THE HUNTED STAG.
"_Three hundred gentlemen, able to ride,
Three hundred horses as gallant and free,
Beheld him escape on the evening tide
Far out till he sank in the Severn Sea . . .
The stag, the runnable stag._"--JOHN DAVIDSON.
Early next morning the two children awoke in clean beds that smelt
deliciously of lavender. The feeling was so new to them and so
pleasant, that for a while they lay in luxurious ease, gazing out upon
so much of the world as could be seen beyond the window--a green
hillside scattered with gorse-bushes, sheeted with yellowing brake-fern
and crossed by drifting veils of mist: all golden in the young sunshine,
and all framed in a tangle of white-flowered solanum that clambered
around the open casement. Arthur Miles lay and drank in the mere beauty
of it. How should he not? Back at the Orphanage, life--such as it
was--and the day's routine had always taken care of themselves; he had
accepted, suffered them, since to change them at all lay out of his
power. But Tilda, after a minute, sat upright in her bed, with knees
drawn up beneath the bedclothes and hands clasped over them.
"This is a good place," she announced, and paused. "_An'_ decent
people, though rummy." Then, as the boy did not answer, "The best thing
we can do is stay 'ere, if they'll let us."
"Stay here?" he echoed. There was surprise in the echo and dismay.
"But why should we stay here?"
"W'y not?"
She had yet to break it to him that Sir Miles Chandon was abroad, and
would (so Miss Chrissy had told her) almost certainly remain abroad for
months to come. She must soften the blow.
"W'y not?" she repeated. "They're kind 'ere. If they'll keep us we can
look about an' make inquiries."
"But we must get to the Island."
"The Island? Oh, yes, I dessay we'll get there sometime or another.
What're you doin'?" she asked, for he had leapt out of bed and run to
the window.
"Looking for it."
But the Island was not visible. This gable of the house fronted a steep
coombe, which doubtless wound its way to the sea, since far to the right
a patch of sea shone beyond a notch in the enfolding slopes.
"It'll stay there, don't you fret," Tilda promised. "'Wish I could be
as sure that _we'd_ stay _'ere_: though, far as I can see, we're safe
enough for a few days. The old lady's puzzled about me. I reckon she
don't attend circuses--nor the Minister neither--an' that Child-Acrobat
turn fairly fetched 'em. They set it down to the 'fects of grace. I
'eard them talkin' it over, an' that was 'ow the Minister put it--
whatever 'e meant."
"Well, but wasn't it?"
Arthur Miles had come back from the window, and stood at the foot of the
bed in a nightshirt many sizes too large for him.
"Wasn't it _wot?_"
"Hadn't--hadn't it anything to do with the praying?"
"Garn!" Tilda chuckled. "But I'm glad it took _you_ in too.
The foolishness was my overdoin' it with 'Dolph. Dogs don't 'ave any
religion, it seems; and it rattled 'em a bit, 'is be'avin' like a person
that 'ad just found salvation. The Minister talked some science about
it to Mother Tossell--said as 'ow dogs 'adn't no souls but a 'eap of
_sympathy_; and it ended by 'er 'avin' a good cry over me when she
tucked me up for the night, an' sayin' as after all I might be a brand
plucked from the burnin'. But it didn' take in Miss Chrissy, as I could
tell from the look in 'er eyes."
Whatever Miss Chrissy's doubts may have been, she chose a curious and
perhaps a subtle method of expressing them. After breakfast she took
Tilda to her room, and showed her a small volume with a cloth binding
printed over with blue forget-me-nots and a gilt title, _The Lady's
Vade-Mecum, or How to Shine in Society_. It put forth a preface in
which a lady, who signed herself "One of the Upper Ten Thousand" but
gave no further clue to her identity, undertook (as she put it)
"to steer the aspirant through the shoals and cross-currents which beset
novitiate in the _haut-ton_;" and Miss Chrissy displayed the manual
shyly, explaining that she had bought it in Taunton, and in a foolish
moment. "It flies too high for me. It says, under 'Cards,' that no
lady who respects herself would talk about the 'Jack of Spades'; but
when I played _Fives and Sevens_ at the last harvest supper but one, and
started to call him a Knave, they all made fun of me till I gave it up."
She opined, nevertheless, that Tilda would find some good reading in it
here and there; and Tilda, sharp as a needle, guessed what Miss Chrissy
meant--that a study of it would discourage an aspirant to good society
from smiling up at it between her ankles. She forgave the divined
intention of the gift, for the gift itself was precisely what her soul
had been craving. She borrowed it for the day with affected
nonchalance--Tilda never gave herself away--and hugged the volume in her
pocket as she and Arthur Miles and 'Dolph explored the coombe's downward
windings to the sea.
