Chapter II: Part 2

“And even if I do, sirrah?” asked Gamaliel, taking up his visitor’s question, after scrutinising him from head to heel.

“Well, master, if you do,” said the fellow, readily, “you would be acting a charity by giving a poor man a chance to serve you.”

“I do not doubt it,” said the landlord. “But if your looks be a true credential, I may live to rue the day. Upon my life, I never saw a countenance I like so little. If my eyes do not deceive me, I take ye to be a rogue of the first magnitude; a villain that I should fear to turn my back upon.”

The fellow laughed. Perchance it was well he did so. For in his laugh there was something frank and human. His lowering face grew vastly more engaging; and the landlord set the candour of it to his favour.

“Ah! master,” he said, “you are very hard upon a poor wight who knows not where to turn for a meal in these troublous times. I pray you, have a little pity for one who hath been accustomed to fill his belly, and to sleep in comfort and security.”

“In a bridewell, I do not doubt,” said the grim Gamaliel.

“Nay, master, there you wrong me,” said the vagrant. “Few have followed a more reputable course than I.”

The landlord looked at him piercingly. After all, his mind might be a little better than his appearance. His speech was hardly so rustic as one would expect.

“What hath been your station in life?” asked Gamaliel. “And what hath brought you to this pass?”

“It is but a few weeks since I was serving-man to my Lord Wilmot,” said the other, hesitatingly.

“Why did you quit his service?” the landlord demanded.

“’Twas a stroke of evil fortune, master. My lord was too good a friend to poor King Charles Stuart. He is now fleeing o’er hill and dale for his life, with devil a serving-man to attend him.”

The landlord listened greedily. In a flash a very bright idea illuminated his mind.

“Have you ever seen this Charles Stuart?” he demanded, almost breathlessly.

“Have I!” laughed Lord Wilmot’s servitor. “Why, master, I am more familiar with King Charles than I am with my own mother. He and my lord were hand in glove together. Many’s the time I have filled the King’s cup, and listened to his voice. There never was so jovial and kind a gentleman. Why, master, he hath even spoken to me by my name.”

The landlord could hardly conceal his great excitement.

“Then, of course, sirrah,” said he, “you would recognise this Charles Stuart at once if you saw him?”

“Why, master,” said the fellow, “I know him as well as I know the nose on my face.”

That was enough for the landlord. He engaged him at once in the dual capacity of drawer and ostler. And so excited was the good Gamaliel, that he forgot or overrode the accumulated instincts of a lifetime. He did not even attempt to beat him down a farthing in the matter of wages. For was it not a truly providential thing, that on that of all nights, in that of all seasons, a man should walk into his kitchen who would be able so readily to resolve his difficulties? He might have searched the breadth of Dorset, and yet have not discovered a person capable of giving an opinion on the identity of Charles Stuart. Fortune was on his side indeed.

No sooner had the details of his employment been agreed upon, and this somewhat uncouth-looking serving-man had passed into the hands of a new master, than the landlord in a moment of unwonted generosity bade his son fetch the fellow half a pint of small ale.

“Now sit ye here, my lad,” said Gamaliel, “and let me hear about this Charles Stuart. But I think we might get on better if first I had your name.”

“My name is William Jackson,” said the serving-man, “but they call me Will for short.”

“Will Jackson, is it?” said the landlord. “Humph! I think as little of the name as I do of the bearer. But for the present we will let that pass. Now tell me of this Charles Stuart. What kind of a person might you call him?”

“Oh, master, a grand man indeed!” said Will Jackson, with a fine air of enthusiasm. “A rare noble gentleman.”

“Humph!” said Gamaliel, “I have my doubts about it--the Popish dog! But what doth he look like?”

“A wonderful handsome fellow, master,” the earnest William said. “Every woman that he looks upon just languishes for love of him, they say.”

“Can you recall his features at all?” the landlord asked. “Is he a black man or a light man? A tall man or a small man? Come, trim your memory.”

