tone, “Gamaliel Hooker is not a man to shirk his plain and manifest
duty. A few hours prior to your appearance a band of soldiers called
here, and told me where I might find them should any malignants appear.
I will send an information to them the first thing in the morning.
And now I give you good-night, madam; I think after our nocturnal
wanderings we shall both welcome a return to bed.”
The landlord made to go upstairs. He would reserve the question of what
she was doing in the dead of night, and her highly singular conduct
towards his serving-man, until the morrow. He must not exhaust all his
weapons at once; he would save a few with which to amuse himself at his
leisure. But he had enjoyed using these vastly. He would teach her to
take him trapesing in the dead of the night through the winter gale!
However, as the landlord made to retire the woman sprang forward with
an appeal. She clung to his coat with her frozen hands.
“Have mercy, I beseech you!” was her cry.
The landlord laughed in her face.
“It is a matter for the Lord Protector,” he said. “But I have yet to
hear that he is a merciful man.”
“You will not deliver up my poor husband,” she cried,--“you will not be
so cruel!”
“Mother of God!” said the landlord. “I will do my duty.”
For the second time that night the woman fell upon her knees. She flung
herself at the landlord’s feet. There never was grosser clay in the
world than his. He neither pitied nor spared her. Nay, he prolonged
the agony of her self-abasement to the last bitter moment. He drew out
the frenzy of her abandonment to its last wild prayer. He derived an
intimate pleasure from the picture of the creature at his feet, casting
herself upon his mercy. It was the rarest nectar to his self-esteem; he
sipped it to the dregs and smacked his lips upon it. He waited as one
melting in spite of himself, and then dashed her hopes to the earth by
adopting the same precise, formal voice he had used before:
“Madam, I am determined to do my duty.”
“I beseech you; I implore you!” cried the unhappy woman. “Will you have
no mercy for the sufferings of a wife?”
The landlord turned from her coldly.
“Will you have no pity for the agonies of a mother?” she cried. “Will
you not spare the father of the babe I bear?”
In the mad frenzy of her fear she suddenly rose to her feet, with all
the blood quivering and sparkling now in her cheeks. The landlord
admitted to himself, even as he tortured her, that there never was so
perfectly noble, so perfectly magnificent a creature as this wretched
lady. But when she flung back her cloak to lend the prayer of her
motherhood an additional emphasis, he laughed in her face.
It was more than the woman could endure; the last appeal of her sex had
been despised. The shame and the agony overcame her; she sank senseless
to the kitchen floor.
The landlord, by a deft use of cordials and cold water, brought her to
her senses very soon.
“Mercy, mercy!” she moaned as her eyes came open.
The landlord, deeming that the comedy had gone far enough for that
night at least, thought it time he appeared in his true character. He
exchanged the formal tone he had used when he spoke of doing his duty,
for one more natural to him.
“You shall purchase a day’s respite, madam,” he said, in a brisk voice
of business, “on one condition.”
The woman’s heart leapt in her side.
“Take that ring of sapphires off your finger, madam, and place it in my
hand. On that condition, I will undertake not to lodge an information
against your husband during the next twenty-four hours.”
The woman plucked off the ring eagerly, and, giving it to the landlord,
thanked him with eyes that shone far more bravely than the jewels that
she gave away. In the security of the short respite she had purchased,
she went upstairs to the chamber of her stricken lord. It was almost
less than nothing; yet, after all, there was one day more left to her
in which she might struggle wildly for her husband’s safety.
The landlord had no desire to return to his couch. He was too excited
by the strange events of the night, and too eager to meditate upon
what manner they affected him, and the nature of the mystery he had
been confronted with, to have any hope of going to sleep. Therefore he
rekindled the fire, brewed himself a posset, charged his long pipe with
tobacco, and sat down to reflection. He was hugely pleased with his own
conduct of the last half-hour. The woman was entirely at his mercy. He
would be able to wring her jewels and money from her with ridiculous
ease; whilst at the eleventh hour, when all their portable possessions
had become his own, he would still be able to save his reputation by
giving them over to Cromwell’s men. He gazed tenderly on the bright
jewel in his hand. He amused himself by computing the value of the
stones within it, and figuring out in his mind what he stood to gain.
