“… _a little spark in a blue bonnet, who fought like the devil at
Preston._”--Boswell.
The tourists peered past the grey stone pillars of the gateway into
the courtyard, paved with round cobbles, grass-grown in between. The
low sculptured doorway gave admittance to the old manor house that had
so fascinated the lady of the party from the first moment she had cast
eyes on it.
“Oh, this is a bit of the real thing!” she had exclaimed fervently,
when, five miles out of Richmond, the road had ceased to follow the
course of the Swale, mantled all the way with heavy oak and hazel
copses. They seemed to hang like hairy beards from the beetle-browed
face of the cliffs that shelter the east bank of the river. “The very
real thing!” she had continued, as the wagonette turned out into the
open moorland, and their town-bleached cheeks were bathed at once in
the pure sullen airs that roamed over it, softened and suffused with
the tears of an April storm gone by. “This is the real Yorkshire moor
I’ve read of, bare and empty, with not a single dwelling to be seen.
Yes, there’s one!”
For as their conveyance dived down into the scarp of a hill, she
sighted beyond the now familiar river which wound again into view,
directly crossing their path, and the low bridge of quite modern
construction which spanned it, the square mass of a house commanding
the river bank. It seemed to stand, bull-dog like, on the slight
acclivity, posing as guardian of the ford at that place, which was
certainly all that had served for crossing a hundred years ago. So her
instructive companion remarked to the eager lady. She grew more and
more enthusiastic.
“John, I can’t possibly pass it! I couldn’t reconcile it with my
historical conscience to go by without an attempt to see it. It’s like
a grey-haired woman standing stranded on the edge of the world, an old
Ariadne of a house, waiting for ever by the side of the flood.… Ask
the driver what they call it?”
“Wallburn Old Hall,” said the stolid Yorkshireman, flicking a fly off
his horse’s ear.
Three blind hopeless windows which had been closed up for the tax
looked over the old garden garth. The eyes of the persons looking
thence could have swept the stream and the narrow neck which formed
the ford. The stone flagged courtyard of the house was enclosed by
buildings on all sides but one. On the west, looking towards the
river, was a ruined battlement on which a man might still walk and
survey the country round for miles. But it was now insecure, the inner
rubble exposed. Clumps of wild mustard and garlic sprang from every
cranny and crevice and made a yellow blaze that lit up the grey
substance of the pile. The lady unable to contain herself longer,
requested the driver to pull up and let them have a look. Her
companion took out a guide-book and read aloud, as they sat in the
break in the streaming sunshine.
“Wallburn Old Hall… fortified manor house… dismantled.…”
“I should think it was!”
“_Et pour cause._ _The_ old Cause of all! Listen! Family of Daunet.
There’s the shield on the door, evidently--see all that _répoussé_
work?--only we can’t read it from here.”
“The book says: ‘The ancient family of Daunet, who beareth sable
gultie, argent and a canton ermine.…’ Yes, Guy Daunet’s tomb is in the
church at Redmire--remember it?--His feet are cased in brass-toed
sollerets. Above his lady’s head are three shields of arms. She
appears to have been a Conyers. Well, they seem to be pretty well
extinct now. The last Daunet was out and killed in the fifteen. There
were Daunets in the Great Rebellion, Daunets in the Gunpowder Plot--in
the Rising in the North----”
“Poor romantic dears!”
“Yes, that’s the plague of lost causes. They swayed the emotions so
forcibly and through the emotions the very lives of the old
families--those that had any good in them. One imagines them, up to
the very latest day, having an indistinct glimmering of their own
original _raison d’être_, that is, lands given in exchange for
service.… Their modern representatives have lost even the glimmering.
Well, oughtn’t we to be driving on?”
“Oh, no. After what you’ve been making out, I must have a try to see
over it. I want to make out that blurred shield over the door. Gules
argent and canton ermine, was it? They can but refuse us.”
The young couple alighted, under mute protest from the driver, and
entered the courtyard, the lady bold, the man nervous, deprecating.
They received forthwith a Teniers-like vision of an interior.
