occult gift of scenting a horse leagues away, and a stubborn purpose to
acquire him--by purchase if he had the money, but otherwise if
Providence ordained it so.
"Has the rider gone to Banbury?" he asked.
"Yes, two hours since, by a messenger I trust, He is from Yorkshire,
too--one Nicholas Blake, who never seems to tire."
Kit's eagerness, blunted a little by good fare and ease after months of
hardship, was awake again. "Blake?" he asked. "Is he a little man, made
up of nerves and whipcord?"
"That, and a pluck that would serve three usual men."
"I'm glad he has the ride to Banbury. It was he who first brought us
out of Yoredale into this big fight for the King. When last I saw him,
he was limping in the middle of Skipton High Street, with blood running
down his coat--I thought he had done his last errand."
"Blake does not die, somehow. Sometimes, looking at him, I think he
longs to die and cannot. At any rate, he rode south last autumn with a
letter for me, and I kept him for my own private errands. One does not
let rare birds escape."
The next moment Rupert, the gay, impulsive Cavalier, as his enemies
accounted him, the man with grace and foolhardiness, they said, but
little wit, thrust the _debris_ of their supper aside and spread out a
map upon the table. It was a good map, drawn in detail by himself, and
it covered the whole country from London to the Scottish border.
"I am impatient for the coming of your clan, gentlemen," he said. "Let
us get to figures. Mr. Blake is at Banbury already, we'll say, and has
found your first outpost. _He_ covers two miles at the gallop, and the
next man covers two, and so to Knaresborough. How soon can they win into
Oxford?"
"In five days," said Michael, with his rose-coloured view of detail.
Prince Rupert challenged his reckoning, and the puzzle of the
calculation grew more bewildering as the four men argued about it. They
had another bottle to help them, but the only result was that each clung
more tenaciously to his opinion. Maurice said the journey, allowing for
mischances and the scarcity of horses, would take eight days at least;
Kit Metcalf hazarded a guess that seven was nearer the mark; and at last
they agreed to wager each a guinea on the matter, and parted with a
pleasant sense of expectation, as if a horse race were in the running.
Soldiers must take their recreations this way; for they travel on a road
that is set thick with hazard, and a gamble round about the winning
chance is part of the day's work.
"I give you welcome here to Oxford," said Rupert, as he bade them
good-night. "Since the tale of your exploits blew about our sleepy
climate, I knew that in the north I had a company of friends. When the
Squire of Nappa rides in, I shall tell him that he and I, alone in
England, know what light cavalry can do against these men of
Cromwell's."
The Metcalfs, when they said farewell, and he asked where they were
lodging for the night, did not explain that they had come in a carrier's
cart to Oxford, without ceremony and entirely without change of gear.
They just went out into the street, wandered for an hour among the scent
of lilacs, then found a little tavern that seemed in keeping with their
own simplicity. The host asked proof of their respectability, and they
showed him many guineas, convincing him that they were righteous folk.
Thereafter they slept as tired men do, without back reckonings or fear
of the insistent morrow. Once only Kit awoke and tapped his brother on
the shoulder.
"They'll be here in seven days, Michael," he said, and immediately began
to snore.
*CHAPTER X.*
*THE RIDING IN.*
Through the quiet lanes Blake, the messenger, rode out to Banbury.
Nightingales were singing through the dusk; stars were blinking at him
from a sky of blue and purple; a moth blundered now and then against his
face. He understood the beauty of the gloaming, though he seemed to
have no time to spare for it. Prince Rupert had sent him spurring with
a message to the big rider of a white horse, who was to be found
somewhere on the road leading from the north to Banbury; and the
password was "A Mecca for the King." That was his business on the road.
But, as he journeyed, a strange pain of heart went with him. The
nightingales were singing, and God knew that he had forgotten love-songs
long ago, or had tried to.
Spring, and the rising sap, and the soft, cool scents of eventide are
magical to those climbing up the hill of dreams; to those who have
ceased to climb, they are echoes of a fairyland once lived in, but now
seen from afar. It had all been so long ago. Skirmish and wounds, and
lonely rides in many weathers, should have dug a grave deep enough for
memories to lie in; but old ghosts rose to-night, unbidden. If it had
been his sinning, he could have borne the hardship better; he had the
old knightly faith--touched with extravagance, but haloed by the Further
Light--that all women are sacrosanct. If he had failed--well, men were
rough and headstrong; but it was she who had stooped to meaner issues.
