to the wood, Gamaliel was able to discover the object of her pity. The
thing in her hand was an open locket. It was suspended by a chain of
fine gold round her neck, and was worn apparently in the recesses of
her bosom. The landlord was presently able to discern that it was a
portrait in miniature. Yet it was far too small and delicately wrought
for its outlines to be distinguished at that distance. Gamaliel had not
to speculate long on its subject, however. For on a sudden impulse the
lady pressed it to her lips with a passionate gesture, crying aloud in
her throbbing tones:
“Oh, my King! oh, my King! our Lady be with thee forever and alway!”
She sank to her knees in an attitude of prayer.
The landlord, deeming that there was nothing further to gain by
remaining longer in his precarious and grievously exposed situation,
crept down from his perch, and sent up the shivering Will Jackson in
his stead. It would require but a glance for the fellow to discover
whether the man in the bed was or was not Charles Stuart.
Now, whether it was that Will Jackson had not the address of his master
in the delicate art of seeing without being seen, or whether the fellow
had had the audacity to advise wantonly those within the chamber of his
presence, the landlord was in no case to tell; but certain it is Master
Hooker heard a strange, wild cry arise from the room: and the next
instant the serving-man came pellmell down the ladder, very much after
the manner of one who has confronted a ghost.
The landlord hurriedly bore away the ladder and went indoors with his
man, lest the lady above should fling back the shutters and discover
in what manner she had been spied upon. For it was plain that Jackson
had had the folly to let her see his face at the window. Having abused
his servant in the roundest terms for his incaution, the landlord
proceeded to question him as to what he had seen.
“Was it the King?” was the breathless question.
“Oh, no, master!” the fellow assured him.
So much for the slender hope the landlord had been secretly cherishing!
He could not confess to any surprise, for many circumstances pointed
against it. And as there was no sort of hesitation about the fellow,
Gamaliel had no temptation to doubt him. Yet if it were not Charles
Stuart, Jackson’s demeanour at the window clearly showed that he and
the persons in the chamber were well acquainted.
“Then if it was not Charles Stuart,” the landlord demanded, “who was
it, sirrah?”
“I do not know,” said Will Jackson.
“You are lying to me,” said the landlord, furiously; “and if you lie to
me, you rogue, I will break your head--or no, I will not; I will send
for those soldiers that were here two nights agone, and I will deliver
you up to them as a malignant who was concerned in Worcester fight.
Now, who are they? D’ye hear me? Who are they, I say?”
“I do not know, master,” Will Jackson repeated doggedly.
“I say ye do know, sir!” the landlord cried. “And ye shall speak the
truth, d’ye hear me! Why should you come down the ladder in that plight
if ye had never seen these persons before?”
The fellow stood silent. The landlord repeated the question and
heightened the threat. But it was of no avail. The drawer abided by his
denial, simply and tenaciously. His master fell into a violent rage. He
shook him by the collar, he kicked him, he beat him with his fists; but
all he could get out of him was the same unwavering, stolid answer.
And at last, Gamaliel’s anger having spent itself somewhat and his
disappointment having grown a little less keen, he grew to believe
the unfortunate Jackson. There was that in his humble, thick-witted
rusticity that in itself killed suspicion. After all, it was not
unlikely that the nervousness begotten by his strange employment, and
his horror at being discovered in it, was the true cause of his wild
appearance and behaviour.
As the landlord sat that evening, as usual, by his cheerful fire,
examining the knowledge he had lately gained, and weighing it in
his mind for what it was worth, he felt that he had no cause to be
dissatisfied. The man and the woman upstairs in his best taffety
chamber fronting the sea were certainly Royalists. And one of them, and
he the man, was stricken and helpless; and were there not diamonds on
the fair hands of them both?
[Illustration:
CHAPTER
VI
_The night: the Sea:
the Rocks:_]
It was a rather late hour when the landlord went to bed that night. As
was usual with him on the cold nights of the autumn and winter time, he
found it hard to tear himself away from the cosy warmth of the fireside
and his generous potations. Midnight had long gone when he rose from
his chair, tried the kitchen door according to his inveterate custom,
and then stumbled up the creaking stairs to the icy sheets of his
chamber.