A moor stream ran down the coombe, dodging and twisting between the
overlaps of the hills, and ended in a fairy waterfall, over which it
sprang some thirty feet to alight on a beach of clean-washed boulders.
Close beside the edge of the fall stood a mud-walled cottage, untenanted
and roofless, relic of a time when Farmer Tossell's father had
adventured two or three hundred pounds in the fishery, and kept a man
here with two grown sons to look after his nets. Nettles crowded the
doorway, and even sprouted from crevices of the empty window sockets.
Nettles almost breast-high carpeted the kitchen floor to the
hearthstone. Nettles, in fact--whole regiments of nettles--had taken
possession and defended it. But Tilda, with the book in her pocket,
decided that here was the very spot for her--a real house in which to
practise the manners and deportment of a real lady, and she resolved to
borrow or steal a hook after dinner and clear the nettles away.
Farmer Tossell had promised the children that on the morrow he would
(as he put it) ride them over to Miss Sally's house at Culvercoombe, to
pay a call on that great gentlewoman; to-morrow being Sunday and his day
of leisure. But to-day he was busy with the sheep, and the children had
a long morning and afternoon to fill up as best they might.
Arthur Miles did not share Tilda's rapture over the ruined cottage, and
for a very good reason. He was battling with a cruel disappointment.
All the way down the coombe he had been on the look-out for his Island,
at every new twist and bend hoping for sight of it; and behold, when
they came here to the edge of the beach, a fog almost as dense as
yesterday's had drifted up Channel, and the Island was invisible.
Somewhere out yonder it surely lay, and faith is the evidence of things
not seen; but it cost him all his fortitude to keep back his tears and
play the man.
By and by, leaning over the edge of the fall, he made a discovery that
almost cheered him. Right below, and a little to the left of the rocky
pool in which the tumbling stream threw up bubbles like champagne, lay a
boat--a boat without oars or mast or rudder, yet plainly serviceable,
and even freshly painted. She was stanch too, for some pints of water
overflowed her bottom boards where her stern pointed down the beach--
collected rain water, perhaps, or splashings from the pool.
The descent appeared easy to the right of the fall, and the boy
clambered down to examine her. She lay twenty feet or more--or almost
twice her length--above the line of dried seaweed left by the high
spring tides. Arthur Miles knew nothing about tides; but he soon found
that, tug as he might at the boat, he could not budge her an inch.
By and by he desisted and began to explore the beach. A tangle of
bramble bushes draped the low cliff to the right of the waterfall, and
peering beneath these, he presently discovered a pair of paddles and a
rudder, stored away for safety. He dragged out one of the paddles and
carried it to the boat, in the stern-sheets of which he made his next
find--five or six thole-pins afloat around a rusty baler. He was now as
well equipped as a boy could hope to be for an imaginary voyage, and was
fixing the thole-pins for an essay in the art of rowing upon dry land,
when Tilda, emerging from the cottage (where the nettles stung her legs)
and missing him, came to the edge of the fall in a fright lest he had
tumbled over and broken his neck. Then, catching sight of him, she at
once began to scold--as folks will, after a scare.
"Come down and play at boats!" the boy invited her.
"Shan't!" snapped Tilda. "Leave that silly boat alone, an' come an'
play at houses."
"Boats aren't silly," he retorted; "not half so silly as a house without
any roof."
"A boat out of water--bah!"
Here Tilda was forced to stoop and rub her calves, thus in one moment
demonstrating by word and action how much she had to learn before
qualifying to shine in Society.
So for the first time the two children quarrelled, and on the first day
that invited them to cast away care and be as happy as they listed.
Arthur Miles turned his back upon Tilda, and would not budge from his
boat; while Tilda seated herself huffily upon a half-decayed log by the
cottage doorway, with 'Dolph beside her, and perused _The Lady's
Vade-Mecum_. "A hostess," she read, "should make her preparations
beforehand, and especially avoid appearing _distraite_ during the
progress of dinner. . . . Small blunders in the service should either be
ignored, or, at the worst, glided over with a laughing apology. . . .
A trace too much of curacao in the _salade d'oranges_ will be less
easily detected and, if detected, more readily pardoned, than the
slightest suspicion of _gene_ on the part of the presiding goddess. . .
