to the rocks by the side of the sea. Horses stamped under the signboard
of the “Sea Rover”; boots, spurs, and stirrups struck one against the
other; bridles shook; hoarse commands were given; the cavalcade moved
fiercely and swiftly away.
Now that the crisis was past, the landlord was sufficiently master of
himself to watch them go from his door. After this fiasco it was highly
necessary, he argued, that he should do all he could to win their
favour and their confidence. Captain Culpeper, despite the rage and
excitement under which he was labouring, called out as he sprang to the
saddle:
“Landlord, I charge you to detain the man and the woman upstairs
against my return, on the peril of your life. I hold you already
responsible for the King’s escape. Do you watch over these two persons,
therefore, yet more jealously. I cannot spare any of my men to look
after them, but you have your son and that strapping servant-girl. We
will fetch them as soon as maybe, and lodge them in greater security.”
While the last of these words were being uttered, Captain Culpeper and
his troops were riding away. Stunned by their import, the landlord went
within and closed the door. It was as though he had heard the sentence
of his own death, for he knew it was wholly out of his power to detain
the man and the woman upstairs should Diggory Fargus only prove true
to his appointment. The sailor had promised to come, in the company of
three of his friends, at half-past nine, to bear away the lady and her
stricken husband.
If they came, what an irony it was to suppose that he, his son Joseph,
and Cicely, the serving-maid, could possibly prevail against the
redoubtable mariner and three of his pirates or his smugglers!
As a preliminary measure, the landlord locked the door. Not only did
he lock it, but he bolted it at the top and at the bottom, and ran
the chain across. Then he looked at the clock. Ten minutes to ten.
Diggory Fargus had promised to come at half-past nine. Probably he had
purposely held off when he saw that the soldiers were at the inn. He
even might have had so tender a regard for his own skin as to go back
again. God grant that that were so! He even might not have meant to
come at all. The landlord prayed with all his soul that Diggory Fargus
and his men might not appear. The loss of the King was effaced for the
time being from his mind by this new matter.
The security of his own person was involved in it, and the immunity of
that sacred thing was of even greater moment to Gamaliel than the loss
of a King’s ransom. All his life he had had a holy dread of violence.
God in heaven be merciful to him a sinner, and keep away that ruthless
sailor!
The landlord looked at the clock again. Five minutes to ten. Diggory
Fargus was already twenty-five minutes behind his time. But there
was hardly any comfort in the thought. Hours must elapse ere Captain
Culpeper could come to his aid, unless by a miracle the King were
retaken immediately. A little bitterly the landlord reflected that
miracles did not happen to him. Was not his life stern, terrible,
inexorable matter of fact? At least, it seemed so then.
The landlord fell once again to his principal occupation of that tragic
day. He began to hobble up and down the kitchen, with ever and anon an
anxious eye for the clock.
There might be hours of this form of torture. If there were, Gamaliel
felt that surely he must go out of his mind. It was a suspense to which
there would be no end. There was no limit to the hour at which Captain
Culpeper might return to claim the two persons left in his custody. It
might be an hour, or it might be twelve; it might be a day, a week,
or a month. But be that as it may, his instructions were perfectly
clear. He must detain those two guilty persons at his inn, by force, if
necessary, or he would forfeit his life.
The first stroke of ten had barely struck, when the landlord caught a
sound that froze the blood in his veins. The noise of persons on foot
coming down the bridle-path rose above the distant roar of the sea.
He heard rough voices. The kitchen door was tried; a lusty smack was
delivered upon it.
“Open the door, mate!” cried the great voice of Diggory Fargus.
The landlord did not stir. He leant against the wall for support; he
had not the strength of a mouse.
“Open the door, mate, d’ye hear me?” demanded Diggory Fargus.
A terrific blow shook the lusty oak. Still the landlord leant sickly
against the wall.
The lady appeared at the head of the stairs, cloaked, masked, and
gloved for a journey. Hearing that her deliverers were at hand, she ran
down the stairs, and, not heeding the helpless landlord, thrust back
the bolts, the chain, and the lock of the kitchen door.
The mariner and three companions as rude and ill-favoured as himself
stepped out of the night.