These were brave times indeed! Why, he had already earned more during
that last half-hour than in a year of quiet, jog-trot trading. And this
was, doubtless, nothing to the wealth they had upstairs. He only hoped
the soldiers would not return and discover their owners, ere he could
take them for himself. But Master Gamaliel was not without a certain
confidence in his own acquisitiveness; he shrewdly suspected that in
any case they were doomed to lodge in his custody. Oh, if the King
would only come his way as well!
He then turned his attention to the strange events of the night. He
was morally sure that the woman had gone forth to discover Diggory
Fargus’s boat or that of some other mariner, and that her meeting with
Will Jackson, the serving-man, was, as far as she was concerned, an
accidental one. But what could account for her extraordinary behaviour
on his appearance? Why had she adopted so wrought and passionate an
attitude towards him? Most probably for the same reason that she had
adopted it a little later towards himself: she feared him. Him, too,
she had been beseeching. Of course she had been begging him not to
betray her; but why should she be at such pains to implore a fellow
like that not to do so? The landlord recalled the incident of Will
Jackson going up the ladder. It was then he first knew that she and her
husband were at the inn. Gamaliel recalled how his serving-man had
rushed pellmell to the ground as though he had seen a ghost, whilst
the woman above pierced the night with her wild cry. What could be the
significance of that recognition?
The landlord built a theory. This Will Jackson had probably been lately
in their employment; and the woman knowing him to be so well acquainted
with their circumstances, and that he was doubtless a rogue to boot,
she felt her husband to be undone. Again, the serving-man’s surprise
would not be unnatural. It would be a rather dramatic thing to go up
that ladder, and for him to discover his former patrons thus. Assuming
that to be the case, it was not unlikely that the woman, utterly
desperate as she was, ventured into the night to find Will Jackson and
to propitiate him with her prayers. Yet, after all, she was not likely
to find him by the side of the sea.
The landlord was unable to settle this last point definitely in his
mind; but the remainder of the theory he thought very excellent.
However, be that as it may, he would take the first opportunity
of having Will Jackson’s version of the affair. Here a new thought
assailed the landlord. Last night, when the fellow fled down the
ladder, had he not positively asserted and reiterated that he had never
seen the persons upstairs before? He had lied--he had lied foully. Not
only had he seen them, but he was intimately acquainted with the woman
at least. But he would have the truth out of the fellow. Could it be
that some more guilty secret than he suspected lay between them? Was
some deep mystery involved? The landlord nestled nearer to the embers,
and went over all the ground again. Why should a serving-man and a
woman of condition be so intimate and familiar one with the other? She
was a lady--a woman of quality, he was sure--yet with his own eyes he
had seen her on her knees to the fellow; and she had kissed his hands.
[Illustration:
CHAPTER
VIII
_The King’s face_]
When a few slow hours had passed, and the household of the “Sea Rover”
were astir, the landlord lost no time in despatching his son to the
stable to summon Will Jackson to his presence.
The serving-man soon afterwards shambled into the kitchen, wearing
a particularly sleepy and unkempt look. He pulled his forelock to
Gamaliel gravely; yawned, and rubbed his weary eyes on the sleeve
of his jerkin. The landlord regarded him keenly. It seemed almost
impossible that this rustic clod and the beautiful woman upstairs
should have anything in common. But what of her behaviour on the rock
during the night? Could it merely have been fright at his appearance?
Hardly that: besides, his own behaviour had been very incongruous,
considering what a bucolic clown of a fellow he was during the daytime.
Yet was he such a clown after all? Had not the landlord first remarked
about him that he appeared to have wits rather above his station?
However, he would see.
“My lad,” said Gamaliel, sternly, “what did you during the night?”
“Slept,” said the fellow, laconically.
“Did you not walk abroad?” said the landlord.
“Nay, not I,” said the fellow. “Too tired I was; I lay down in my straw
and slept like a hog.”
“You are lying to me,” said the landlord, raising his voice. “You
walked out on to the top of one of those rocks by the seashore, and
there you met the woman in the chamber upstairs. You met her there in
the middle of the night; you talked to her; and she fell on her knees
before you, and she kissed your hands. I know all, you lying villain!
Now, sirrah, confess the reason of it all, or take the consequences.”