“Well, do you know, master,” said Will Jackson, with a sly laugh,--“do you know, master, they do say that his gracious Majesty is most remarkable like me. I’ve heard say that we’re as like as two peas, master, and that we might be brothers, as it were.”

“Confound the rogue!” cried the landlord, laughing, in spite of himself, at the fellow’s impudence. “A pretty sort of likeness you’d be, I reckon, to discover a king by! I suppose, you ragged, dirty scoundrel, that some wench hath caressed your self-esteem with this fair parallel to coax an extra groat or two. A mighty fine king you’d make, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, master, if you please, more than one wench hath told me so,” said Will Jackson.

His master shook his fist at him, and threatened to cuff his ear. But the fellow in his own mind seemed so certain that he bore a striking resemblance to the King, that he appeared quite unable to divine the source of Gamaliel’s mirth. For the landlord fell to laughing until he nearly wept over the perplexed gravity of his drawer. Whatever the intolerable impudence of the assumption, Will Jackson certainly appeared not to regard it in the light of a jest. To him it seemed rather a circumstance from which he extracted a highly legitimate pride.

Even as the landlord talked with his servitor he made up his mind that he would lose no time in making the utmost possible use of Will Jackson’s special knowledge. He must see the young man with the incurable disease at once. But how could it be contrived? That matter was not so easy. It seemed hopeless to gain access to a domain guarded by so fair a Cerberus. After much hard thinking, Master Gamaliel had recourse to a stratagem--an extreme one, it is true, but highly necessary in this present pass.

Rising from his comfortable posture by the fire with a reluctance that made the act heroic, the landlord went forth to the stable, and bade Will Jackson follow him. He procured a ladder there. He had it borne without, and, under cover of the darkness, reared it with caution against the sill of the window of his guests. Drawn shutters guarded the window; but, as Gamaliel was well aware, they lacked some two inches of the top of the casement. A thread of candle-light shone through the chink. The work of a spy was therefore not likely to be difficult.

Ordering Will Jackson to hold his peace and also at the same time to hold the ladder, the eager old landlord, infirm as he was, first climbed to the top himself to discover how the land lay. No night-thief could have been more astutely skilful. It is true he scaled the ladder in a gingerly manner, but never a sound did he make. Planting his feet firmly on the highest rung but one, he cocked his cunning eyes over the top of the shutter, and was rewarded by a clear view of the chamber, and the unhappy persons there immured.

It was a piece of good fortune that the bed was facing the window. The landlord was the better able to regard its occupant. He was half prepared to discover that the young man was the victim of no malady whatsoever. He would not be surprised to find him quite hale and hearty. Nay, so little faith had he in this young man’s condition, that should he prove to have left the chamber secretly already, and gone away in stealth, he was not likely to be astounded. It so befell, however, that the landlord had no grounds for his suspicions. For there confronting him the sufferer lay. By the mellow light of the candles he saw him prone in the bed, as ghastly as death. He was wide awake, but lay with glazed eyes and a face convulsed with agony. The woman was binding a cloth steeped in water about his forehead.

In spite of the night’s bitterness, the landlord had so intense an interest in that which was passing before his eyes, that he betrayed no desire to leave his perch for the present. Looking down upon these unconscious persons from his high situation, he felt fairly secure from discovery. And was it not exhilarating to see without being seen! He must contrive to hear too. A chance phrase might reveal their identity.

Thus, notwithstanding that poor Will Jackson was shivering in the cold below, the landlord took his jackknife from his pocket and began to whittle away a piece of the wooden window frame. Already rotten with decay, it yielded readily to the silent deftness that was brought to bear upon it.

There was soon a hole big enough for Gamaliel’s ear. At once he could detect the gasps and low groans of the man in the bed. And he heard the woman say, in her soft low tones that thrilled to the heart like music:

“We can delay no longer, mine own; it must be done. Canst thou not trust me?”