And it was all so long ago that it seemed absurd the nightingales should
make his heart ache like a child's.
Fame was his. The Metcalfs, big on big horses, had captured the fancy
of all England by their exploits in the open. Yet Blake, the
messenger--riding alone for the most part, through perils that had no
music of the battle-charge about them--had his own place, his claim to
quick, affectionate regard wherever Cavaliers were met together. They
laughed at his high, punctilious view of life, but they warmed to the
knowledge that he had gone single-handed along tracks that asked for
comrades on his right hand and his left. But this was unknown to Blake,
who did not ask what men thought of him. It was enough for him to go
doing his journeys, carrying a heartache till the end came and he was
free to understand the why and wherefore of it all.
It was a relief to see the moonlight blinking on the roofs of Banbury as
he rode into the town. There were no nightingales here; instead, there
was the hum and clamour of a Roundhead populace, infuriated by the news
that two Cavaliers had broken prison in the early morning and had locked
the gaoler in.
Blake found his bridle seized roughly, and it was doubtful for a moment
whether he or his high-spirited mare, or the two of them, would come to
grief.
"Well, friend?" he asked of the burly Puritan who held the bridle.
"Your business here?"
"To sell cloth. I come from Oxford, and have done much business there
with the Court."
"Then why come selling wares in Banbury? Court fashions find no favour
here."
"Cloth is cloth," said Blake impassively, "and I've some remnants going
cheap."
A woman in the crowd pressed forward. "How much the yard?" she asked.
With his tired knowledge of the world, he named a price that made the
woman ask eagerly for a sample. "I have no samples. The cloth itself
will come in by carrier to-morrow. I'm tired and hungry," he said,
smiling at the man who held his rein. "Perhaps you will direct me to a
lodging for the night?"
"Was there great stir among the sons of Belial in Oxford?" asked his
captor, with a shrewd sideways glance.
"They were like bees in a busy hive," assented Blake cheerily.
"You learned something, maybe, of their plans?"
"I did, friend."
"That might be worth free lodging to you for the night, and a supper of
the best. What did you learn?"
"Why, that they planned to buy a good deal of my cloth. That's how I
measure a man--with the eye of a merchant who has cloth to sell. You,
sir--your clothes are of the shabbiest, if you'll pardon my frankness.
Will you not come to the tavern to-morrow, after the carrier has brought
my bales, and let me show you some good broadcloth--cloth of a sober
colour, suited to the pious habits you profess? To-day I clothe a
Cavalier, to-morrow a gentleman who fights on the Parliament side--a
merchant knows no niceties of party."
Blake had thrust home. This man, named gentle for the first time in his
busy life as tradesman, traducer of the King's good fame, and the prime
stirabout of anarchy in Banbury, was filled with a heady, spurious
pride. This merchant had sold cloth to the dandies of the Court,
perhaps to the King himself, and now it was his turn. There were men of
this odd, cringing habit among the sterner Roundhead stuff, and Blake
knew them as a harpist knows the strings he plays on.
The end of it was that he was directed to a comfortable tavern, was
given, though he scarcely seemed to ask for it, the password that
ensured him the freedom of the streets, and parted from his captor with
an easy-going reminder that the cloth should reach Banbury about nine of
the next morning.
The password was useful to him more than once. It saved much trouble
with soldiery who held him up at every turn. It saved appeal to the
pistol he carried in his holster; and that would have meant the rousing
of the town, and odds against him that would put his whole errand into
jeopardy.
He halted once only, at the front of the tavern which had been
recommended to him. An ostler was standing at the door, chewing a straw
and waiting for some fresh excitement to stir these strenuous days.
Blake slipped a coin into his hand, and explained that, about nine of
the next morning, a townsman would come asking for a merchant who had
cloth to sell.
"You will explain, ostler, that I am called away on business--business
connected with the two Cavaliers who broke gaol last night. Explain,
too, that I hope to return to your town in a few days' time. The
townsman's name was Ebenezer Fear-the-Snare--I remember it because of
its consuming drollery."