In England it is customary to offer sherry with the soup, but this
should not be dispensed lavishly. Nursed by a careful butler
(or parlour-maid, as the case may be), a single bottle will sherry
twelve guests, or, should the glasses be economical, thirteen. Remember
the Grecian proverb, 'Meden agan,' or 'In all things moderation.'"
All this Tilda read in a chapter which started with the sentence,
"A dinner is a Waterloo which even a Napoleon may lose; and it is with
especial care, therefore, almost with trepidation, that we open this
chapter. We will assume that our pupil has sufficiently mastered those
that precede it; that she is apparelled for the fray, her frock modest
but _chic_, her _coiffure_ adequate . . .'" This was going too fast.
She harked back and read, under _General Observations_, that "It is the
hall-mark of a lady to be sure of herself under all circumstances," and
that "A lady must practise self-restraint, and never allow herself to
exhibit temper."
"And I'm showin' temper at this moment! Oh, 'Dolph"--she caught the dog
close to her in a hug--"the lot we've got to learn!"
'Dolph might have answered that he for his part was practising
self-restraint, and practising it hard. He loved his mistress before
all the world, but he had no opinion of books, and would have vastly
preferred to be on the beach with Arthur Miles, nosing about the boat or
among the common objects of the seashore.
By this time Arthur Miles, too, was feeling lonely and contrite.
On their way back to dinner--signalled by the blowing of a horn in the
farm-place--he ranged up beside Tilda and said gently, "I'm sorry," upon
which, to her astonishment, Tilda's eyes filled with tears. She herself
could not have said it; but somehow it was just by differing from her
and from other folks that this boy endeared himself.
The reconciliation made them both very happy, and after dinner--to which
the whole family, the shepherd and half a dozen labourers assembled, so
that Tilda marvelled how, even with a fireplace so ample, Mrs. Tossell
managed to cook for them all--Arthur Miles boldly approached Chrissy and
got her to persuade her sweetheart, Festus, to lend him a hook.
Armed with this, the children retraced their steps down the coombe.
The fog had lifted a little, and in the offing Holmness loomed out
dimly, with a streak of golden light on the water beyond its westernmost
cliffs. But the boy nerved himself; he would not loiter to gaze at it,
but strode into the cottage and began hacking with great fierceness at
the nettles, which Tilda--her hands cased in a pair of old pruning
gloves--gathered in skirtfuls and carried out of door. Godolphus, in
his joy at this restored amity, played at assisting Arthur Miles in his
onslaught, barking and leaping at the nettles, yet never quite closely
enough to endanger his sensitive nose.
They had been engaged thus for half an hour, perhaps, when they heard a
horn sounded far up the coombe. It had not the note of Mrs. Tossell's
dinner-horn; it seemed to travel, too, from a distance beyond the farm,
and as Tilda listened, it was followed by a yet fainter sound, as of
many dogs baying or barking together. 'Dolph heard it, yapped
excitedly, and made a dash out through the doorway. But, when Tilda
followed, the sounds had died away. The coombe was silent save for the
chatter of the fall and the mewing of an army of sea-gulls up the vale,
where, on the farthest slope in sight, young Roger paced to and fro with
a team of horses breaking up the stubble.
Tilda whistled 'Dolph back and fell to work again, filling her lap with
nettles; but the load was scarcely complete before the dog, who had been
whimpering and trembling with excitement, made another dash for the
open, his yells all but drowning a thud of hooves with which a dark body
hurled itself past the doorway, between the children and the sunshine,
and so leapt clear for the beach over the fall.
Tilda, running to the doorway, saw the animal leap, but in so quick a
flash that she noted nothing but its size, and mistook it for a
riderless, runaway horse. Then as it appeared again and with three
bounds cleared the beach and plunged into the sea, she knew that it was
no horse but a huge stag--even such a stag as she had seen portrayed on
menagerie posters--a huge Exmoor stag leaping dark against the sun, but
with a flame along the russet-gold ridge of his back and flame tipping
his noble antlers as he laid them back and breasted the quiet swell of
the waves.
The hounds were close upon him. Not until they were close had he
quitted his hide-hole in the stream, where for the last time he had
broken the scent for them. This was the third stream he had used since
they had tufted him out of the wood where through the summer he had
lorded it, thirty-five miles away; and each stream had helped him, and
had failed him in the end. He had weakened the scent over stony ridges,
checked it through dense brakes of gorse, fouled and baffled it by
charging through herds of cattle and groups of hinds of his own race
couching or pasturing with their calves; for the stag-hunting season was
drawing close to its end, and in a few weeks it would be the hinds'
turn. But the hinds knew that their peril was not yet, and, being as
selfish as he, they had helped him but little or not at all. And now
his hour was near.