Farm-hands were sitting round a wooden table, placed in the
oak-panelled greasy blackness of a low raftered hall. All looked up,
and ceased pulling at their mugs. A frowsy young girl of eighteen,
wiping her mouth, came forward.
“Could we see over?” The glint of a silver coin in the lady’s hand
pleasingly accentuated her request.
A voice came from the interior as the girl stood hesitating and shy.
“Mind, hinny, thou’st not take the lady anywhere it isn’t safe. Keep
out of the room the captain’s leg came through. And mind, the stairway
beyont isn’t much to crack on.”
The girl thus admonished, turned and led the enthusiastic pair in and
up the rich darkness of the stair.
“That’s the best part of it her mother told her to leave out!”
whispered the lady. “That about the captain’s leg. It sounds most
exciting. Ask her--or I will.”
The girl, questioned, replied over her shoulder.
“It’s a tale, ma’am. A long while back it were--ages and ages. They do
say a man’s leg came through the floor, and he’s always called the
capting. The boards is rotten just there, and was then. That whole end
o’ the house is fair gone to powder. My grandfeyther used for to say
that a man’s leg made it coming through. But it was long before his
time, and he were a very old man. The ceilings of that part of the
house is that powdery, would you believe it, that we can always scrape
the plaster and get a bit for baby.”
“How funny and utilitarian! And is it haunted?”
“Grandfeyther always said ’twas.”
“Who by?”
“They do say a poor man went clean daft there--came home and found
every one lying dead about the place.”
“But what had they died of? Plague?”
“The smit? Naw. Grandfeyther allus said ’twor a tragedy, same as they
has in the papers now-a-days.”
“Where is your grandfather now?”
She jerked her finger over towards the north.
“Churchyard. But he knew all about this place. His feyther before him
was ostler about the inn at Redmire--you’ll pass it on your way to
Bolton. He always said there was a hiding hole here, and mor’n that, a
secret way, but teacher says that’s all nonsense and we mustn’t waste
our time looking for it, besides it isn’t safe. We shut oop this part,
and just pack into the other, where it’s still pretty good, and at
Michaelmas we’ve all got to go out and Lord Scrope is going to pull
the old place down.”
“Shame!”
“Oh, I dunno. It’s fair rotten.”
“Are you sure you can’t take us into the rotten part--just for once
before it all goes?”
“That I cannot. The worst room is the one the man’s leg came
through--they call it the Lady Christina’s room. And it’s there
Grandfeyther says the priest’s hole was.”
“It was generally out of the principal room in the house,” said the
man. “They wanted him under their own hand and to be able to feed him
at night. Come along, Mary, you really can’t see it.”
“I suppose not.” She sighed. “But I do somehow seem to see
Christina--the Lady Christina. I suppose her spirit is about? Why
‘Lady’? The Daunets had no title.”
“These people always dignify ghosts and raise them to the peerage.
Let’s see if we can’t make up a story for her. Christina Daunet and
her lover--was he the man who went mad or the priest she hid?”
They were descending the stairs. Their cicerone broke in suddenly.
“Nay, that weren’t the way. The real heir was troth-plight to the Lady
Christina, and he was drowned one day here in the ford, here under her
very eyes.”
“Another touch!” said her companion eagerly. “So legend grows. Let us
go and sit out on the hill, here, and look towards the ford, and I’ll
try to reconstruct her story for you. I’m not a novelist for nothing.
This is how the man went mad when he came home.”
* * * * * * *
There was no priest. The lover was that “little spark in a blue bonnet
that fought at Preston” Boswell speaks of. I’ve always wanted to
connect him up with a story. Miss Christina Daunet--not Lady--was tall
and pale, and a fine girl, so long as she had enough to eat, and
nothing to brood on. But her adolescence and greatest need of
nourishment happened to coincide with Jacobite times of stress, when
loyal subjects starved in order that the Stuarts might come by their
own. The females of her family were used--even hardened to the more
domestic consequences of the males’ unfaltering loyalty. When the fuss
was about priests, Christina’s own grandmother had successfully
concealed one in the hiding-place in her room--that very room that we
were not permitted to investigate, looking towards the ford and the
road to Richmond. To-day her own mother lay there, eighty, bedridden,
daft and doited.
