A RED WAISTCOAT
Cheerful lights shining from the open doorway and the red-curtained
windows of the inn, illumined the road immediately before it; and if
these and the change in all the surroundings did not at once dispel the
loneliness at Henrietta’s heart, at least they drove the tears from her
eyes and the blushes from her cheeks. The cold moonlight, the
unchanging face of nature, had sobered and frightened her; the warmth
of fire and candle, the sound of voices, and the low, homely front of
the house, with its two projecting gables, reassured her. The forlorn
child who had flung herself into her lover’s arms not forty seconds
before was not to be recognised in the girl who alighted slowly and
with gay self-possession, took in the scene at a glance, and won the
hearts of ostler and stableboy by her ease and her fresh young beauty.
She was bare-headed, and her high-dressed hair, a little disordered by
the journey, gleamed in the lanthorn-light. Her eyes were like stars.
The landlord of the inn—known for twenty miles round as “Long Tom
Gilson”—saw at a glance that the missus’s tongue would run on her. He
wished that he might not be credited with his hundred-and-thirty-first
conquest!
The thought, however, did not stand between him and his duty. “Sharp,
Sam,” he cried briskly. “Fire in Mr. Rogers’s room.” Then to his
guests: “Late? No, sir, not at all. This way, ma’am. All will be ready
in a twinkling.”
But Henrietta stood smiling.
“Thank you,” she answered pleasantly, her clear young voice slightly
raised. “But I wished to be placed in the landlady’s charge. Is she
here?”
Gilson turned toward the doorway, which his wife’s portly form fitted
pretty tightly.
“Here, missus,” he cried, “the young lady wants you.”
But Mrs. Gilson was a woman who was not wont to be hurried and before
she reached the side of the carriage Stewart interposed; more roughly
and more hurriedly than seemed discreet in the circumstances.
“Let us go in, and settle that afterwards,” he said.
“No.”
“Yes,” he retorted. And he grasped the girl’s arm tightly. His voice
was low, but insistent. “Let us go in.”
But the girl only vouchsafed him a look, half wondering, half
indignant. She turned to the landlady.
“I am tired, and need no supper,” she said. “Will you take me into a
room, if you please, where I can rest at once, as we go on early
to-morrow.”
“Certainly,” the landlady answered. She was a burly, red-faced,
heavy-browed woman. “But you have come some way, ma’am. Will you not
take supper with the gentleman?”
“No.”
He interposed.
“At least let us go in!” he repeated pettishly. And there was an
agitation in his tone and manner not easy to explain, except on the
supposition that in some way she had thwarted him. “We do not want to
spend the night on the road, I suppose?”
She did not reply. But none the less, as she followed Mrs. Gilson to
the door, was she wondering what ailed him. She was unsuspicious by
nature, and she would not entertain the thought that he wished her to
act otherwise than she was acting. What was it then? Save for a burly
man in a red waistcoat who stood in a lighted doorway farther along the
front of the inn, and seemed to be watching their movements with lazy
interest, there were only the people of the inn present. And the
red-waistcoated man could hardly be in pursuit of them, for, for
certain, he was a stranger. Then what was it?
She might have turned and asked her lover; but she was offended and she
would not stoop. And before she thought better of it—or worse—she had
crossed the threshold. A warmer air, an odour of spices and lemons and
old rum, met her. On the left of the low-browed passage a half-open
door offered a glimpse of shining glass and ruddy firelight; there was
Mrs. Gilson’s snuggery, sometimes called the coach office. On the right
a room with a long table spoke of coaching meals and a groaning board.
From beyond these, from the penetralia of kitchen and pantry, came
faint indications of plenty and the spit.
A chambermaid was waiting at the foot of the narrow staircase to go
before them with lights; but the landlady took the candles herself, and
dismissed the woman with a single turn of the eye. A habit of obedience
to Mrs. Gilson was the one habit of the inn, the one common ground on
which all, from Tom Gilson to the smallest strapper in the stable, came
together.
The landlady went ponderously up before her guest and opened the door
of a dimity-hung chamber. It was small and simple, but of the cleanest.
Hid in it were rosemary and lavender; and the leafless branches of a
rose-tree whipped the diamond panes of the low, broad window. Mrs.
Gilson lighted the two wax candles—“waxes” in those days formed part of
every bill but the bagman’s. Then she turned and looked at the girl
with deliberate disapproval.
“You will take nothing, ma’am, to eat?” she said.
“No, thank you,” Henrietta answered. And then, resenting the woman’s
look, “I may as well tell you,” she continued, holding her head high,
“that we have eloped, and are going to be married to-morrow. That is
why I wished to be put in your charge.”
