THE LOCKED DOOR.
"When I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be
content."
--_As You Like It._
Before alighting from her horse, Mistress Hazlehurst waited to see what
her enemy should do. The enemy's first proceedings were similar to those
taken upon his arrival at Catworth Magna. That is to say, through the
expeditious offices of Captain Bottle, new horses were placed ready
before the inn, ere the party dismounted from the tired ones; dinner and
a room were bespoken; and all possible charges were forestalled by
advance payment. Anne imitated this whole arrangement precisely, causing
no little wonder on the part of the inn people, that she should give her
orders independently, though they were exactly like those of the three
men with whom she and her page were manifestly travelling. It was
mentally set down by the shrewd ones that here were man and wife, or
brother and sister, not on speaking terms, yet obliged to perform a
journey together.
Hal remained outside the inn with Anthony, till Bottle should ride back
to keep watch. Anne stood near him, not irresolute, but to observe his
actions. Refreshed with a stirrup-cup and some cakes, Bottle soon rode
off, with two led horses. Perceiving the object of this movement, Anne
dismissed the captain from her observation, that she might concentrate
it upon the supposed Sir Valentine. As her boy Francis was in no less
need of food and sleep than herself, she gave a coin to one of the
hostlers, with orders to walk her horses up and down before the inn till
she should come for them.
Hal counted on her fatigue to reinforce her proud determination that she
would not resort to the local authorities against him. Yet he would not
go to his chamber ere she went to hers. Deducing this from his
actions--for no speech passed between them while they tarried before the
inn--and being indeed well-nigh too exhausted to stand, she finally
called for a servant to show her to her room. Francis followed her, to
wait upon her at dinner and then to lie on a bench outside her door.
Hal watched her into the entrance-hall of the inn. At the foot of the
stairs leading to the upper floor, she stopped, handed a piece of money
to the attendant, and spoke a few words in a low tone. The fellow
glanced toward the inn porch in which Hal was standing, and nodded
obedience. Hal inferred that she was engaging to be notified instantly
in case of his departure. A moment later Hal beckoned Anthony to
follow, and went, under the guidance of the landlady herself, up to his
own room.
As he turned from the stair-head into the upper passage, he saw a door
close, which he divined to be that of his fair enemy. A moment later an
inn servant appeared with a bench, and placed it outside this door. On
reaching his own room, in the same passage, Hal noticed that this bench,
on which Francis was to rest, stood in view of his own door, and
also--by way of the stairs--of the entrance-hall below. He smiled at the
precautions taken by the foe.
Examining his room, he saw that it had the required window overlooking
the front inn yard and the road beyond. Immediately beneath this window
was the sloping roof of the inn porch. Having opened the casement, and
moved the bed's head near it, Hal turned to the dinner that a servant
was placing on a small trestle-table, for which there was ample free
space in the chamber. The English inns of those days were indeed
commodious, and those in the country towns were better than those in
London. Hosts took pride in their tapestry, furniture, bedding, plate,
and glasses. Some of the inns in the greater towns and roads had room
for three hundred guests with their horses and servants. Noblemen
travelled with great retinues, and carried furniture with them. It was
a golden age of inns,--though, to be sure, the servants were in many
cases in league with highway robbers, to whom they gave information of
the wealth, destinations, routes, and times of setting forth of
well-furnished guests. The inn at which Hal now refreshed himself, in
Oakham, was not of the large or celebrated ones. He had his own reasons
for resorting to small and obscure hostelries. Yet he found the dinner
good, the ale of the best, and, after that, the bed extremely
comfortable, even though he lay in his clothes, with his hand on his
sword-hilt.
He had flung himself down, immediately after dinner, not waiting for the
platters and cups to be taken away. Anthony, who had been as a
table-fellow sour and monosyllabic, but by no means abstemious, for all
his Puritanism, was as prompt as Hal to avail himself of the comfort of
the bed. His appreciation was soon evinced by a loud snoring, whose
sturdy nasality seemed of a piece with his canting, rebuking manner of
speech when he allowed himself to be lured into conversation. There was
in his snore a rhythmic wrestling and protesting, as of Jacob with the
angel, or a preacher against Satan, that befitted well his righteous
non-conformity. From this thought--for which he wondered that he could
find place when his situation provided so much other matter for
meditation--Hal's mind lapsed into the incoherent visions of slumber,
and soon deep sleep was upon him.
Hal had arranged that Kit Bottle should return to the inn and call him,
after four hours, in the event of no appearance of the pursuit. When Hal
awoke with a start, therefore, and yet heard no such hallooing as
Anthony had given at Catworth, he supposed that Kit must have summoned
him by a less alarming cry. His head shot out of the window, but he
beheld no Kit. Turning to Anthony, he saw that the Puritan had just
opened his eyes.
"Didst hear anything?" queried Hal.
"Not sith I awoke," was the answer. "Yet meseems in my sleep there was a
loud grating sound and a terrific crash."
"In our dreams we multiply the sounds that touch our ears," said Hal.