These two women were the widow and daughter of the last Daunet of the
direct line. Since the great Guy of the canton ermine, the race had
continually dwindled. So many of them had been strangled, so many
hanged and drawn and quartered, a half-dozen desiccated heads
belonging to the strain had rotted on Temple Bar. Cold steel and a
touch of poison had been responsible for some others, and thus the
foolish, forlorn race had been cleared off to make room for persons of
finer judgment and less realistic ideals. Acts of attainder, recusant
fines, had impoverished their estates, and mulcted them of their
goods, till of all the broad lands, castles and noble manor houses
that had bred and sheltered and maintained Daunets for the King’s
service, only the austere, embattled farm-house on the Richmondshire
moors remained, and therein the two women that alone bore the fine
fighting name slowly pined and withered away.
They had not enough to eat. Yet their appetites were no larger than
feminine appetites are reputed to be. Sir Christopher Daunet,
Christina’s father, was killed at Sheriffmuir when his little daughter
was a year old, and her mother, grown doited with the shock, lived on
to give very little trouble, and represent no great charge on the
family finances. She lay always in her big room in the south-west
wing. Her heavy four-post bed, too mighty and perhaps too rotten to be
moved, remained firm in its old place on the safer part of the
flooring; the tester was hung by heavy rings to the ceiling. Her
daughter, ministering to her slight wants, had learned to walk warily
round the bed.
Christina Daunet was loyal--as women are loyal. She realized very
fairly that this task of the reinstatement of the Stuart dynasty on
the throne of England had been set by Providence on her and hers,
incidentally carrying with it the doom of extermination set on the
race. Their blind inherent loyalty clustered as it must, round the
losing side which sucked in, naturally, these people who always went
where their advantage was not--and the losing side had drawn in her
father, her uncle, even the man she loved.
She loved her cousin, Charles Daunet of Scanwood. Scanwood House lay
three miles hence on the Richmond Road. Charles was the only son of
her father’s only sister. Christina and this young man were early
troth-plighted--they were about to wed--but the Stuarts came first. It
was the Cause that intervened and forbade the innocent banns. Charles
Daunet allowed the just impediment and went out as a matter of course.
He was more eager for the day of the stranger’s crowning than for the
morn that should usher in his wedding with Christina whom he knew and
loved. He had left her too easily. Folk in the neighbourhood said he
was slack. Christina herself admitted that Charles was more of a
fighter than a lover. But the Stuarts called! What was a Daunet to do?
She cried sometimes and mourned over her baulked betrothal with her
only confidant, a certain Luke Daunet. Her father had had a son, but
he was not her mother’s child. Luke lived with them--his mother had
been innkeeper’s daughter over at Redmire, a good girl enough till Sir
Christopher Daunet came her way. He lived so near, at Wallburn, and he
was not the man to leave so fair a flower ungathered.
Madam Daunet was not a hard woman. She undertook the child’s
maintenance when its mother died and Sir Christopher fell at
Sheriffmuir. Luke grew up. He was not “all there,” but he was an
honest, kindly, gentle fellow, and for the two lonely women he did a
man’s work about the place. There was not much to do. There was not a
beast left in the stable, except a wall-eyed, knock-kneed pony that
Luke rode into Redmire or Marske now and then to buy necessaries. They
could afford no other servant. The white-handed proud Christina tended
her mother, cooked, and did the inside work of the house. It was all
one. When the Prince should come into his own, Christina would do so
likewise.