The serving-man twitched not a muscle. He regarded his master with a
stolidity amounting almost to the bovine, and he blankly professed his
ignorance of the charge. The landlord grew furious.
“Do you give the lie to my ears and eyes?” he cried.
The serving-man merely replied by a look of profound indifference.
To the angry and astonished landlord, it seemed to amount almost to
contempt. Will Jackson appeared to consider that his denial was enough.
He neither entered into the merits of the matter, nor took the trouble
to soften the force of his affirmation.
Gamaliel had never been so nonplussed in his life. He had proof
positive that his serving-man had been out in the night, and that
he was intimately acquainted with the woman upstairs. Yet here he
audaciously denied all knowledge of her.
“By God, sirrah!” cried the landlord, “I will see to it that you hang
before a week is out, as an aider and abettor of proscribed Royalists
fleeing the country, if you persist in this most abominable falsehood.”
The serving-man shrugged his shoulders. He still seemed to have
a perfect indifference to the landlord’s threats. And, indeed,
Master Gamaliel fumed and browbeat in vain. It was precious little
satisfaction he got out of the lumpish Will Jackson.
He breakfasted upon the matter. Coming to review it afterwards, he did
but grow more firm in his conviction that the woman and his drawer had
something more to conceal than he had at first suspected. At last he
decided to confront them face to face. First, he sent up his son with
a message to the lady’s chamber. Would she step down immediately to
his father, as he desired to speak with her on a matter of the first
importance? Her fear of the landlord was now so great, that she lost
not an instant in complying with his demand.
Will Jackson was already submitting to another interrogatory from his
master, when she came whitely and wearily down the stairs. The cunning
landlord had contrived that their meeting should be in his presence.
They should have no chance to pre-arrange an ignorance of one another.
He now observed their demeanour with a devilish intentness, and he
could swear he saw a sudden swift flush dart across the woman’s face
and a hunted, hungry look of fear spring in her eyes the moment her
gaze alighted on Will Jackson.
As for that clod-like servitor, he was just as imperturbable as ever.
Not by the relaxing of a muscle did he betray that he had encountered
the woman before. The landlord admitted to himself that such a studied
stolidity was remarkable. The fellow made respectfully to withdraw on
the woman’s appearance.
“Not so,” said his master, roughly. “I would have you stay here,
sirrah. You shall be condemned out of the mouth of your accomplice.”
He then turned, bully as he was, even more roughly on the woman.
“Madam,” he said, “I have sent for you to demand an explanation of
your last night’s conduct. In the middle of the night you crept out
of my house, climbed upon a rock in front of the open sea, and while
there you encountered this serving-man of mine, Will Jackson. Madam, I
demand to know what passed between you; also when and where you met my
serving-man before.”
“How can madam say that,” the serving-man promptly answered for her,
before she had a chance to reply on her own part, “when I have told you
over and over again, good master, that I was never out last night at
all; and, if you must know, the only time she hath seen me before this
morning was when you sent me up the ladder to spy upon her. Then it was
she happened to raise her eyes to the window, and accidentally caught
mine looking at her.”
“Silence, you insolent scoundrel!” roared the landlord. “How dare you
presume to put words in the mouth of this lady! You impertinent dog!
Come, madam, I await your explanation of this odd circumstance.”
The woman stood silent, with her head bent upon the ground. The
landlord was obliged to admit that the exceeding promptness of his clod
of a servant had done a great deal towards outwitting him. She had
had her cue from this impudent rogue. It was too plain that she was
striving to summon up the courage to utilise it.
“Come, madam,” cried the landlord; “I would not have you attempt to
dissemble. You are not of the pattern of a dissembler, as witness your
somewhat melancholy performance in that role in the small hours of this
morning. Be frank, madam. I prithee do not exhaust my patience. Your
respite of twenty-four hours may suffer a curtailment else.”
This threat was not without its effect. The landlord grimly noted how
the fear sprang to her eyes. He noted, too, that as she raised them
they rested a moment wildly on Will Jackson’s face. His countenance,
however, the landlord saw with a new amazement, was absolutely empty
and passive. The fellow was either a clown of no capacity at all, or a
man of an infinite wit, resource, and intelligence.
“Madam, I demand an answer,” said the landlord.
“I have never seen this--this--this man ere now,” the woman faltered.