“We’re behind our time, ma’am,” said Diggory Fargus; “but, d’ye see, at
half-past nine we had to tack and go about, for the place was full of
soldiers. We supposed they had come to take ye, but we thought it our
dooty to return and satisfy ourselves.”
“God requite you, sailor,” said the woman, fervently. “My husband
is still upstairs. But let us make all haste, for at any moment his
enemies may return upon him.”
Even as the woman spoke, the pale figure of a man tottered down the
stairs. Clinging tightly to the rail, he put one weak limb before the
other and reached the kitchen before they had observed him. He too was
fully accomplished for the journey.
“Oh, mine own,” said the woman, tenderly, “what a foolish valour! ’Tis
ever the same headstrong, wilful, heedless fellow. Did I not order you
to stay upstairs until we fetched you? Thou art much too weak to use
thine own legs as yet, lad.”
“Peace, Patsy woman,” said the young man. “If I can walk into this
accursed place, I can walk out of it. I am hale and strong by
comparison with what I was when I came here with the bullet in my side.
Landlord, give me a cup of wine, and I shall be fit to encounter the
perils of the sea. Deuce take me! what hath happened to the landlord?”
As pale as linen, his eyes staring and his knees knocking, the landlord
still clung in silence to the wall. Diggory Fargus looked at him
grimly. Lying in concealment close at hand when the soldiers rode away,
he had overheard the injunctions of Captain Culpeper.
“The Cap’n left particular orders,” said the mariner to the lady, “that
this ’ere son of a rum puncheon was to hold you and your mate, ma’am,
against his return, by force, if necessary. And as it goes agen his
principles to use violence o’ any sort, he’s asking of himself, d’ye
see, whether ye would take it amiss if he invited you to tarry.”
The woman looked at the landlord. None had had a fairer opportunity of
judging his character than she during her sojourn in that place. Her
eyes shone through her mask; the stern lines fell about her mouth; and
then she turned away from him with the same tremor of disgust as one
turns away from a venomous reptile. Even to her compassion there was a
limit.
“Come, my own,” she said. “It is folly in us to lose a precious moment.
I wonder what hath happened to the poor King. God be with him, poor
lad, this night!”
“He should make good his escape,” said Lord Farnham. “He hath a horse
and a full ten minutes start of his foes.”
Leaning on the arm of his wife he passed slowly out of the door, into
the night and his freedom. The landlord still leant against the wall:
not a word did he speak; not a finger did he lift to stay the departing
guests.
Diggory Fargus tarried behind an instant to speak a word in the
landlord’s ear.
“Mate,” said he, thrusting his one eye into the quivering face of the
landlord, “I said, if ye played me false I would twist your head off
your body with these two hands. But I shall leave it to others, d’ye
see. I shall kind o’ leave it to my deppities. They’ll make a cleaner
job of it than me. They’ll do it more formal and more lawyerlike.
Besides, I have hardly the time to do it now. But let me tell ye,
mate, as one man to another, that when next I am around this coast, I
shall make a call at this old grog shop, and if I find that them there
soldiers has not done their dooty by you, ye can lay to it as Diggory
Fargus is a christened man he’ll keep his word. A pleasant evenin’ to
you, mate.”
The sailor spat vehemently upon the kitchen floor, and lurched out into
the darkness in the wake of his companions.
[Illustration:
CHAPTER
XVII
_The Landlord_]
Gamaliel closed the door upon the last of his visitors. Gradually
their slow footsteps receded into the roar of the sea. He listened,
and fancied he could hear them long after he had ceased to do so.
Insensibly his mind lingered on their sound, for when they should die
away he knew that his life was at an end.
As one who has suffered the tortures and paroxysms of a disease may
lose his agonies as soon as it develops mortal symptoms, so the
landlord, possessed with the knowledge that his own life was the price
he must pay for his weakness, sat down in his chair by the fire with a
clear mind. There was no longer any need for him to torment himself. He
foresaw the issue as plainly as the man in the cart when he looks upon
the scaffold.
He had lost all. Events had been too great for his second-rate
character. They had called for a strong man--a man of courage, of
indomitable spirit and tenacity of purpose--to grapple with them.
For such a one there had been a fortune. The landlord, self-deceived
because all his life he had never been put to the test, had attempted
to bend them to his own purposes. But they had proved too great and
unwieldy; he had not had the physical strength to overcome them.
Instead they had overcome him.