With a cheery nod and a laugh that might mean anything, Blake left the
other wondering "what devilment this mad fellow was bent on," and rode
out into the beauty of the summer's night that lay beyond the outskirts
of Banbury. Here, again, the nightingales assailed him. They could not
rest for the love-songs in their throats; and ancient pain, deep where
the soul beats at the prison-house of flesh, guided his left hand on the
reins until, not knowing it, he was riding at a furious gallop. Then he
checked to a sober trot.
The land was fragrant with the warmth of wet soil, the scent of flowers
and rain-washed herbage. The moon shone blue above the keen white light
of gloaming, and the road ahead stretched silver, miraculous, like some
highway of the old romance that was waiting for the tread of kings and
knights, of ladies fair as their own fame.
Old dreams clambered up to Blake's saddle and rode with him--wild
heartaches of the long ago--the whetstone of first love, sharpening the
power to feel, to dare all things--the unalterable need of youth to
build a shrine about some woman made of the same clay as himself. They
were good dreams, tasted again in this mellow dusk; but he put them by
at last reluctantly. He had a live ambition before him--to bring a
company of riders, bred in his own stiff Yorkshire county, for the
Cavaliers of Oxford to appraise.
He slackened pace with some misgiving. The two Metcalfs, when he bade
farewell to them in Oxford, had been so sure that one of their kinsmen
would have reached the outskirts of Banbury, would be waiting for him.
The horseman, they had explained, would not approach the town too
closely, knowing its fame as a place of Parliament men who watched
narrowly all Oxford's incoming and outgoing travellers; but Blake had
travelled three miles or so already, and he grew impatient for a sight
of his man.
Through the still air and the complaint of nightingales he heard the
whinny of a horse. His own replied. The road made a wide swerve here
through the middle of a beech wood. As he rounded it and came into the
open country, he saw a broken wayside cross, and near it a horseman
mounted on a white horse as big and raking in the build as its rider.
"A Mecca?" asked Blake, with the indifference of one traveller who
passes the time of day with another.
"Nay, that will not serve," laughed the other. "Half a sixpence is as
good as nothing at all."
"A Mecca for the King, then, and I was bred in Yorkshire, too."
The freemasonry of loyalty to one King, to the county that had reared a
man, is a power that makes all roads friendly, that kills suspicion and
the wary reaching down of the right hand toward a pistol-holster.
"How does Yoredale look," went on Blake, with a little, eager catch in
his voice, "and the slope of Whernside as you see it riding over the
tops from Kettlewell?"
"Bonnie, though I've not seen either since last year's harvest. This
King's affair of ride and skirmish is well enough; but there's no time
to slip away to Yoredale for a day and smell the wind up yonder. Are
Kit and Michael safe?"
"They are in Oxford, accepting flattery with astounding modesty."
"They've found Prince Rupert? The Metcalfs--oh, I touch wood!--keep a
bee-line when they know where home lies."
"That is no boast, so why go touching wood? I tell you the King knows
what your folk have done and hope to do. The Prince is raising cavalry
for the relief of York, and will not rest until you Metcalfs join him.
How soon can your company get south?"
The horseman thought the matter over. "It will take five days and a
half," he said at last.
"Good for you!" snapped Blake. "Even your brother Christopher, with the
starry look o' dreams about his face, was sure that it would take seven
days. I wager a guinea to a pinch o' snuff that you're not in Oxford in
five days and a half."
"That is a wager?"
"I said as much, sir."
"Then lend me the pinch of snuff. I emptied my box in waiting for you,
and was feeling lonely."
Blake laughed as he passed his box over. There was an arresting humour
about the man, a streak of the mother-wit that made the Metcalf clan at
home in camp or city. "I'll see you to the next stage," he said,
reining his horse about--"that is, if you care for an idle man's
company. I've nothing in the world to do just now."
The other only nodded, touched his horse sharply with the spur, and
Blake found himself galloping with a fury that, even to his experience
of night adventures, seemed breakneck and disastrous. At the end of a
mile their horses were in a lather; at the end of two they had to check
a little up the rise of a hill. On the top of the hill, clear against
the sky, they saw a horseman sitting quiet in saddle. They saw, too,
that his sword was out, and naked to the moonlight.
[Illustration: "They saw, too, that his sword was out, and naked to the
moonlight."]
"A Mecca!" panted Blake's companion.