Perchance they clapped too cold about his ancient blood for sleep to
visit him; or likelier, he had an indigestion of the mind from excess
of things to think about, for close his eyes as often and firmly as
he might, or insinuate his fat person in every fantastic posture in
the cold recesses of his bed, sleep was banished from him utterly.
Those nerves of his still twittered in his old head. The events that
had recently come within his ken were telling upon him. He could not
grapple with them with the ease and deftness of a younger man, or a man
endowed with stronger fibres in his character.
Do as he would, there was no sleep for him to-night. When he shut his
eyes he saw the King with rime on his fine cloak, and rings on his
fingers, and a feather in his hat, and a retinue of noble-looking
gentlemen bowing low before him. When he opened them, the ugly visage
of Diggory Fargus, that dreadful mariner, was grinning at him from
the foot of the four-poster. His image was quite as realistic as the
King’s. How those earrings bobbed about in his ears! Twice when he
was dozing off a convulsive twitch shot through his limbs, and he was
compelled to draw his breath cautiously, for he felt a knife to be
buried to the hilt in his back.
Suddenly he withdrew his ears from a coil of sheets, and twisted
his nightcapped head half across the bed in a strained attitude of
listening.
When the sound had first assailed him, he thought it was a rat
scratching through a wainscot. But now there was the muffled grunt
of a key revolving in a lock; and then a distinct, timid patter of
footsteps. The chamber in which he lay was next to that of the lady;
she was leaving her room at last.
She was probably only descending to the buttery to procure some
necessary for her stricken companion. Or could it be that she was
making her escape from the inn? Certainly her movements were cloaked
in caution itself. He could hear her stealthy feet on the creaking
stairs. Less than a minute afterwards he sprang from his couch with an
oath; he could hear her unbarring the outer door.
The bitter darkness was a fierce enemy to the old man, but not even
it could daunt his curiosity. With many groans he swiftly grappled
with his breeches, dragged on his vest and doublet, and wriggled his
cold toes into hose and leather. The night bit him keenly, but he was
determined that this woman should not be allowed to pass out of his
house, in the dead of the night, with impunity. The landlord was sure
she could not be going forth thus with an innocent intention. And in
any case, his curiosity apart, he was the last man in the world to
neglect a chance of obtaining a weapon against her.
In the midst of these brief speculations he found himself downstairs
in the kitchen, protecting an unsteady candle with his hand. A sudden
rush of air extinguished it. He was left entirely in the dark, with no
precise knowledge of his bearings. He struck a course, however, for
the kitchen door, and found it, as he expected, open wide.
On entering the night, his face and hands were stung with the icy
kisses of the falling sleet; little waves of it were running down the
wind; the sea was crying with loud and many voices; and the hour seemed
perishingly desolate and cold. The landlord peered up the path leading
to the shore, and saw, many yards away, with the starlight playing
round it, a wind-blown figure, whose bent head and flapping cloak were
fighting hard against the blast. It was a woman struggling to the
sands, and the thing that made her form the more conspicuous was a
lantern that she bore. It picked her out in a prominence of light, and
made a mark of her for the landlord’s eyes.
Crossing the road, the innkeeper came within the shadows of the rocks.
Crouching in them, he dogged her step by step to the open sea. She
was not long upon her road. She strode forth through the very teeth
of the gale, straightly and confidently, either as one well-broken
to adventure with no mind to shrink from this, or, as the landlord
more shrewdly preferred to think, as one by nature timid--himself,
for example--who, being involved in a course of a highly daunting
character, was compelled to act in a manner of frenzied eagerness, or
not at all.
The landlord, panting after her in stealth, found his breath quite
insufficient for the wicked wind, and, too, his head became the prey
of neuralgic pains. He had never been so nearly a hero in his life as
his curiosity, his cunning, and rapacity made him now. Presently a
sheer and narrow cleft appeared between the rocks. The woman walked
along, and a minute afterwards her gaze was strained upon the sea. She
approached to the extreme verge of the waters, so that her feet were
wetted with the tide. She held her hand across her brows to shield them
against the darkness and the driving sleet; and that her eyes might
cleave the boiling waste before her.
Nothing could she see, however, except the sea whining and straining
from the wind and snow, and casting up its giant belly to the stars
like some impotent god of emptiness and fury frothing its threats
against the universe. Again her eyes embraced this chaos, but only a
lightship could she see swaying many a mile away; the light upon it
seemed to hang above a chasm on the very margin of the world.