The landlord did not give himself up to despair. He was too far gone
for that. He was bitterly afraid of death. A death by violence would
still have the power to revolt him; but the thing uppermost in his mind
was his humiliation. It was so fierce and overpowering, that it became
an anodyne to lull and allay all the passions of his soul. It took the
sting out of death itself. He had been tried and found wanting. At the
age of sixty the supreme moment of a laborious and fairly successful
life had come. He had failed; let him perish.
“Finis” was about to be written to his history. He had no longer to
fear that awful suspense which had the power to overthrow the firmest
intelligence. As plainly as he could hear the roar of the sea, he saw
his doom. He sat still and thought upon it, almost calmly. Right at the
very last he had emerged from the furnace, and had come out strong.
He would bare his neck, and they should do their worst. He would
welcome it. He had no desire to live now; he had ceased to be swayed
by his animal passions. All his life, when he could escape a moment
from his greed and his sensuality, he had been a philosopher. He had
warmed both hands at the fire of his own egotism. He had flattered
himself that he had known his own strength and his own weakness. He
knew nothing of the sort. Just as in one direction he had overestimated
his resolution, he was now to prove that he had underestimated it in
another.
A day ago he would probably have writhed on the ground in a fit had he
been confronted by a death by violence. By now, however, he had got
beyond all that. There were things a man occasionally had to submit to,
which made such a thing almost a luxury. He had spent that day upon
the rack. The sharp rending asunder of his body and his soul would
be a merciful release. His eyeballs would no longer start from their
sockets; his limbs would no longer crack; nor would his blood burst
through the walls of his arteries. His shuddering frame would be at
peace.
The clock struck twelve. The landlord clenched his hands as he sat in
his chair; a smile crept stealthily upon the dead white of his cheeks.
It was the last touch of irony that he, Gamaliel Hooker, should be
sitting there so calmly looking a death by violence full in the face.
To think that his old pampered flesh, cossetted and cushioned for sixty
winters, should accept it without a murmur! The wind is tempered to
the shorn lamb: Nature has her marvellous compensations; she takes the
grossness from the animal spirit, that it may be insensible to the
throes of death.
About one o’clock of the wintry morning the landlord rose from his
chair, and had recourse to paper, a pen, and ink. He solemnly made his
will. For the keeper of a sea tavern on a lonely coast, the home of
the pirate and the smuggler, he had done excellently well in trade.
He had added thrift to a natural aptitude. His money had not all been
come by honestly, as the world interpreted that word. But that did not
irk the landlord. All his life he had never pretended to a conscience.
To him it was the hallmark of a superficial mind. And now in his last
extremity he would not pretend to one. It was to be the great triumph
of his life, that in his last hour he should prove to be stronger than
he had ever judged himself to be. He would yield up his life calmly,
without a snuffle, a whine, or a prayer.
About two o’clock he had signed his name with controlled fingers to
this document. He sanded it carefully and put it by. He had hardly done
so, when he jumped up suddenly from his chair. An old stab returned
upon him; he felt a twinge of the old agony. After all, there was a
chance of life. Suppose the pursuing soldiers retook the King! They
would be then in a mood to overlook all, and they might permit him to
live! The landlord cursed himself for the thought. God! was he going to
be tortured again before he was allowed to perish? No, it was only the
last twinge of an expiring nerve. The pain passed almost in an instant.
He need not be afraid.
Towards three, the old man grew very cold. He had forgotten to
replenish the fire. It had gone out hours ago, leaving the ashes
grey. He was getting tired; the soldiers were a long time coming; he
would try to go to sleep. Soon a pleasant lassitude stole upon his
weariness. He had never been so exquisitely tired in his life before.
It had been a heavy day; he had taken a lot out of himself; he deserved
a rest. He fell asleep.
A little after four o’clock he awoke suddenly out of a dreamless
slumber, as one startled. He lifted up his ears and listened. Horses!
He rubbed his eyes in bewilderment. Why should he be sleeping there,
and why should these signs invade the middle of the night? Ah yes, to
be sure, he remembered! The soldiers were coming back.
