and the Governor and Colonel Ludlow believe
that there is afoot an Oliverian plot-- What is the matter?"
"Nothing, madam."
"You stood still and caught your breath. Are you ill, faint?"
"It is nothing, madam, believe me? You were saying?"
"Oh! the Oliverians! Nothing definite has been discovered as yet, but
there is thunder in the air, my father says, and I know that he and the
Governor and the rest of the council are very watchful just now. But
yesterday my father said that those few hundred men form a greater
menace to the Colony than do all the Indians between this and the South
Sea."
They walked on in silence for a few moments, and then she broke out.
"They are horrible, those grim, frowning men! They are rebels and
traitors, one and all, and yet they stand by and shake curses on the
heads of true men. They slew the best man, the most gracious sovereign;
they trampled the Church under foot, they made the blood of the noble
and the good to flow like water, and now when they receive a portion of
their deserts, they call themselves martyrs! They, martyrs! Roundhead
traitors!"
"Madam," interrupted Landless with a curious smile upon his lips, "did
you not know that I was, that I am, what you call a Roundhead?"
"No," she said, "I did not know," and stood perfectly still, looking
straight before her down the long vista of trees. He saw her face
change and harden into the old expression of aversion. The slaves came
up to them, and Regulus asked if 'lil Missy wanted anything. "No,
nothing at all," she answered, and walked quietly onward.
Landless, an angry pain tugging at his heart, kept beside her, for they
were passing through a deep hollow in the wood where the gnarled and
protruding roots of cypress and juniper made walking difficult, and
where a strong hand was needed to push aside the wet and pendent masses
of vine. Regulus, fifty yards behind them, began to sing a familiar
broadside ballad, torturing the words out of all resemblance to English.
The rich notes rang sweetly through the forest. Down from the far
summit of a pine flashed a cardinal bird, piercing the gloom of the
hollow like a fire ball thrown into a cavern. Landless held aside a
curtain of glistening leaves that, mingled with purple clusters of
fruit, hung across their path. Patricia passed him, then turned
impulsively. "You think me hard!" she said. "Many people think me so,
but I am not so, indeed.... And there are good Puritans. Major
Carrington, they say, is Puritan at heart, and he is a good man and a
gentleman.... And you saved my life.... At least you are not like
those men of whom I spoke. You would not plot against the good peace
which we enjoy! You would not try to array servant against master?"
It was a direct question asked with large, straight-forward eyes fixed
upon his. He tried to evade it, but she asked again with insistence,
and with a faint doubt lurking in her eyes, "If these men are plotting,
which God forbid! you know nothing of it? You have great wrongs, but
you would take no such dastard way to right them?"
Landless's soul writhed within him, but he told the inevitable lie that
was none the less a lie that it was also the truth. He said in a low
voice, "I trust, madam, that I will do naught that may misbecome a
gentleman."
She was quite satisfied. He saw that he had regained the ground lost by
his avowal of a few minutes before, and he cursed himself and cursed his
fate.
Soon afterwards they emerged from the forest upon a tobacco patch, from
the midst of which rose a rude cabin, in whose doorway stood a woman
serving out bowls of loblolly to half a dozen tow-headed children.
Half an hour later, Patricia, rested and refreshed, took her seat behind
the oxen, which the owner of the cabin had harnessed up, with much
protestation of his eagerness to serve the daughter of Colonel Verney,
emptied her purse in the midst of the open-mouthed children, and bade
kindly adieu to the good wife. Darkeih curled herself up in the bottom
of the cart, and Landless and Regulus walked beside it.