Of that she had doubts sometimes, especially when the wind whistled
over the moor, and the stream ran heavy and turbid below the garden,
so that the ford was ill to cross. The Prince’s final triumphing then
seemed surer than her own. Charles had been away now a long while. He
had not been assiduous about her for many months before his departure
to join the Prince. He had sent her no message first or last. She had
even heard of another lady.…
For rumours flew. The news of the brief Stuart apotheosis at
Edinburgh, tidings of the Prince’s meteoric Court at Holyrood, had
filtered down to Redmire, and the bar of the inn there. Preston fight,
too, was mentioned. She thought, but was not sure, that Charles had
been noticed there. Now the Prince was marching south… had marched.…
On that day of December, mild and calm and presageless as it seemed,
Christina was ill at ease, peevish, apprehensive. She went about the
houseplace and courtyard with her ears pricked to the free roving wind
that might have brushed her Charles’s bonnet in passing, as he marched
south with his troops? Or, weary of this fairy listening, she would
droop her eyes, till they rested dreaming on the waterway below the
dip of the hill where Wallburn Hall stood. Then she would raise them
slowly to look a little higher on the level where the turrets of
Scanwood were just visible nestling in their encompassing woods.
Scanwood was a fine place, and would it be hers some day?
Puzzled, like a fox that is hunted, she snuffed the air and could not
tell which way danger, or perhaps bliss, might come. Had the Prince’s
army passed them on its way south? For indeed the last news Luke had
brought had been that the Stuart heir was marching on his own capital,
with his victorious rabble of Highlanders. King George was quaking.
Would not Charles, if this were so, have to pass by Scanwood to see to
his domestic concerns? Her mother babbled for ever of drums; the old
woman would have it that she heard them.…
“They’ve gone by, my dear, they’ve gone by. Oh, the bonny lads!… The
Prince has gone into England, never to leave it again, dearie. Listen
to the old doited woman, for she speaks truth. Rub-a-dub!…
Rub-a-dub!…”
“Whisht, whisht, mother!” Christina now and again murmured softly but
not imperatively, as she stood by the window and herself with her
slight long fingers performed the manœuvre known as drumming on the
pane. Yes, her heart lifted; he had passed, at a point perhaps miles
away, too far for him to get leave to call in and see his sweetheart.
She must have patience. One day soon she would be looking out of this
very window and she would see Charles on his fine horse crossing the
ford at the old place, coming to her, with a light heart, and all his
troubles and hers behind him, cast aside, healed, over and done with.
She could discern the very spot now where the bottom was nearest and
the water shallowest, even exposed at times in drought. The waters
flowed glumly over it now, there had been much rain to swell them.
Sometimes, to the excited girl, who stood there, her nerves wrought by
the faint vocal rub-a-dubbing that came from the bed behind her, it
seemed that the water gathered itself up into shapes--shapes of horses
and men. The little waves seemed to rise obediently under the harsh
wind, and form themselves into the semblance of uncanny humanity. They
massed themselves and menaced, yes, she came to fancy that one figure
rose again and again from the sullen flow to shake a quivering fist at
her. She stared the silly vision down. Soon the water ran by as usual,
huddling, lumping itself into small ridges under the wind, but nothing
so tall as a man.
She turned to receive and divert the mother’s peevish voice. The old
woman had ceased to imitate the drums; she was now convinced in her
senile way they had passed. She talked strange nonsense, used strange
names. “Bound for the South, they are.… The Bridge.… Swarkstone!
Swarkstone.”
“Where’s that, mother?”
“Bad luck! Bad luck! The Bridge.… No further.… Swarkstone. No further.
Back! Back! I’m cold, Christina. I’m cold.…”
“The day’s changing and you feel it,” said Christina sadly, altering
the position of the coverings. It was all she could do.
“Nay, ’tis the smit of death I’ve got, Christina! I know it.”
“Oh, mother, not now, just when we are going to be so happy.” But her
heart did not back her words. “Look here, I’ll have Luke go to Redmire
at once and get you some of Betty Candlish’s cordial. She promised me
some for you the moment I wanted it, and you seemed low as you do
to-day. We won’t let you die just yet.”
“Ay, but can you keep me?” said the voice from the bed gently. “It’s
that I’ve got and no mistake. I’ve felt it all day.… Come back and
kiss me, Christina. You’re a good girl--a very good girl.… The Bridge
at Swarkstone--I saw him there--the Prince.… Remember that,
Christina.”
“Yes, mother, I will, though I never heard of such a place in my
life!” cajoled the girl as she went downstairs to seek the half-witted
Luke and confide her errand to him.