The landlady, with her great face frowning, continued to look at the
girl, and for a moment did not answer.
At length, “You’ve run away,” she said, “from your friends?”
Henrietta nodded loftily.
“From a distance, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Mrs. Gilson rejoined, her face continuing to express growing
disapproval, “there’s a stock of fools near and far. And if I did my
duty, young lady, there’d be one who would likely be thankful all her
life.” She took the snuffers and slowly and carefully snuffed the two
candles. “If I did my duty, I’d lock you up and keep you safe till your
friends came for you.”
“You are insolent,” the girl cried, flaming up.
“That depends,” Mrs. Gilson retorted, with the utmost coolness. “Fine
feathers make fine birds. You may be my lady, or my lady’s maid. Men
are such fools—all’s of the best that’s red and white. But I’m not so
easy.”
Henrietta raised her chin a little higher.
“Be good enough to leave the room!” she said.
But the stout woman held her ground.
“Not before I’ve said what I have to say,” she answered. “It is one
thing, and one thing only, hinders me doing what I ought to do, and
what if you were my girl I’d wish another to do. And that is—your
friends may not want you back. And then, to be married tomorrow is like
enough the best you can do for yourself! And the sooner the better!”
Henrietta’s face turned scarlet, and she stamped on the floor.
“You are a wicked, insolent woman!” she said. “You do not know your
place, nor mine. How dare you say such things to me? How dare you? Did
you hear me bid you leave the room?”
“Hoity-toity!”
“Yes, at once!”
“Very good,” Mrs. Gilson replied ponderously—“very good! But you may
find worse friends than me. And maybe one of them is downstairs now.”
“You hateful woman!” the girl cried; and had a glimpse of the
landlady’s red, frowning face as the woman turned for a last look in
the doorway. Then the door closed, and she was left alone—alone with
her thoughts.
Her face burned, her neck tingled. She was very, very angry, and a
little frightened. This was a scene in her elopement which anticipation
had not pictured. It humiliated her—and scared her. To-morrow, no
doubt, all would be well; all would be cheerfulness, tenderness,
sunshine; all would be on the right basis. But in the meantime the
sense of forlornness which had attacked her in the chaise returned on
her as her anger cooled, and with renewed strength. Her world, the
world of her whole life up to daybreak of this day, was gone forever.
In its place she had only this bare room with its small-paned casement
and its dimity hangings and its clean scent. Of course _he_ was below,
and he was the world to her, and would make up a hundredfold what she
had resigned for him. But he was below, he was absent; and meantime her
ear and her heart ached for a tender word, a kind voice, a look of
love. At least, she thought, he might have come under her window, and
whistled the air that had been the dear signal for their meetings. Or
he might have stood a while and chatted with her, and shown her that he
was not offended. The severest prude, even that dreadful woman who had
insulted her, could not object to that!
But he did not come. Of course he was supping—what things men were! And
then, out of sheer loneliness, her eyes filled, and her thoughts of him
grew tender and more humble. She dwelt on him no longer as her
conquest, her admirer, the prize of her bow and spear, subject to her
lightest whim and her most foolish caprice; but as her all, the one to
whom she must cling and on whom she must depend. She thought of him as
for a brief while she had thought of him in the chaise. And she
wondered with a chill of fear if she would be left after marriage as
she was left now. She had heard of such things, but in the pride of her
beauty, and his subjection, she had not thought that they could happen
to her. Now—— But instead of dwelling on a possibility which frightened
her, she vowed to be very good to him—good and tender and loyal, and a
true wife. They were resolutions that a trifling temptation, an hour’s
neglect or a cross word, might have overcome. But they were honest,
they were sincere, they were made in the soberest moment that her young
life had ever known; and they marked a step in development, a point in
that progress from girlhood to womanhood which so few hours might see
complete.
Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson had returned to her snuggery, wearing a face
that, had the lemons and other comforts about her included cream, must
have turned it sour. That snuggery, it may be, still exists in the
older part of the Low Wood Inn. In that event it should have a value.
For to it Mr. Samuel Rogers, the rich London banker, would sometimes
condescend from his apartments in the south gable; and with him Mr.