For even while the children gazed after him the hounds came streaming
down the coombe in a flood, with a man on a grey horse close behind
them; and behind him, but with a gap between, a straggling line of
riders broke into sight, some scarlet-coated, others in black or in
tweeds. The man on the grey horse shouted up the hill to Roger, who had
left his team and was running. Away over the crest above him two
labourers hove in sight, these also running at full speed. And all--
hounds, horses, men--were pouring down the coombe towards the beach.
The hounds swept down in a mass so solid and compact that Tilda dragged
Arthur Miles into the doorway, fearful of being swept by them over the
edge of the fall. Past the cottage they streamed, down over the grassy
cliff, and across the beach. 'Dolph, barking furiously by the edge of
the waves, was caught and borne down by the first line of them--borne
down and rolled over into the water with no more ceremony than if he had
been a log. They did not deign to hurt him, but passed on swimming, and
he found his feet and emerged behind them, sneezing and shaking himself
and looking a fool. He was, as we know, sensitive about looking a fool;
but just then no one had time to laugh at him.
The riders had arrived, and reined up, crowding the ledge before the
cottage, and the most of them stood raising themselves in their
stirrups, gazing after the stag that now, with little more than his
antlers visible like a bleached bough moving on the flood, swam strongly
out into the golden mist still cloaking the Island. Moment by moment he
out-distanced the wedge-shaped ripple where the heads of the tired pack
bobbed in pursuit; for here, as always in water, the deer held the
advantage, being able to float and rest at will while the hound must
always ply his forelegs or sink. The huntsman, however, judged it
impossible that he could reach Holmness. He and a dozen gentlemen had
dismounted, clambered down beside the fall, and were dragging the boat
down the beach to launch her, when Roger and the two labourers burst
through the throng and took charge; since to recover a deer that takes
to the sea means a guinea from the hunt. And the boat was necessary
now, for as the Inistow men launched her and sprang aboard the leading
hounds realised that their quarry could not be headed, or that their
remaining strength would scarcely carry them back to shore, and gave up
the chase. By this the hunted stag gained another respite, for as the
rowers pulled in his wake they had to pause half a dozen times and haul
on board a hound that appeared on the point of sinking.
At the last moment the huntsman had leapt into the stern-sheets of the
boat. He had his knife ready, and the rowers too had a rope ready to
lasso the stags' antlers when they caught up with him. Ashore the
huddled crowd of riders watched the issue. The children watched with
them; and while they watched a sharp, authoritative voice said, close
above Tilda's ear--
"They won't reach him now. He'll sink before they get to him, and I'm
glad of it. He's given us the last and best run of as good a season as
either of us can remember--eh, Parson?"
Tilda looked up with a sudden leap of the heart. Above her, on a raw
roan, sat a strong-featured lady in a bottle-green riding-habit, with a
top hat--the nap of which had apparently being brushed the wrong way--
set awry on her iron-grey locks.
The clergyman she addressed--a keen-faced, hunting parson, elderly,
clean-shaven, upright as a ramrod on his mud-splashed grey--answered
half to himself and in a foreign tongue.
"Latin, hey? You must translate for me."
"A pagan sentiment, ma'am, from a pagan poet . . . If I were Jove, that
stag should sleep to-night under the waves on a coral bed. He deserves
it."
"Or, better still, swim out to Holmness and reign his last days there, a
solitary king."
The Parson shook his head as he gazed.
"They would be few and hungry ones, ma'am, on an island more barren than
Ithaca; no shady coverts, no young ash shoots to nibble, no turnip
fields to break into and spoil . . . Jove's is the better boon, by your
leave."
"And, by Jove, he has it! . . . Use your eyes, please; yours are better
than mine. For my part, I've lost him."
They sat erect in their saddles, straining their gaze over the sea.
"It's hard to say--looking straight here against the sun, and with all
this fog drifting about--"
But here a cry, breaking almost simultaneously from a score of riders,
drew his attention to the boat.
"Yes, the boat--they have ceased pulling. He must have sunk!"
"God rest his bones--if a Christian may say it."
"Why not, ma'am?"
But as he turned to her the lady turned also, bending down at a light
eager touch on her stirrup.
"Oh, ma'am! . . . Oh, Miss Sally!"
Miss Sally stared down into the small upturned face.
"Eh? . . . Now where in the world have I seen _you_ before? Why, mercy,
if it ain't the child Elphinstone ran over!"