He sat, as usual, on the oak settle, swallowed up in the glooms of the
chimney corner. She roused him up, and told him what she wanted. She
helped him to saddle the pony and watched him potter slowly up the
hill towards Bolton. Then she re-entered the house and cut up, on the
corner of the big seamed oaken table, some vegetables which she had
fetched from an outhouse. Into a pot on the fire she threw the sliced
turnips and carrots. There was not much fire to hang over, but her
forehead got hot, her cheeks flushed, and her hair escaped a little
from its binding.
Presently, having put the mess to one side on the hob, she walked
slowly out into the courtyard to get air, of which she suddenly felt a
violent need. She languidly ascended the few broken steps that led up
to the old battlement. At that time one could still walk along it
without having one’s attention too much distracted by the necessity of
picking one’s way among the rubble. She strolled backwards and
forwards, enjoying the fresh moorland air that caressed her reddened
cheeks and blew her pale yellow hair away in an easterly direction.
Holding her hand to her forehead instinctively to restrain it, though
there was no one to be seen for miles, she scanned the country to the
south. Her blue eyes roved over the low rolling hills that let her see
a very long way. But not as far as that bridge at Swarkstone, six
miles south of Derby, where the lines of her fate had been converging
for several days past, and were now radiating away from thence in
ragged streaks and strands of fugitive soldiers and brutal complacent
pursuers.
She was overcome with a sudden trepidation, a rush of feeling that
somehow impelled her to get back to the room where her mother lay, and
see for herself how the helpless woman was getting on. But she sat
down on the parapet, which at the point where she was still stood firm
at the side of the battlement next the road. Overcome by a sudden
faintness, she hid her face in her hands. She had eaten very little
to-day. Her back was to the road, and her eyes, should she uncover
them, would have rested on the empty grass-grown courtyard.
It was not empty. A noise like a dead leaf twisting startled her. Luke
come back on foot, without the pony! She had pressed her knuckles into
her eyes until her eyes had grown hazy and suffused, and it was a
second or two before she saw there was actually a man in the courtyard
below her. A man, not Luke.…
His bonnet, faded by sun and wind and rain, had once been blue. She
heard his breath that came quickly, and, very drily, scenting a beggar
and a demand for alms, she asked him his business.
He raised his drooping head.
“Charles!”
“Christina, quick! Who else is here? Can you harbour me?”
“What? What?”
“I come from Derby--the rout at Derby. We got six miles beyond and
turned back.… I am pursued. Quick, can you hide me, will you? They
will search my house at Scanwood, they are there now.…”
Christina was not looking at him. She had half turned when he spoke of
Scanwood, and her eyes pried into the bosky mazes lying between.… The
fugitive thought that the brusque movement had its occasion in a
natural change in her sentiments towards himself. He deserved no
better, he had practically deserted her, he had never written--a woman
scorned!… Yet in his urgent necessity he must needs appeal to her
again.…
“Christina, an answer, I beg of you! Shall I go further for a
shelter?”
“Take off that cap--reach it up to me here. Now go in to the chimney
corner--you know it--sit down--at ease. Not another word.”
While speaking she had taken the blue cap and flung it down into the
chapel garth on the other side of the wall. The cluster of “ramps” and
fronds of wild garlic parted and opened to receive it and came
together again. Meantime such was the power of insistence in her voice
that the fugitive obeyed her as he would obey the military word of
command. Heavily walking over the stones of the courtyard, he took his
place on the settle in the chimney nook and crossed his legs
negligently. He could still see Christina standing on the battlement
looking down towards the ford. She stood first on one leg and then on
the other; she agitated her body strangely, she made signs. Then faint
sounds, voices, the clink of bridles, came to his ears from the
direction in which she looked. His pursuers most likely, for the noise
came from Scanwood. He stretched his legs, stiff from two nights’
exposure, further out in an attitude of ease as she had bidden him. He
did not know what Christina meant to do. She was revengeful--then she
would give him up? She meant perhaps to save him? Well, his life
belonged to her. He waited.