Kirkpatrick Sharp, a particular gentleman who sniffed a little at the
rum; or Sir James Mackintosh, who, rumour had it, enjoyed some
reputation in London as a writer. At times, too, Mr. Southey, Poet
Laureate elsewhere, but here Squire of Greta Hall, would stop on his
way to visit his neighbour at Storrs—no such shorthorns in the world as
Mr. Bolton’s at Storrs; and not seldom he brought with him a London
gentleman, Mr. Brougham, whose vanity in opposing the Lowther interest
at the late election had almost petrified Mrs. Gilson. Mr. Brougham
called himself a Whig, but Mrs. Gilson held him little better than a
Radical—a kind of cattle seldom seen in those days outside the dock of
an assize court. Or sometimes the visitor was that queer,
half-moithered Mr. Wordsworth at Rydal; or Mr. Wilson of Elleray with
his great voice and his homespun jacket. He had a sort of name too; but
if he did anything better than he fished, the head ostler was a
Dutchman!
The visits of these great people, however—not that Mrs. Gilson blenched
before them, she blenched before nobody short of Lord Lonsdale—had
place in the summer. To-night the landlady’s sanctum, instead of its
complement of favourite guests gathered to stare at Mr. Southey’s last
order for “Horses on!” boasted but a single tenant. Even he sat where
the landlady did not at once see him; and it was not until she had cast
a log on the dogs with a violence which betrayed her feelings that he
announced his presence by a cough.
“There’s the sign of a good house,” he said with approval. “Never
unprepared!—never unprepared! Come late, come early—coach, chaise, or
gig—it is all one to a good house.”
“Umph!”
“It is a pleasure to sit by”—he waved his pipe with unction—“and to see
a thing done properly!”
“Ay, it’s a pleasure to many to sit by,” the landlady answered with
withering sarcasm. “It’s an easy way of making a living—especially if
you are waiting for what doesn’t come. Put a red waistcoat on old Sam
the postboy, and he’d sit by and see as well as another!”
The man in the red waistcoat chuckled.
“I’m glad they don’t take you into council at Bow Street, ma’am!” he
said.
“They might do worse.”
“They might do better,” he rejoined. “They might take you into the
force! I warrant”—with a look of respectful admiration—“if they did
there’s little would escape you. Now that young lady?” He indicated the
upper regions with his pipe. “Postboys say she came from Lancaster. But
from where before that?”
“Wherever she’s from, she did not tell me!” Mrs. Gilson snapped.
“Ah!”
“And what is more, if she had, I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Oh, come, come, ma’am!” Mr. Bishop was mildly shocked. “Oh, come,
ma’am! That is not like you. Think of the King and his royal
prerogative!”
“Fiddlesticks!”
Mr. Bishop looked quite staggered.
“You don’t mean it,” he said—“you don’t indeed. You would not have the
Radicals and Jacobins ramping over the country, shooting honest men in
their shops and burning and ravaging, and—and generally playing the
devil?”
“I suppose you think it is you that stops them?”
“No, ma’am, no,” with a modest smile. “I don’t stop them. I leave that
to the yeomanry—old England’s bulwark and their country’s pride! But
when the yeomanry ’ve done their part, I take them, and the law passes
upon them. And when they have been hung or transported and an example
made, then you sleep comfortably in your beds. That is what I do. And I
think I may say that next to Mr. Nadin of Manchester, who is the
greatest man in our line out of London, I have done as much in that way
as another.”
Mrs. Gilson sniffed contemptuously.
“Well,” she said, “if you have never done more than you’ve done since
you’ve been here, it’s a wonder the roof’s on! Though what you expected
to do, except keep a whole skin, passes me! There’s the _Chronicle_ in
today, and such talks of riots at Glasgow and Paisley, and such
meetings here and alarms there, it is a wonder to me”—with
sarcasm—“they can do without you! To judge by what I hear, Lancashire
way is just a kettle of troubles and boiling over, and bread that price
everybody is wanting to take the old King’s crown off his head.”
“And his head off his body, ma’am!” Mr. Bishop added solemnly.
“So that it’s little good you and your yeomanry seem to have done at
Manchester, except get yourselves abused!”
“Ma’am, the King’s crown is on his head,” Mr. Bishop retorted, “and his
head is on his body!”
“Well? Not that his head is much good to him, poor mad gentleman!”
“And King Louis, ma’am, years ago—what of him? The King of France,
ma’am? Crown gone, head gone—all gone! And why? Because there was not a
good blow struck in time, ma’am! Because, poor, foolish foreigner, he
had no yeomanry and no Bow Street, ma’am! But the Government, the
British Government, is wiser. They are brave men—brave noblemen, I
should say,” Mr. Bishop amended with respect,—“but with treason and
misprision of treason stalking the land, with the lower orders, that
should behave themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters,
turned to ramping, roaring Jacobins seeking whom they may devour, and
whose machine they may break, my lords would not sleep in their
beds—no, not they, brave men as they are—if it were not for the
yeomanry and the runners.” He had to pause for breath.