The man clung to her outstretched hand, and drew his head away from her, like a child that is shy, farther back into the pillows. His pale lips were seen to move, but any words they framed the landlord could not hear. Thereafter for a time he lay with closed eyes, pallid and helpless, whilst the woman knelt down by his side and buried her beautiful head in the coverlet of the bed.

Presently she rose as one quickened by a sudden resolution. Tears she had not, but her eyes were filled with an anguish deeper even than the man’s. She crossed the room to where a broad settle stood with a tumbled heap of clothing upon it. The landlord observed, with a desperate dismay, that two cocked pistols lay there, whilst beside them was a case of embroidered leather. The lady opened this, and drew therefrom a dagger with a delicate point.

Concealing this in her hand, perchance that the man might not see it, she approached the bed again. The landlord felt his limbs totter and begin to fail him, whilst his straining eyes seemed inclined to start from his head. What, in the name of the fiend, was the woman about to do?

The man in the bed turned his eyes up to her; they had the look of a wounded animal.

“Can it not stay?” he said, and his hoarse tone penetrated to the listener’s ears. “It can make no difference now; the game is played.”

A sudden rush of tears appeared in the eyes of the woman; but the masterful quivering of her lips said clearly that she refused to admit them to be there.

“Another day of this,” she said, “and all is over. Our only chance is to take it out before another hour goes by.”

“Ay, and if you cut it out,” the sufferer gasped, “I am done with if ever man was.”

“Nay, child; I will not have you say that,” she said, caressing his face with her unoccupied hand. The sweet imperious sorrow of her tone touched even the listener at the window, who, after all, was not a man of stone.

Again the sufferer turned his face up to the woman and regarded her with the same dumb, dog-like look. She averted her gaze suddenly, as though she had not the fortitude to look at him.

“Canst thou not trust me?” she said again. “I will be, oh! so gentle. And we dare not have a surgeon--dare we, child? Indeed, we dare not tarry. Thou art in a fever even now, and every hour it rises. It must be done now, mine own, or thou wilt not see to-morrow.”

She spoke so wistfully that she might be beseeching her obdurate lord to gratify some feminine whim. He continued to regard her sickly and faintly, till at last a wan laugh crept upon his lips. It was the herald to the last desperate flicker of his courage--the courage that enables a man to look the mob in the eyes as he lays his neck on the block deliberately, delicately, and proudly. A fuller tone came into his hoarse, querulous voice. There was no longer complaint and petulance. The pettiness had gone out of it; it was almost a companion for the woman’s own.

“As you will,” he said, and he came as near to achieving a careless laugh as a man in his extreme condition ever could. “In with the knife, then, butcher. Thou art aching to carve me up, I can see. Well, well; it were better that you had your way, for I suppose you’ll give me no peace till you’ve done it. But plague take you! You’re tenacious devils, you women. Your damnable iteration would wear away stone. You know the place, and it’s embedded in the thick of my back, I think. Now, mind you cut deep enough. Oh, but I say, good Mistress Surgeon, prithee, where be thy basin?”

By the time the victim had mentioned these among other details of the torture he was about to undergo, the eavesdropper on the ladder had seen and heard rather more than enough for his personal comfort. Therefore, he quitted his station on the top rung but one, and descended to the ground as speedily as he could, lest he should involuntarily become the horrified witness of the knife at its work. When he came down to Will Jackson, he was shaking as one with the ague.

“I shall not want ye to go up to-night, my lad,” he stuttered; “to-morrow will do. Now, take away the ladder. You careless varlet, did I not tell you to make no sound?”

The clumsy fellow had had the misfortune to hit the top of the ladder against the nose of “The Sea Rover,” scowling in crude colours from the signboard of the inn. He appeared, not inappropriately it must be confessed, the most ill-favoured pirate that ever twirled a sword.