Five minutes ago Christina had seen his enemies taking the ford, a
well-found troop of horse, and a stoutish personable man riding at
their head. Charles Daunet, from the ingle nook, could not see them
but he could see his Christina make a trumpet of her white hands and
hear her bawl--yes, bawl--to them over the battlement--
“Good gentlemen, hear me. Will you please to take some refreshment? I
cannot allow you to go by me, for it is lonely here at Wallburn Hall.”
“Is that what you call it?” said a clear voice. “Wheel, men.”
Charles Daunet saw the speaker ride into the little courtyard at the
head of his troop, and dismount. He was a fine florid man of forty or
so. He wore a high fixed cap with upon it the White Horse of Hanover;
his gaiters were white and at his saddle he carried a dead turkey.
Christina had descended from the battlement, and had gone to the
horse’s head. The man spoke breezily.
“Captain Butler at your service, Mistress. We will eat a crust with
you, the more so because we come to search you in the King’s name.”
“Do you say so?” Christina replied, setting the tone of the interview
in a way that made Charles Daunet shiver. “Come you then in, in the
King’s name. George or James, ’tis all the same to me, a woman. It’s
long enough since a man came this way. I was wearying for the sight of
one.”
The Captain laughed heartily.
“Business, first, Miss, if you please. We have a warrant to take a
certain Colonel Charles Daunet of Scanwood, who fought for the
Pretender at Preston and gave us honest ones a dance of it.”
Christina looked faintly bored.
“My cousin of Scanwood! Is he not at home?”
“We have spent two hours ferreting for him there, and the housekeeper
bade us come here. She said he was a good friend of yours.”
“She is chary of her information,” said the girl composedly. “I was
more than friend, I was once sweethearts with him, for my sins. But I
have no care for the fellow now.” She tossed her head. “Come in, come
in, you and your men, as many as the roof will shelter. The wine cask
is low, but we will do what we can. I am alone here--nearly.”
“My men--some of them--must search the house.”
“Ay, let them search closely! I was always one for formality. But see
they take heed of the flooring of the upper rooms, which is
indifferent and might let one of them through, especially if he be a
fine man like yourself, Captain!” She giggled. “Shall I go along with
them, and indicate the places where the maggots cling and the mouse
gnaws, and all is gone to fine powder?”
“No, they must shift as best they can, and you shall stay here and
talk with me. Our man should be here, without your knowledge, perhaps,
since you say you and he have fallen out?”
“We fell out,” said Christina carelessly, “when he chose to leave me
to go and fight for a man I had never seen and didn’t care for. He
should have stayed here and taken care of his own.”
“I am with you, Mistress. Little as he is, though, he fought us like
the devil at Preston. His blue bonnet was everywhere, and he fairly
swinged our poor fellows! The Duke is wild to have him strung up.
Well, men, off with you! Thoroughly, mind. Every corner! Is there a
cursed hiding hole here?”
“Yes, in my mother’s room,” said the hostess languidly. “She lies
there bedridden. Speak her fair and gently, and she will instruct you
to find the way in. On the left-hand side of the fireplace--a bolt
shaped like a beetle. Only it’s iron, and if Charles is there--so much
the worse for him.”
“You’ve got a spirit--nasty at that. Well, let’s in. ’Tis hot, and
your liquor comes not amiss.”
Christina led the way under the low-browed doorway to the kitchen,
where Charles Daunet was sitting. She made straight for the corner
where he was, and lifting up a wooden flap of the settle, rummaged for
a bottle of spirits. Aloud she said--
“Get thy great foot out of the way, Luke, wilt ’a!”
“Ay, who’s that?” asked Captain Butler, apprehending the sullen inmate
of the chimney corner for the first time.
“That! That’s a poor foolish cousin of mine,” she replied, rising from
her knees with the bottle, a little flushed with stooping.…
“You seem full of cousins----”
“Yes, but this one’s on the wrong side of the blanket. He’s not over
quick, but he’ll answer a civil question, no doubt. Now then!” She
took Charles Daunet roughly by the wounded shoulder, and he winced.
“Look up, speak to the captain, can’t you?”
“What’s your name?” asked that personage humorously, entering into the
spirit of the thing, but he got no answer. Christina shrugged her
shoulders.