Mrs. Gilson coughed dryly.
“Leather’s a fine thing,” she said, “if you believe the cobbler.”
“Well,” Mr. Bishop answered, nodding his head confidently, “it’s so far
true you’d do ill without it.”
But Mrs. Gilson was equal to the situation.
“Ay, underfoot,” she said. “But everything in its place. My man, he be
mad upon tod-hunting; but I never knew him go to Manchester ’Change to
seek one.”
“No?” Mr. Bishop held his pipe at arm’s length, and smiled at it
mysteriously. “Yet I’ve seen one there,” he continued, “or in such
another place.”
“Where?”
“Common Garden, London.”
“It was in a box, then.”
“It was, ma’am,” Mr. Bishop replied, with smiling emphasis. “It was in
a box—‘safe bind, safe find,’ ma’am. That’s the motto of my line, and
that was it precisely! More by token it’s not outside the bounds of
possibility you may see”—he glanced towards the door as he knocked his
pipe against his top-boot—“one of my tods in a box before morning.”
Mrs. Gilson shot out her underlip and looked at him darkly. She never
stooped to express surprise; but she was surprised. There was no
mistaking the ring of triumph in the runner’s tone; yet of all the
unlikely things within the landlady’s range none seemed more unlikely
than that he should flush his game there. She had asked herself more
than once why he was there; and why no coach stopped, no chaise changed
horses, no rider passed or bagman halted, without running the gauntlet
of his eye. For in that country of lake and mountain were neither riots
nor meetings; and though Lancashire lay near, the echoes of strife
sounded but weakly and fitfully across Cartmel Sands. Mills might be
burning in Cheadle and Preston, men might be drilling in Bolland and
Whitewell, sedition might be preaching in Manchester, all England might
be in a flame with dear bread and no work, Corbett’s Twopenny Register
and Orator Hunt’s declamations—but neither the glare nor the noise had
much effect on Windermere. Mr. Bishop’s presence there seemed
superfluous therefore; seemed—— But before she could come to the end of
her logic, her staid waiting-maid appeared, demanding four pennyworth
of old Geneva for the gentleman in Mr. Rogers’s room; and when she was
serving, Mrs. Gilson took refuge in incredulity.
“A man must talk if he can’t do,” she said—“if he’s to live.”
Mr. Bishop smiled, and patted his buckskin breeches with confidence.
“You’ll believe ma’am,” he said, “when you see him walk into the coach
with the handcuffs on his wrists.”
“Ay, I shall!”
The innuendo in the landlady’s tone was so plain that her husband, who
had entered while she was rinsing the noggin in which she had measured
the gin, chuckled audibly. She turned an awful stare on him, and he
collapsed. The Bow Street runner was less amenable to discipline.
“You sent the lad, Tom?” he asked.
The landlord nodded, with an apprehensive eye on his wife.
“He should be back”—Mr. Bishop consulted a huge silver watch—“by
eleven.”
“Ay, sure.”
“Where has he gone?” Mrs. Gilson asked, with an ominous face.
She seldom interfered in stable matters; but if she chose, it was
understood that no department was outside her survey.
“Only to Kendal with a message for me,” Bishop answered.
“At this time of the night?”
“Ma’am”—Mr. Bishop rose and tapped his red waistcoat with meaning,
almost with dignity—“the King has need of him. The King—God bless and
restore him to health—will pay, and handsomely. For the why and the
wherefore he has gone, his majesty’s gracious prerogative is to say
nothing”—with a smile. “That is the rule in Bow Street, and for this
time we’ll make it the rule under Bow Fell, if you please. Moreover,
what he took I wrote, ma’am, and as he cannot read and I sent it to one
who will give it to another, his majesty will enjoy his prerogative as
he should!”
There was a spark in Mrs. Gilson’s eye. Fortunately the runner saw it,
and before she could retort he slipped out, leaving the storm to break
about her husband’s head. Some who had known Mr. Gilson in old days
wondered how he bore his life, and why he did not hang himself—Mrs.
Gilson’s tongue was so famous. And more said he had reason to hang
himself. Only a few, and they the wisest, noted that he who had once
been Long Tom Gilson grew fat and rosy; and these quoted a proverb
about the wind and the shorn lamb. One—it was Bishop himself, but he
had known them no more than three weeks—said nothing when the question
was raised, but tapped his nose and winked, and looked at Long Tom as
if he did not pity him overmuch.