CHAPTER
V

_Shows the inconveniences
that may sometimes attend
an active mind_]

The landlord went indoors to his accustomed fireside chair. He was chilled to the blood; every infirmity that lurked in the gross bulk of him was up in arms against his late impudence; and worse, his nerves seemed all tattered and torn in his brain. He had been privileged to see and hear a little too much. Ha! they were already at it, curse them! The moans of the poor wretch upstairs were penetrating to his ears. Or were they the moans of the sea, sounds he had heard every night these forty years? Now and then he thought he heard a muffled, desperate cry. After all, it might be only the wild fowl on the rocks. How he wished he could rid his imagination of the scene that was being enacted. Would that he had not struggled up the ladder at all! Lord! were they never going to have done? It was enough to make a man revolt against his clay.

At this acute moment, however, Cicely appeared with her master’s nightly potation. It soothed his qualms somewhat. Pah! he had got the nerves of a girl. It was merely a little blood-letting; quite an everyday matter.

Curse the fellow, there were his cries again! What must it be like to have a bullet dug, inch by inch, by a dagger out of one’s own back! Ugh! what a morbid old fool he was; why must he forever keep thinking of it, and receiving the steel in his own pampered flesh? Might it not be there in earnest if he ever went up a ladder again!

After all, however, when he came to think of the thing in its true relation, he was by no means sorry he had been there. He had acquired knowledge of some value. The “incurable disease” was neither more nor less than a bullet wound in the body. Now, why should the woman lie about it and conceal it from the world if the man, her husband, had come by it honestly? Had he been on the side of the just, in other words on that of the party in power, more explicitly, my Lord Cromwell and his Parliament, that wound would have been an honourable scar. They were plainly Royalists; persons of mark, no doubt, for were there not a thousand and one subtle but unmistakable evidences of their condition? And, just as plainly, were they not fleeing the country? Otherwise they would not come at dead of night to the “Sea Rover.”

He was afraid he must dismiss the theory of this young man being the King from his mind. It was almost certain that had Charles Stuart been wounded to death, the fact would have been known over the length and breadth of the land. For him to have escaped so far in that dire condition would have been impossible.

Again, there was evidence in their familiar talk, despite something of a disparity in years, the woman being clearly older than her companion, that they were man and wife. In any case, the woman’s mode of address, tender and solicitous as it was, was hardly the one she would employ, even if she were a princess of the blood, to the King’s majesty. No; he was afraid he must look elsewhere for the King. Yet he had no need to be cast down upon the matter. These two persons were not to be despised. Their appearance suggested money and jewels. And they seemed to be delivered, bound hand and foot as it were, into his hands. Gamaliel hugged himself at that thought. They should be made to pay a price for that cold in his head. They should not aggravate his gout and his rheumatism, and set his nerves in a twitter, for nothing. He smiled malevolently as he sipped his hot cup, and spread his hands out to the fire.

Perchance the poor devil was dying, though. Certainly no human spirit could ever be tottering nearer to the brink than that of the man upstairs. The idea awoke never a spark of pity in the landlord. He simply regarded the near prospect of his death as another factor in the case. If he were not the King, he was not sure that he did prefer him to die. There would be only a woman to deal with them. In the phrase of that malignant sailor, Diggory Fargus, he would trust himself to tear the heart out of a woman with his own two hands. But why at every twist and turn did that uncomfortable mariner obtrude himself? He cursed himself for having called him to mind. If, however, the young man was the King--in spite of everything the landlord still clung tenaciously to that hope,--it would not be to his interest for his Majesty to perish. He must be delivered up alive, if possible.

During the rest of that evening, Gamaliel was too shaken to spy again on his guests, or to connive at others doing so. For he was still determined that his new drawer, whom he had engaged for that particular purpose, should go up the ladder also, and finally settle this hard problem as to whether Charles Stuart was actually at his inn or not.