“Truth, he’s got no name, by the rights of it. Or if he has, it’s the
same as mine. Luke Daunet, at your service. Drat you, Luke, why don’t
you stand up and speak for yourself?”
Still the man on the settle did not move.
“He’s taken that way sometimes, Captain. A fit of the sullens. As
obstinate as a mule, and you can’t get a word out of him; and another
day he’ll rattle away fit to deave you. Poor sort of company for a
girl like me! We just have to give him house room and a bite and a sup
now and then for kinship’s sake.”
She poured out a glass of mead and the captain took up the glass and
raised it to his lips.
“A kiss before I drink!”
He put his hand on her shrinking shoulder. The kiss lit on her ear.
The man in the corner looked up sharply.
“Be quiet, Luke. Don’t you see I never gave it?” she said, as if to a
froward jealous baby.
“It isn’t to his taste, eh?” said Butler. “Ha! Ha!”
“Never you mind his tantrums, Captain. We never take any notice,
mother and I.” She filled his glass again. He sat down near the end of
the table. She made shift to sweep the fragments of vegetables away
with the carroty knife, but the captain raised his hand.
“Let be!” he said.… “Come and sit here, if this surly fellow will
permit it. I shall like to watch his face.” He put his burly arm out,
and, not before she knew what she was doing, proud Christina Daunet
was sitting on a trooper’s knee and playing with his beard.
There was a sound of feet and much stamping overhead. Presently, with
a sharp ugly crash of splintering timber, the booted leg of one of
Butler’s men came through the ceiling and dangled helplessly.
Christina jumped off the captain’s knee and burst out laughing.
“There! I told you ’twould happen.”
“Bravo, Tim Jobling! I’d know his leg in a hundred. Gad, I can hear
him squealing like a pig up there!”
“’Tis in my mother’s room!” exclaimed Christina suddenly. “’Twill
frighten her to death.”
“You shan’t go till they come down. They’ll be here directly. Look
you, it’s all right now. Tim Jobling has gotten back his leg. They
have him by the shoulders, and hoist him up so. He’s still swearing,
though I can’t hear. You shall hear me roast him.”
Christina did not sit on his knee again, but leaped away with a
coquettish grimace as the members of the search party came downstairs.
Sheepishly came Tim Jobling at the tail of the group, minded to avoid
Butler’s merriment.
“Found naught, Cap’n, except one doited old woman in bed.”
“My mother!” interposed Christina proudly.
“Ay, Walters, keep a civil tongue in your head, it can do you no harm.
Did you put your blade thro’ the bed?”
“We did, ay, and the old body sat up, and talked gibberish. She
frightened poor Tim so that he stepped back sharp and through the
flooring.”
“His leg came out just there,” said Butler, pointing to the comminuted
fracture of laths and planks that sagged down from the ceiling. “Well,
Tim, you’re no worse and you’ve given me and my young lady here very
good amusement. Your leg wagged like a mouse’s tail in the trap. My
word!… Well, well, there’s meetings and there’s partings, Mistress.…
We’ll have to be jogging away. Our man’s still to seek. What’s this
place Redmire?” He spoke to Christina, taking her by the chin.
“It’s a lost sort of place, three miles away from here. Marske’s a
deal more likely. Yet why should I be helping you to catch the poor
escaped fellow? You’ll hang him, I’ll warrant, and though he’s
despised me, I don’t wish him that much harm. I was never fond of
telling the hunt which way the fox had gone.”
“Do you say so?” He looked judicial, and stroked his beard. After a
pause--“Still, I’ll just have the correct name of that last place you
mentioned.… You’ve no call to be careful for Charles Scanwood, he’s
given you the go-by, you say. A man merits a rope for neglecting a
pretty wench, over and above being punished for the hell he gave us
all at Preston. That blue bonnet of his was like the clout of the
devil himself. Well, well, adieu. Thank you for your mead, and if ever
I’m this way again----”
“Go, since go you will,” said she, “I shall see or speak to no man but
you here this side of Lady Day. So, Captain, farewell. Grant me a
favour?”
“Ask it.”