The night had now pierced her to the blood, while the upthrown surf
had stung her face so bitterly that she could support its devilries no
more. The landlord, in his wisdom, had not advanced beyond the shelter
of the rocks; but the lantern that the woman bore was much his friend,
and now at last the tardy moon showed signs of bursting through the
wrack that forever raced across it. To him the lady’s movements were
therefore made excellently plain; their very visibility, however, did
but render her motives the more obscure. After a little while the
landlord saw her turn her back upon the black waste of roaring winds
and waters, and retrace her steps near to where he crouched encumbered
in shingle and rank grass. He crept the closer into secrecy, so that
presently she walked so closely past him that in her unconsciousness
the hem of her cloak nearly brushed his feet.
By the time the woman had gone some yards beyond him, the landlord got
upon his legs and followed her with the same precaution as before.
To his bewilderment, and untold annoyance too, instead of pressing
directly back upon the path leading to the inn, as he had calculated
that she would, she began swiftly to ascend one of the beetling faces
of the rocks. The landlord put the stern question to himself whether
he should attempt to follow her. The rocks, as he was well aware, were
at this point of no particular height, nor were they very difficult
or steep. But even in broad daylight they called for an effort from
a man in years ambitious to ascend them. Curiosity, however, had its
tentacles upon the landlord’s soul; it insensibly drew him panting,
groaning, and stumbling up the cliff in the wake of the woman, even as
he debated the matter in his mind. The god of circumstance was stronger
than he.
The landlord tore his hands on the sharp fragments that studded the
face of the rocks; he tripped over others that lay concealed. He barked
his shins, tore his clothes, bruised his body; but where the woman
with the lantern went, he went to. In the teeth of the gale she won
her way up to the pinnacle. The uncertain flame in the lantern blinked
and tottered in her hand; but, like its bearer, it somehow prevailed
intrepidly against the gale. Once more her eyes were for the sea; and
as they confronted it even more steadfastly than before, the moon
suddenly swam forth from a black patch of storm, and painted the tense
lines of her form in a weird grey ghostliness. It even fell upon her
face, and betrayed it wilder and more sombre than the night itself.
Still this grim moon and the few sardonic stars that revealed the
woman’s face and form so clearly, mocked the groping blind-eyed rogue
who, lying in a new concealment, strove to profit by their aid. They
showed him all, yet showed him nothing. He could see her precariously
poised under the awful sky, confronting the more awful sea. He could
see the very flesh of her quiver in the wind; he could hear her
garments flapping in the blast; and as once she raised her lantern
a fortunate angle to the moon, he saw the pale tears shine upon her
cheeks. All this: yet how much did he know! To the sensual landlord
it was symbolical of nothing; of nothing beyond the elements lurking
in his own base intelligence. To him the woman was indubitably mad
or drunk or criminal. He clenched his frozen hands upon the thought.
Body of God! she should be made to pay a price for exposing his sacred
person to the night and the tempest in this manner. He would have his
two clotted hands upon her. He would tear every jewel, every rag off
her mad body; he would tear out the very heart of her for this; and
then she and that precious husband of hers should be delivered over to
the gibbet; and they should swing in the wind o’ nights such as these,
forever.
There was unction in these thoughts to the bruised and beaten landlord,
now spying full-length upon his belly behind a boulder. But either
these ideas or a particular phrase recalled Diggory Fargus to his
mind. How he loathed the image of that mariner! Could it be possible
that this woman was searching for him? Indeed, what more likely? He
doubtless had some wretched smuggler lying in some little cove on the
beach; lying in readiness to take fugitive cavaliers by night into
France. Could it be that she was waving that lantern as a signal to
Diggory Fargus?
Already the landlord’s mind was at work on that new phase of the
night’s mystery; already, despite the extreme bodily discomfort in
which he was, he fell to tracing its bearing on his own private
interests, as was his invariable wont, under every conceivable
condition. His mind did not follow that trend very long, however.
For while the woman stood with the moon and the stars, the wind and
the spray beating upon her, a second figure sprang silently and
mysteriously out of the night.