"It must have been a sound of omen, to have waked us both. So let us
think of a small grating sound--"
At that instant his eyes alighted on the door. He would have sworn a key
had been in that door, though he had not locked it before sleeping. He
had noticed the key for its great size and rustiness. But no key was
there now, at least on the inside. Hal strode from the bed, and tried
the door. It was locked.
"How now?" quoth he. "Some one has robbed us of our key, and used it on
the wrong side of the door!"
"I warrant it should be no far seeking to find that some one," growled
Anthony, rising to his feet.
"Ay," said Hal, "'tis just the shallow, childish stop-nobody thing a
woman would do, and think she hath played a fine trick! Come,
Anthony,"--Hal spoke the Puritan's name not superciliously now, for he
was beginning to like a fellow who could toil forward so uncomplainingly
through fatigue and danger, yet make such full use of comforts when they
fell to him,--"I see Captain Bottle riding hither, at a walk. That means
'tis four o'clock, though Master Barnet hath not yet shown his face. We
must be taking horse again."
And he dropped out of the window to the porch roof, let himself down a
corner-post, and stood in the inn yard. Anne's horses were still there.
As soon as Anthony was beside him, Hal stepped into the
entrance-passage. At the stair-foot stood Mistress Hazlehurst, her back
to the door, giving some swift and excited commands to her page,
Francis, who was ready to ride.
She turned to see who had entered the inn. On perceiving it was Hal, and
that his face wore an involuntary quizzical smile, she caught her
breath, and became the very picture of defeat and self-discovered
foolishness.
"Have you seen aught of a key I lost?" said Hal, ere he thought. "I need
it to unlock my door and get out of my room, as I am in some haste!"
She turned deep crimson at the jest; her eyes shot a glance of fire, her
lips closed tight; and, without a word, she glided past him, and out to
her horses. He saw in her look a new sense of the insufficiency of easy
and obvious means, and a resolution to rise to the needs of her purpose.
"Her eyes are opened," mused Hal, following her and Francis to the yard.
"Her next step is like to be more considerable!"
Meeting Kit and the horses just within the inn yard gate, Hal and
Anthony mounted. Anne and her page were prompt to follow their example.
With courtesy, Hal held back his horses for her to precede him out to
the road. A minute afterward the five riders, so strangely brought into
a single group, were pushing northward in the cold, waning afternoon.
She had slept some, and was the better for the food she had taken. Yet
this riding was manifestly a wearier business than it could have been at
the time of her setting out. It was a chilly business, too, for March
had begun to turn out very January-like, and was steadily becoming more
so. The look of dogged endurance that mingled on her face with the new
resolution there, continually touched Hal's tender and pitying side. His
countenance as continually showed his feelings, and she perceived them
with deep and ill-concealed resentment.
But she at last attained a degree of stolid iciness at which she
remained. It imposed upon Hal, riding at her side, a silence that became
the harder to break as it became the less bearable. And the further she
tried to put herself out of his pity, the greater his pity grew, for the
effort she was required to make. The more his admiration increased, too;
and if pity is ever akin to love, it is certainly so when united to
admiration. Her determination had not the mannish mien, nor her dislike
the acrid, ill-bred aspect that would have repelled; they were of the
womanly and high-born character that made them rather pique and allure.
Partly to provoke her feelings to some change of phase, partly to elicit
relief from the impassiveness in which she had sought refuge, partly for
the cruel pleasure sometimes inexplicably found in torturing the tender
and beautiful,--a pleasure followed by penitence as keen,--he made two
or three delicate jests about the locked door; these were received with
momentary glints of rage from her dark eyes, succeeded by coldness more
freezing than before.
The silence created--and diffused--by her enveloped the whole party,
making the ride even more bleak than it was already from the wintry day
and the loneliness of the road. It was bad weather for travelling, less
by reason of the present cold than of the signs of impending storm.
"There is snow in the air," growled Anthony Underhill to himself, as if
he smelled it. Of the country through which they passed, the most was
open, only the pasture-land and the grounds pertaining immediately to
gentlemen's houses being fenced. Enclosures were a new thing in those
days, defended by the raisers of sheep and cattle, bewailed by the
farmers who tilled the soil. Where the road did not run between woods or
over wild moors, it gave views of far-off sheep-cotes, of mills, and
here and there of distant castle-towers, or the gables of some squire's
rambling manor-house; or it passed through straggling villages, each
with a central green having a may-pole and an open pool.
But most human life was indoors upon this evening of belated winter;
still and brown was the landscape. Once, soon after they had passed from
Rutlandshire into Leicestershire, a burst of yokelish laughter struck
their ears from among some trees, like a sudden ray of light and warmth
in a cold, dead world. It came from some yeomen's sons who were
destroying the eggs of birds of prey. The population of Melton Mowbray
was housed and at supper, as they rode through that town in the early
dusk without stop.
On into Nottinghamshire they went; and at last, checked alike by
darkness and by weariness, they came to a halt before a little, low,
wobbly-looking wood-and-plaster inn at the junction of the Nottingham
road with the cross-road to Newark.