“You are lying, madam!” the landlord cried in his brutal manner; “and,
my God! if you lie to me I will rescind my promise, and your husband
shall be delivered within the hour into the hands of his enemies. And
this fellow, Will Jackson, shall be given up also, as an aider and
abettor of dangerous Royalists.”
The woman grew white to the lips.
“No, no; not that!” she moaned. “Not that! You will not be so cruel--so
unmerciful.”
“Madam, I will not be trifled with,” said the landlord. “If you do not
speak the truth to me, all three of you shall be given up.”
“Oh, sir,” she said, trembling like a reed in the wind, “it is indeed
the truth. I beg you to believe me.”
“I never saw a worse hand at a lie,” said the landlord, with a sneer.
“But, ’fore God! you shall pay for it. Joseph, do you come here
instantly.”
The landlord summoned his son. That rather dismal youth obeyed his
father’s call with a resentful alacrity.
“Madam,” said the landlord, “I give you one minute by this watch
of mine in which to make your decision. Confess the truth, and the
twenty-four hours’ respite holds good. Persevere in this monstrous
falsehood, and you shall pay for it in your husband’s blood. I have
never yet seen the man, let alone the woman, who could trifle with
Gamaliel Hooker. And, sirrah, do you heed this also. As I’m a live man,
you shall swing in a gibbet for this!”
The old man ended in a gust of fury that carried him away. He then said
to his son:
“I fear me, Joseph, that you must go saddle your horse in a minute. I
shall be wanting you to take a message to a certain place I wot of.”
The landlord pulled forth his watch and began to count the seconds
dramatically. The woman seemed petrified to stone.
“I ask you for the last time, madam, what you know of this fellow,”
said the implacable landlord. “Refuse to tell me, and it is your
unhappy husband, not yourself, who pays the price.”
None knew more perfectly than the landlord how to torture her. Again he
had the wretched creature on her knees before him; and again he had the
privilege of laughing in her face.
“Rise, madam,” said Will Jackson.
The landlord turned towards him and gazed at him in blank astonishment.
It was not so much the drawer’s words, audacious as they were, that
had this electrical effect on Gamaliel Hooker. It was the manner of
their utterance. They were spoken in a full, calm voice, quiet and
self-contained, and one that sounded mighty odd from the mouth of a
servant. For, above all, it had a tone that even a bold man would have
found it hard to disobey.
“Rise, madam,” said the serving-man, and, bending forward towards her,
he assisted her to do so.
She trembled so violently when she got upon her feet that she could
hardly stand. But she kept her face averted from the audacious servitor
in a singularly painful way. She seemed afraid to look at him.
“We will have done with play-acting, if you please,” said the drawer,
addressing his master, but, strangely enough, in the same authoritative
voice. “After all, is it not a little vulgar, and a little cowardly?”
The astonished landlord spluttered out a string of oaths. But he was
almost inarticulate with anger and bewilderment. A frank sparkle
of amusement showed at the same time in Will Jackson’s eyes. The
transformation of his voice was extending to his face; nay, to his
person and his bearing too. Where a minute ago there had been stolid
inanimation and indifference, were intelligence and vivacity. Where
there had been lumpishness and awkwardness of gait, were graciousness
and breeding. The fellow still wore his coarse rustic clothes, his face
was still bedaubed with dirt, but he was no longer the same person. The
landlord was slowly beginning to recognise the fact.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.
It seemed that his transformed serving-man was on the point of telling
him, when the poor lady, who seemed just now to be acting in a kind of
delirium, stayed him suddenly by placing her two hands on the leathern
sleeve of his jerkin.
“No, no, no!” she cried; “it must not be. Whatever the cost, it must
not be.”
“Think of your husband’s life, madam,” said the triumphant landlord.
Neither the man nor the woman paid heed to him now, however. There
seemed some far graver matter between them.
“At all costs,” the landlord heard the woman say to his serving-man
in a hoarse whisper, “I implore you to be wise, to be discreet. It is
not for yourself alone I beseech you; think, oh! think of all that it
means.”
Her voice, too, was changing. While she spoke, it lost something of
its wildness. It still throbbed with its passion, but above it was a
yearning tenderness, a maternal solicitude that dominated it completely.