It appeared so suddenly upon the platform of rock on which the woman
stood at gaze, that the astonished landlord could not tell how it had
come there. It had evidently climbed up from the other side, however,
and, strangely enough, the woman seemed neither to be aware of its
apparition nor to expect it; for even when the figure was less than ten
yards behind her, her back was towards it, and she still looked out to
the sea.
After the landlord’s first shock of excitement and surprise was over,
he was quite prepared to recognise the form of Diggory Fargus in
this unexpected vision. But one keen look at it, as it struggled and
stumbled through the fierce wind, showed it to be too tall for that
stunted mariner. The landlord heaved a sigh of vast relief.
It was not until the man, for man it clearly was, had come directly
behind the absorbed woman, and plucked her by the cloak, that she
withdrew her eyes from the sea and confronted him. And her manner
of doing so was so wild and startled, that she could have had no
cognisance of his presence. A cry escaped her lips; a cry so great that
it pierced through the gale to the landlord’s ears; and it appeared to
the watcher’s astonished eyes that had the man not supported her in
his arms, she might have fallen headforemost down the cliff. And then a
little moment afterwards occurred a thing more singular.
The woman sank on her knees on the rock before this strange appearance;
and, taking his outstretched hand within her own, she bent her face
convulsively against it, so that it seemed to him who watched that her
eyes, her lips, her hair, her tears were imbrued upon it in a strange
mad passion, the like of which he had never seen before.
She might have been a minute or an hour thus, the act was so vivid,
so unforgettable, so pregnant with that which sears the memory and
leaves it raw. But at last the man seemed to draw her to her feet,
and thereafter they stood together, talking eagerly. There was that
in the frantic gestures of the woman, in her wrought attitude, and
the perfervid manner of her utterance, that the landlord was able to
interpret. It seemed to him that she was pouring forth a wild appeal.
But listen as tensely as he might, the noise of the sea and the wind,
and the intervening distance, were too great for him to catch a word
that fell between them.
The next thing of which the landlord was aware, was, that they were
leaving the altitude on which they stood. As they prepared to descend
to the path beneath, the woman hung heavily upon the strange man’s
arm. And as they came down the incline of the rocks, they approached
so near to Gamaliel’s hiding-place that the old man was able to train
his eyes full upon them; and the moonlight and the light of the woman’s
lantern falling on them too, they became a feast for his curiosity. He
was able to discern almost every detail of the stranger’s countenance;
and as he did so, he had to strangle the cry of surprise that welled up
on his lips. The woman’s mysterious companion was none other than the
landlord’s new serving-man, Will Jackson.
[Illustration:
CHAPTER
VII
_The Woman_]
By the time Gamaliel had recovered a little of his amaze, the man and
the woman had gone past him; and when at last he reached his feet to
follow them, they were already lost to sight in the descent. Judging
them to be upon the path that led back to his inn, and that thither
doubtless was their destination, the landlord stumbled down as
speedily as he could towards it. As he had supposed, the woman and his
serving-man had reached it too, and were steering a straight course to
the inn. The landlord crouched after them as stealthily as ever. It was
his desire to see without disturbing them. He must observe every detail
of their behaviour, and afterwards construe it at his leisure. To his
mind there never was so deep a mystery as the wild business of that
night.
When they came to the inn they stayed a minute underneath the sign,
and resumed their eager converse. Again was the landlord too far off
to hear the purport of it, but there was still the same passion and
excitement on the woman’s side as formerly; and when they parted--the
lady through the open kitchen door, and the serving-man to a
temporary bed of straw that had been found for him in the stable at
the back--there was again that astounding incident of her lips being
pressed upon the fellow’s hand.
The landlord waited until Will Jackson had retired, and then hastily
came up just as the woman had entered the kitchen and was about to
close the door. Without saying a word, he put his shoulder to it and
forced an entry. He paid no heed to the woman until the door was
bolted, so that no one might intrude, and he had got the candles lit.
Then he turned upon his victim.
That the winterly cold had struck her he could see. Her pale face was
mottled with blue patches where its claws had pinched her; the belated
hair that had wriggled from her hood hung on her temples limp and wet;
and the fingers of one starved hand were stiffened to the burnt-out
lantern that they bore. She had a crying need for warmth and kindness,
but those were luxuries that Master Gamaliel administered only to
himself. Thus he poured some brandy forth and drank it briskly, and
warmed his frozen hands at the candle-blaze. He then felt strong enough
to turn his attention to the lady.