"Cousin does not slay cousin," said the man on the hill-top, rattling
his sword into the sheath again. "Have they found Rupert?" The second
rider was given his errand briefly and without waste of breath. Then he
flicked his horse, and Blake was tempted to follow him, too. There was
something uncanny, some hint of mystery and deep, resistless strength
about this picketing of the road north. Blake had a quick imagination;
he saw this chain of riders, linking York with Oxfordshire, spurring
through a country fast asleep--only they and the moon and the
nightingales awake--until, kinsman passing the message on to kinsman at
each two-miles stage, the last rider came in with his tale of "Boot and
saddle."
Indeed, Blake urged his mare to follow the second horseman; but she was
reluctant, and was sobbing under him after the headlong gallop.
"I had forgotten. She has carried me from Oxford already," he said,
turning to his companion.
"She's a good little mare," said Metcalf, with instinctive judgment of
all horseflesh. "She will have time to rest if you're minded to share
the waiting time with me."
"Your five days and a half?" laughed the other, as they returned at a
quiet pace to their first meeting-place. "Yes, I shall stay, if only to
claim my wager. It is not in human power for your company to muster in
the time."
"It is a game we have played often during these last months. Lord
Fairfax, in the north, swears there's witchcraft in it, because we have
carried news from York to Skipton, from Skipton into Lancashire, while
single messengers were spurring half-way on the road."
"_I_ am a messenger of the lonely sort," put in Blake--with a touch of
spleen, for he was tired. "Well, I propose to see what comes of your new
way of galloping."
"The first that comes"--Metcalf yawned and stretched himself with an air
of complete strength and bodily content--"will be my Cousin Ralph, who
took the message on just now. When he has passed it on, he rides
hitherto. We may expect him in a half-hour or so."
Blake, himself something of a mystic, who rode fine errands by help of
no careful planning, but by intuition, was interested in this man, who
stood for the Metcalf thoroughness, in detail and in hot battle, that
had made their name alive through England. He learned, here in the
moonlight, with the _jug-jug_ of nightingales from the thickets on their
right, and the stir of moths about their faces, how carefully the old
Squire had planned this venture. The clan was a line of single links
from Oxford to the north, so long as the message needed to be carried
swiftly; but afterwards each messenger was to ride back along the route
to Banbury, until the company mustered on its outskirts grew big enough
to hold attack from the town in check.
As they talked, and while Metcalf was pushing tobacco--borrowed, like
the snuff, from Blake--into the bowl of a clay pipe, there came a little
sound from up the road. It was a rhythmical, recurrent sound.
"That is my Cousin Ralph," said Metcalf unconcernedly.
The music grew louder by degrees, till the din of nightingales was lost
in the rat-a-tat of hoofs.
"The first to the tryst," laughed Blake, as the new-comer dismounted and
picketed his horse close to their own. "We have a wager that your folk
will not be in Oxford within five days and a half."
"For my part," said Ralph, "I have a hunger that eats inwards. Have you
found nothing for the larder, cousin, all this time of waiting?"
Will Metcalf had, as it happened. Near sundown he had set two
traps--simple contrivances of looped wire--in a neighbouring rabbit
burrow; and, a little while before Blake rode out from Banbury, he had
dismounted to find a coney in each snare.
"We shall do well enough," said Will.
Again Blake was astonished by the downrightness of these people. Ralph,
who had not tasted food since noon, was sure that his cousin would have
made due provision. Methodically they sought for a likely hollow,
screened from the rising wind, gathered brushwood and fallen branches,
and made a fire. While it was burning up, they skinned and cleaned the
rabbits.
"Gentlemen," said Blake, while their meal was in the cooking, "do you
give no homage to the god known as chance? All is planned out, from
here to York; but I've travelled the night-roads--have them by heart, as
a man knows the whimsies of his wife. Suppose some of your men were
thrown badly, or killed by Roundheads, how would it fare with the
message up to York?"
Ralph Metcalf turned the rabbits with nice regard for the meal overdue.
Then he glanced up. "If there was a gap of four miles, instead of two,
the rider would gallop four. If he found another dead man at the next
stage, he would gallop six."
So then Blake laughed. "We are well met, I think. I was jealous of
your clan, to be candid, when I was told their speed put us poor
night-riders to shame. Yet, friends, I think we carry the same
loyalty."