“My cousin, here----”
“Sulky-face! Ay.”
“He’s got business for me in Marske. The ford’s swollen. We have no
horse. Let him ride behind one of your men so far? You’re going to
Marske to look for Scanwood?”
“Certainly, Miss, we’ll oblige you. Tim Jobling shall take him behind.
Come, men, saddle. We must be off.”
“Give me a letter--so that the next company passes this way don’t
trouble me,” she said.
He scribbled something in a pocket-book, and tore it out. She took it.
“Another glass before you go?”
“I’ll not say no to that. Here’s to King George! Will you toast him?”
She drank it down.
“Just a good excuse to get a drink,” she said.
“Right. Women have no call to meddle with politics. And your cousin?”
“You can try him. But I fear he’s stubborn. These sullen fits last for
days. Here, Luke, drink to please me and the kind captain.”
She held the cup to his mouth and whispered, “_Return here as soon as
may be_.”
Aloud she sneered, “Look you, the great baby! He is suffering me to
spill the good liquor. His lips are close shut----”
“Waste no more time on the lout that will not drink when a lady begs
him,” the captain said. He wiped his lips. “Well, good-bye, then.… You
were so glad to see me, you’ll not refuse me a kiss at parting?”
“What are you thinking of, Captain Butler?” she minced affectedly.
“And before your men, too.”
“Be hanged to my men! They’re busy getting off. You’re the prettiest
picking I’ve seen since I left my barracks at Hounslow and I cannot
leave it unkissed!”
He forced her lips. The man in the chimney corner stirred.
“Touches him nearly,” said Butler, whose eyes shone.… “I could do with
another, given freely. Maybe, if we were alone----”
She shook her head.
“No good, eh? Your promise, Madam, was finer than your performance.
But I’m a gentleman. Come, my lob-lie-by-the-fire, stump up!”
The man in the ingle nook, with one reproachful glance at Christina,
rose. He tottered a little, and appeared dazed. Captain Butler, in
sudden haste to be gone, clapped him on the back.
“Come, my little fellow, don’t keep us waiting. We’re bound to catch
our gallows-bird before dark!”
The haggard eyes of the fugitive were fixed now on Christina, and now
on the stained kitchen knife that lay on the table.
“It’s the money,” she said hastily. “I was forgetting.”
Opening a shabby little leather bag that hung at her girdle, she
produced a silver coin.
“Here, take it, Luke. For all that Betty Candlish would have given us
credit. There goes! Don’t drop it, ye daft goneril! And, mind, you’ll
have to come back by the bridge up Marske way, for these kind
gentlemen won’t be coming back, I fancy. It’s saving him a matter of
two miles, Captain, thanking you kindly, and my mother pining for her
drops.”
The troopers in the yard were all mounted now, their bridles clinking,
their horses pawing. Christina, standing by Captain Butler’s stirrup,
bickering with him gaily to the last, watched her lover out of the
corner of her eye, as he doggedly passed out, and hoisted himself up
behind the man called Tim. He seemed woefully stiff. Christina
supposed him to have a hurt somewhere, or was it merely the result of
two nights’ exposure? If it was the former, she promised herself a
month’s delicious nursing. Yet not a look did he cast in her direction
as he rode away, uncovered, leaving one of Luke’s old caps, which she
had reached down from a nail for him, on the table beside the kitchen
knife and the carrot scrapings.
She saw it when she went in again. His negligence of any head covering
must have looked odd and indifferent, but then his sullen and cross
demeanour had tallied exactly with her account of him. She was proud
of the part she had played.
Yet the first thing she did when the sounds had died away was to catch
up a rough cloth, not over clean, that lay there, and rub her lips
with it till the blood came.
Then she sat down for a little while with her head buried in the
self-same cloth, crouching low in shame, remembering bitterly the
indignities to which she had submitted in order to secure her false
lover’s safety.
Half an hour she sat like this. Then the old clock in the corner
struck wheezily. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.
She remembered her mother. She ought to go and see and comfort the old
woman. Perhaps the rough troopers had frightened her. Heavy-footed,
hating herself, loving Charles, she ascended the crazy stairs.