“Madam,” he said, “this is a very serious thing. I await your
explanation of it, madam.”
Saying this, he craftily assumed a place between her and the stairs
leading to the bedfast traveller’s chamber. Her retreat was intercepted.
She looked at him dumbly, and did not answer. But she lifted her
pleading eyes up to his face of stone, as one who knew the great powers
residing in them, and who was accustomed to employ them as weapons of
defence. The landlord laughed a little insolently.
“I am very weary,” said the woman. “Can we not choose a better season
to discuss this matter?”
“Madam,” said the landlord harshly, “I choose to discuss it now. But
first, before I do so, I must have your name. Your companion and
yourself have been two days immured in my best taffety chamber fronting
the sea, yet up to this very hour have I been denied what is the first
essential to us innkeepers. But, madam, I must have it now.”
The woman looked at his cold face falteringly. Then she withdrew her
eyes and took a further refuge in her silence.
“Madam, I demand it,” said Gamaliel, sternly. “The times are greatly
perilous, and what assurances have I that you are not a pair of
malignants, a pair of proscribed Royalists, a pair of Charles Stuart’s
friends and my Lord Cromwell’s enemies?”
The woman trembled. When the hunted doe takes to the water, it has the
look and manner that the pale woman had then. The landlord wrote every
inflection of her demeanour down in his heart. His two little eyes, now
contracted with their cunning so that they looked like two glass beads
in his head, pierced her like steel. In spite of herself she shuddered.
She closed her own eyes that she might not see them.
“Madam, I swear I will not be put off,” said the landlord. “I demand
your name and the name of your companion.”
The woman’s lips were frozen. Twice she struggled to speak, and twice
no words issued from them. The landlord had chosen his moment craftily.
The unexpectedness of his appearance at that hour, and the shaken state
she was in already, thanks to her adventures in the night, left her at
a hopeless disadvantage. She might have the desire to dissemble, but
she certainly had not the power. She was bound hand and foot at his
mercy.
“I would prefer to withhold our names for the present,” she said at
last, in a hoarse whisper.
“That you shall not do, madam,” said the landlord. “I must have your
names here, now, this instant.”
“I cannot give them,” said the woman, simply.
Again the landlord enclosed her with his cold eyes. They fascinated
her, they pinned her helpless, they changed her blood into stone;
they were the eyes with which the snake holds the fragile bird. The
same bale and venom crept into them as he gazed upon the frightened
creature, and as she cowered and shrank away, a smile and a sneer crept
together round his mouth slowly. The moment to strike the victim was at
hand.
“So you cannot give them, madam,” he said, with a suave mockery. “So
you cannot give them. I do not know, madam, that I am surprised. I
should have been more surprised had you been able to do so. In the
very hour of your coming, I formed my own opinion of you. I am not
altogether a blind man, madam,--I am not. And when in that first hour
of your coming, madam, in a most unholy and exceptional season that is
not very usual for simple honest travellers to employ, you had recourse
to a lie----”
For an instant the woman’s chin went up imperiously, and a spark
kindled in her eyes.
“I repeat, madam,” said the suave landlord, “in the very first hour of
your coming you had recourse to a lie. You said your husband suffered
from an incurable disease. More correctly, you should have said a
bullet wound obtained a few weeks ago at the battle of Worcester.”
It was a shot in the dark, but it found its mark. The woman fell back
against the stairs with a face the colour of snow.
“No, madam,” the landlord went on, “I can confess to no surprise at
the course you have taken. It is hardly to be supposed that the wife
of a proscribed cavalier, who hath come a fugitive to a lonely inn on
the seacoast, in the hope of slipping over to France on a dark night,
should be willing to publish his name to all and sundry. But it is a
fortunate circumstance that old Gamaliel Hooker hath a few wits in his
head, otherwise a notable traitor to his country might have escaped his
deserts, and there would be one malignant more than there should be in
the world.”
The landlord had trimmed his cruel words, and, uttered them slowly.
Each one sank like a sharp-pointed knife into the very flesh of the
woman. She shrank away from him, torn, bleeding, trembling.