Their meal was scarcely ready when again there came the fret of distant
hoof-beats. Another giant joined their company. In face and sturdiness
he was like the rest; but he happened to be six-foot-four, while his
kinsmen here were shorter by two inches. He, too, was hungry.
"That's good hearing," said Ralph. "I was puzzling how to carve two
rabbits into three, but it's easy to split them into twice two."
"Half a coney to feed my sort of appetite?"
"Be content. If it had not been for Will here we'd have had no food at
all."
The newcomer drew a bottle from the pocket of his riding-coat. "I
forget whether I stole it or paid honest money. It's a small bottle,
but it will give us the bite of the northern winds again."
When they had ended this queer supper, and had borrowed from the store
of tobacco that to Blake was better than a meal, they fell into silence.
The languorous beauty of the night wove its spell about them; and the
fourth Metcalf, when he rode in presently, jarred them roughly out of
dreams. The newcomer, as it happened, had contrived to snatch supper
while he waited, six miles further north, to take on the message. He
did not ask for food; after picketing his horse, he just wrapped himself
in the blanket hastily unstrapped from saddle, turned over once or twice
in a luxury of weariness, and snored a litany to the overarching
heavens.
Through that night Blake did not sleep or ask for slumber. The
nightingales were tireless, as if their throats would break unless they
eased them. The Metcalf riders were tireless, too. At longer and at
longer intervals they came in from the north, their horses showing signs
of stress. Two miles from outpost to outpost was a trifling distance;
but, before the last of that night's company joined the muster here at
Banbury, he had travelled forty miles.
Blake lay, his face to the moonlight, and could not stifle memory. The
sleepy fragrance, the scent of moist earth and flowering stuff, took
him, as by sorcery, to a walled garden in Knaresborough and a summer
that had been, and the end of blandishment. There had been no
nightingales--it lay too far north, that garden, to tempt them--but a
stronger song had stirred him. And there had been the same lush smell
of summer, the same hovering of bats across the moon's face.
It was as if she sat beside him again--they two listening to the ripple
of Nidd River far below--and her voice was low and tender as she chided
him for love-making. There had been other meetings--stolen ones and
brief--and all the world a-maying to Blake's view of it.
He would not let the dream go--played with it, pretended he had not
learned long since what it meant to love a light-of-heart. Her face, of
the kind that painters dote on when they picture maiden innocence, the
shifting play of light and colour in her eyes, the trick she had of
making all men long to be better than they were--surely he could rest
this once from many journeyings, and snatch another stolen meeting,
there in Knaresborough, with all the roses blowing kisses to them.
As he lay there, the two Metcalfs who were sentrying their little camp
grew tired of pacing to and fro, each on his own short beat, and halted
for a gossip. Blake did not heed them until they began to talk of
Knaresborough, of Michael's dash into the Castle, of a Mistress Bingham
he had met there.
"Michael met his match for once," laughed one sentry. "You know his
gift of finding the finest eyes in England housed under every other
woman's brows? Well, Mistress Demaine plays a good game at hearts, too,
they say. Michael was touched in earnest this time. Oh, the jest of
it!"
"It would be a better if they began by playing, and ended with the
silken noose. Can you picture Michael wedded--Michael, with cut wings
and drooping comb, seeking no more for fairest eyes?"
Blake left his dreams as if they scorched him. So Mistress Bingham had
been two years ago; so she would be, doubtless, when the King had come
to his own again, and had reigned long, and passed on the crown. There
is a stability about inconstancy, Blake realised.
He got to his feet, crossed to where the sentries stood, and yawned.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I cannot sleep for hunger; and there will be
others in my case before the night ends. Can I borrow two of your
company to make up a forage-party?"
One of the sentries pointed to a distant belt of wood, high up against
the sky. "When dawn rides over the trees yonder, our watch is ended.
We'll join you, Mr. Blake, if only because you have the most diverting
laugh I ever heard, except Michael's when he's seen a pair of pretty
eyes."
A half-hour later they kicked the fresh sentries out of sleep. Then
Blake and they went up the pasture-lands on foot. It was a good night
for foraging; every pitfall of the ground, every farmstead sleeping in
the bosom of its guardian trees, showed clear in the dawn-light. And
none of the three men had qualms about the business, for the Banbury
country, through and through, was traitorous to the King.