It was not until the following evening that he summoned the courage to make a fresh attempt to set his mind at rest. During the day he could not venture to do so, for the publicity of light was too great. In the meantime he had not an idea of what had happened upstairs. He was still denied the chamber as sedulously as ever. He had tapped on the chamber door during the morning; the pale-eyed lady had appeared, more beautiful and more beset with anguish than before. She had taken a bowl of milk and a loaf of bread from the landlord’s hands, but beyond a word of thanks and a prayer that he should not again disturb the sleeper, he had nothing of her conversation. It was on his lips to inquire of the young man’s condition; but ere he could frame the question the door was swiftly yet silently closed upon him, and for that day his chance had passed. As time wore on, a conviction grew up in his mind that the man was dead. The silence upstairs was so extreme; besides, an intangible sense of foreboding seemed to invade and presently possess, not only the atmosphere of the dismal old inn, but the minds of those dwelling in it.

Cicely went about in tears. The tender-hearted wench was sure something terrible had happened to the poor young gentleman. Her master swore at her, but he could not relieve his own mind of her fears. Joseph, his son, was also afraid: it was true that he and the serving-maid were singularly often in sympathy, more often than Gamaliel cared about. He would have got rid of her long ago, were she not such an industrious, capable girl. Then, again, a shadow seemed to hang over the mind, or what there was of it, of his new drawer. He had hardly spoken a word, and every task he was set to, whether it was cutting faggots or washing the floor, he performed in a perfunctory and absent manner. Indeed, the first day he spent in the service of his new master was not to the satisfaction of the landlord. A more idle, more incapable fellow, he vowed he had never beheld. He would take the first chance of getting rid of him when he had served his turn. Twice during the day he had had to kick him up from the straw in the stable, where he had discovered him fast asleep.

At last, when the darkness had come again, the landlord once more resolved to allay his doubts. His nausea of the night before was merged in his overmastering curiosity. Summoning Will Jackson, he again had recourse to the ladder; and being at the mercy of his passions, he again had the temerity first to ascend himself.

No sooner, however, were his feet on the ladder, than a latent sense of horror was quickened within him. The bitter winter evening biting his ears, the moans of the sea, the gloom, the insecurity of hanging by one’s icy fingers in mid-air, all came upon him as a special reminiscence, and reproduced his pangs of the night before. And no sooner had he cocked his eyes over the shutter than they were greeted by a face as pallid as the sheets in which it lay. The man was asleep. Many evidences of pain had vanished from his countenance; indeed, his slumber looked as natural as it was profound. Then it began to dawn on the landlord that this was the peace of death. The sweat broke out on the watcher’s face. Why, in the fiend’s name, had he ventured up that ladder a second time, when there was a loathsome, ugly corpse at the top to greet him!

So if this was the King, the King was dead. Poor young man! he had died under the knife, perchance. But why had he been so unthoughtful as to die at the “Sea Rover”? There would, doubtless, be no end of a business presently. Yet, more probably, it was not the King at all; in that case there would only be a woman to deal with, for fugitives must be made to pay for the privilege of perishing in that respectable house. Just, however, as Master Gamaliel’s thoughts had travelled back to their customary sphere, and were beginning to revolve in their natural orbit--namely and to wit, the personal interests of Gamaliel Hooker--a phenomenon occurred to the corpse. It raised its arms and stretched itself.

The landlord bit his lips with anger. What a zany he was, to be sure; he had come to his dotage. To think that he should have mistaken a sleeping man for a corpse! It did not occur to him, cunning as he was, that it calls for as full-blooded a creature to be an eminent scoundrel, as it does for one to be distinguished in the more civil sciences. He could not shake off that sinister incident of the night before; he was a bag of nerves; he could hear skeletons creaking in the wind. With the best will in the world, there was hardly enough blood and pulse about him for this business. He had a thought too much imagination. He made but a poor second-rate sort of rascal, after all.

All this time, though the lady was in the chamber, she had been so still that the landlord had not noticed her. Turning his attention to her now, the eavesdropper saw that she was standing hard by the bed. She was no longer regarding the sleeper, however. Her head was bent over something she held in her hand; and her tears were falling fast and thick. In the very frenzy of her companion’s sufferings she had restrained them; but now, when she had procured him some little surcease, her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere, and her infinite compassion extended to another.

Craning to the window and alternately pressing his ears and his eyes 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?

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.

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.