In two hours' time they were at Verney Manor, where they found none but
women to greet them. Rendered uneasy by the storm, Woodson had
despatched a messenger to Rosemead, who had returned with the tidings
that no boat from Verney Manor had reached that plantation. The
overseer had ill news with which to greet the Colonel and Sir Charles
when at midnight they arrived unexpectedly from Green Spring. Since
then every able-bodied man had deserted the plantation. There were no
boats at the wharf, no horses in the stables. The master and Sir
Charles were gone in the Nancy, the two overseers on horseback. A
Sabbath stillness brooded over the plantation, until a negro woman
recognized the occupants of the ox-cart lumbering up the road. Then
there was noise enough of an exclamatory, feminine kind. The shrill
sounds penetrated to the great room, where, behind drawn curtains,
surrounded by essences, and an odor of burnt feathers, with Chloe to fan
her, and Mr. Frederick Jones to murmur consolation, reclined Mistress
Lettice. As Patricia stepped upon the porch, Betty Carrington flew down
the stairs and through the hall, and the two met with a little
inarticulate burst of cries and kisses. Mistress Lettice in the great
room went into hysterics for the fifth time that morning.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*A CAPTURE*
At noon the next day returned the search party, dispatched by the
Colonel on receipt of his daughter's information, and headed by Woodson
and Sir Charles Carew. In their midst, bound with ropes, and seated
behind one of the mounted men, was Roach. His clothing hung from him in
tatters, and witnessed, moreover, to the quagmires and mantled pools
through which he had struggled; his arm had been injured, and was tied
with a bloody rag; blood was caked upon his villainous face, scratched
and torn in his breathless bursting through thickets; his red hair fell
over his eyes in matted elf-locks; his lips were drawn back in a snarl
over discolored fangs; he panted like a dog, his thick red tongue
hanging out. He looked hardly human. The man behind whom he rode was
Luiz Sebastian.
The party dismounted in the small square, in the midst of the quarters.
It being the noon rest, the entire servant population was on hand, and
leaving its cabins and smoking messes of bacon and succotash, it
hastened to a man to the square, where, beneath the dead tree and its
sinister appendage, stood the master, listening to Woodson's account of
the capture, and to Sir Charles's airy interpolations. Roach, dragged
from the horse by a dozen officious hands, staggered with exhaustion.
Luiz Sebastian caught him by the arm and so held him during the ensuing
interview.
When the unusual bustle, the neighing of the horses, and the excited
voices of the crowd brought the news of the capture to Landless,
sitting, sunk in anxious thought, within his cabin, he rose and began to
pace to and fro in the narrow room. Past his door hurried men, women
and children on their way to the square. One or two beckoned him to
follow, but he shook his head. "If he betray me," he thought, "my fate
will come to me soon enough. I will not go to meet it."
In his restless pacing to and fro, he stopped before a shelf where,
beside some coarse eating utensils and the heap of tobacco pegs, the
cutting of which occupied his spare moments, lay a little worn book. It
had been Godwyn's. He opened it at random, and read a few verses. With
a heavy sigh he laid his arm along the shelf and rested his burning
forehead upon it. "'Let not your heart be troubled,'" he said beneath
his breath; and again, "'Let not your heart be troubled.'" He
recommenced his pacing up and down the room. "'Peace I leave with you,
My peace I give unto you.'" Going to the doorway he leaned against it
and looked out into a world of sunshine, and up to where the topmost
branches of a pine slept against the blue. "There may be peace beyond,"
he said. "I have not found it here."
Down the lane came a murmur of voices; then the overseer's harsh tones;
then a light and mocking laugh. Seized by an uncontrollable impulse he
left the cabin and directed his steps towards the square. As he passed a
cabin some doors from his own, a gaunt figure arose from the doorstep
and joined itself to him.
"The murderer is here," said the sepulchral voice of Master Win-Grace
Porringer. "Verily the blood hath been taken out of his mouth, and his
abominations from between his teeth. Cursed be the shedder of innocent
blood!"
"Amen," said Landless, then. "This capture is like to be our ruin.
This wretch will not keep silence."
"But he has no proofs. Since you destroyed those lists there exists not
a scrap of writing about this affair. And we have covered our tracks as
carefully as if we were the cursed heathen of the land upon the
war-path. Let him say what he will. The Malignants, besotted fools!
will think he lies to save his neck."
"A week ago they might have thought so," said Landless. "But not now.
Something has gotten abroad. Already Governor and Council think they
smell a plot."