His first thought was, had they caught the King? He banished it
instantly. He had got past all that before he went to sleep. He would
not go back, otherwise the last twenty-four hours had been lived in
vain. He listened calmly for their near approach, but he still kept
his chair by the side of the dead embers. There was no need for him
to rise to let them in, as he remembered that he had not considered
it necessary to secure the door before he went to sleep. What a
transcendent thing it was to have a heart utterly without bodily
fear! It was rather hard, though, that he should only be allowed to
experience that pleasure for so short a period in his long life.
However, it was very excellent even to have known it at all. He could
hardly be said to have lived in vain.
The landlord, still in his chair by the dead fire, watched the kitchen
door. He saw it open. He saw Captain Culpeper appear, stiff and cold
with riding, and very morose. His men, stiff and cold and morose too,
crowded in behind him. The landlord neither moved nor spoke; he seemed
wholly indifferent to their entrance.
“The King is escaped!” said Captain Culpeper, eyeing him savagely.
“I knew it,” said the landlord, a little wearily. He closed his eyes;
almost a smile came upon his white lips.
“Oh, you knew it!” said Captain Culpeper, with a grim satisfaction.
“You knew it, did you! And how did you know it, fool and poltroon as
you are?”
“Poltroon I am,” said the landlord, “a thousand times a poltroon; but I
am no fool. I knew it because I knew it.”
“Bah!” said the soldier, “I have not the patience to talk with you. But
I trust the man and the woman are still upstairs in their chamber.”
“They are not,” said the landlord; there was a note of triumph in his
voice. “A company of smugglers bore them away half an hour after your
departure.”
“And you allowed them to leave your inn, after what I had said to you?”
said Culpeper, striving to control the fury that was shaking him from
head to foot.
“I could not help myself,” said the landlord, indifferently.
“And you could not help the King’s going, I suppose,” said the soldier,
“even when he went past your very nose?”
“No, I could not help myself,” said the landlord again.
“And wherefore could you not?”
The soldier’s rage was giving place now to a self-contained harshness
which did not distress the landlord to observe.
“I do not know why I could not stay the King’s going,” said the
landlord.
“What do you mean?” said the soldier.
“When the King went,” said the landlord, “I was not the master of
myself; but, thank God, I am master of myself now.”
“You will soon cease to be,” said the soldier, regarding him with a
grim surprise.
“That is as maybe,” said the landlord.
The soldiers crowded about the landlord with sinister intention upon
their faces. Captain Culpeper briefly told two of them to procure a
rope.
“You will find plenty in the stable,” said the landlord.
Several of the soldiers chuckled.
“Do you know for what purpose we require it, good Master Innkeeper?”
said Culpeper, laughingly.
“The signboard will suit your purpose best,” said the landlord.
“You oblige us vastly,” said the soldier.
The landlord astonished them vastly too. They had not looked for this
demeanour in one who was about to undergo the penalty of death. They
had never encountered such an indifference in the face of it before.
However, when the two men returned bearing a stout piece of hemp,
an evidence was furnished of the price at which the landlord’s
newly-acquired fortitude had been purchased. When his bloodshot eyes
fell on the rope, a cord appeared to snap in the middle of his brain;
his head revolved slowly on his neck; and he pitched heavily on to the
kitchen floor.
They turned him over on his back, but all attempts to restore the
landlord to sensibility failed. After a while he appeared to grow dimly
conscious of his surroundings; but he was bereft of speech, and he had
not the power to move. It mattered not what remedies they had recourse
to, the horrible, convulsed white face still had the vacancy and the
inanimation of death without the repose of it.
“’Tis a pity we could not hang the old rogue more prettily,” said
Captain Culpeper, when all their exertions had failed of their effect.
“For if ever a man did merit a hanging, here he lies. He hath played a
double game all through. But what he could have hoped to gain by it,
for the life of me I cannot see. He must have been a sanguine fellow to
think that he could run with the hare, and hunt with the dogs. He must
have known that he went in danger of being torn to pieces. But why he
should first betray the King, and then promote his escape, passes me
completely. A queer old rogue, this landlord. Now then, lift him up,
lads, and set him in the place he himself did choose.”
They placed the noose around the landlord’s neck and bore him out into
the shrewd air of the morning. It was still as dark as pitch; never a
star looked out of the sky; mercifully the moon had hidden her face;
and thus the body of the landlord was unregarded, as it swung in the
wintry darkness from the signboard of the “Sea Rover.”
THE END.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.