“Nay,” said Will Jackson, with his strange, cool smile again creeping
out of his eyes. “What’s the odds? I am weary to death of this farce;
it is become intolerable. And, after all, we are in the hands of God,
are we not? There is but our destiny to trust to.”
“But must we not shape it?” said the woman. “You may mitigate it, or
enhance it, by your unremitting prudence. I beseech you to remember,
all is not lost. There are still those that are your friends. Be wary,
be discreet, I pray you.”
It distinctly seemed to the landlord’s eager ears that the woman had as
great a solicitude for this fellow as her husband--nay, an even greater
one. For was she not apparently prepared to sacrifice her lord, rather
than Will Jackson should reveal the secret between them?
Gamaliel was cunning enough; but, after all, cunning is a quality
with grievous limitations. It is the offspring of a mean mind, and
is therefore of value only up to a particular point. Therefore what
should have been by now as clear as day to the innkeeper was still
quite obscure. Instead of reading the plain, simple truth, he went
deeper than a more straightforward person would have done, and missed
it altogether. He was convinced that the woman and the man--whoever
he was, he was no serving-man--stood one to the other in a guilty
relation. The previous night he had witnessed an assignation; and,
further, now that the woman had to choose between this fellow and her
husband, she was ready to sacrifice her husband.
There never was anything so plain, the landlord thought, yet he
flattered himself that it was not everyone who would have found it so.
This fine theory was doomed to perish almost as soon as it was born,
however. Despite all that the woman had done to urge him to prudence,
this strangest of serving-men insisted, in his cool, smiling, slightly
indifferent manner, on going his own way.
“My dear madam,” he said, in a louder tone than any he had yet
employed, “we honour your devotion and your solicitude; we shall
ever cherish it vastly. But we are a-weary of this mumming, of this
intolerable play-acting; we yawn to death. ’Twere better far to perish
of the axe than to die thus incontinently. Besides, we are hungry and
thirsty. The food our landlord reserves for his servants is fit only
for swine. Landlord, have the goodness to hold your peace, and fetch us
a cup of sack and a nuncheon of bread and meat. ’Od’s body! never was a
king’s belly so sharp before.”
At last the landlord saw. At first his bewilderment was so great that
he could have been easily felled by a feather. Every emotion that
the old rogue had was suddenly laid stark naked by this wonderful
revelation of the King; indeed, his behaviour was so ludicrous that
that frank young man burst out a-laughing at him. Too excited to
speak, too dumbfounded to act, too paralysed with all the conflicting
sensations let loose in his head to be able to think, he was as one
suddenly become deaf, dumb, and blind. He could neither see nor hear;
he could neither speak nor lift a finger. The occasion was too great
for him; he had lost control of his own entity.
In the meantime the anguish of the poor lady was even more terrible,
more unutterable than before.
“Oh, my King! my King!” she wailed, “what hast thou done? My God! what
hast thou done?”
The King put his hand upon her shoulder, gently.
“Peace, dear lady, peace,” he said. “This is no season for your tears.
Landlord, I asked you a minute since for a cup of sack. ’Od’s fish! you
must obey me, landlord; I am no longer your servitor, to be kicked and
cuffed and bullied, but your King. I wonder if the royal coat was ever
tarnished with such dirty hands before.”
The King looked a little deprecatingly at the sleeve of his leather
jerkin. In lieu of the morose, thick-witted Will Jackson, he now
stood forth a frank and jovial rogue enough. For all the disguise of
his dirt and his rags, his kingship seemed suddenly to make him a
gentleman. As a serving-man or a wandering vagabond he would still
have been excellent; but granted his kingliness, he made no such very
bad specimen of a monarch. The title shone forth in his swarthy looks,
added a freedom to his manners, and a grace to his bearing, as, in
the fashion of a simple commoner, he drank his sack and munched his
nuncheon, and offered words of gallantry and comfort to his beautiful,
distressed companion. But in the absence of the title, he would still
have done very well for Will Jackson. As is the way with many another,
the coat was the man. It required the label of King to make him one;
but once affixed, it certainly suited him admirably.
“Is my lord strong enough to receive me,” he asked the lady as he
disposed of the last morsel of his bread and meat.
“I pray that he may ever be strong enough to receive your Majesty,”
said the lady, fervently. “May I conduct you to his chamber, Sire?”