Chapter IV (2)

His head dropped. He seemed disinclined to say more. Still the smart woman persisted.

“But the details----?”

“Are purely medical, Ma’am. Not without a physiological interest, I may say. Interesting to men of science, pathologically. The”--he named a daily paper much in vogue at that time, “made a good deal of the strong sense of artistry--of contrast--the morbid warp inherent in the executant----”

His head sank again on his chest.

“I do believe,” said the baby farmer, nudging the smart woman, “that we shall find he’s the man who killed his sweetheart and then carefully tied her poor inside all into true lover’s knots with sky-blue ribbon. Artist, indeed! They’re quite common colours--blue and red----”

“Disgusting!” The delicate lady from Monte Carlo shuddered, and turning coldly away, joined in the petition proffered by the other ghosts to the breezy man in corduroys, to relate his experiences.

“Oh, I’ll tell you how I came to join you and welcome!” he said, rolling his huge neck about in its setting of red cotton. “Well, to begin with, I was drunk. Equally, of course, I was hard up. My missus--she’s married again, by the way, blast her!--was always nagging me to do something for her and the kids. I did. Nation’s taking care of them now, along of what I did. Work, she meant, but that was only by the way. I did choose to take on a job, though, on a rich man’s estate, building some kind of Folly, lots of glass and that, working away day and night by naphtha flares, you know. He was one of those men, you know the sort, that has more money than a man can properly spend, and feels quite sick about it, and says so, in interviews and so on, in the papers a working man reads. That’s the mischief. He was always giving away chunks of money to charities and libraries and that sort of useless lumber, but none of it ever seemed to come the way of those that were in real need of it. They said the money had got on his nerves, and would not let him sleep o’ nights, and that he was afraid by day and went about with a loaded stick and I don’t know what all. And he was looked after by detectives, at one time, so the papers said--again the papers, putting things in people’s heads, as it’s their way. So one blessed evening I was very low--funds and all, and my missus and the kids hollering and complaining as they always do when luck’s bad. Lord bless them, they never thought as they were ’citing their man to murder. Women never do think. And going out with their snivelling in my ears, I passed the station where he landed every evening after his day in town, and I happened to see him come out of the train and send away his motor that was a-waiting for him all regular, and start out to walk ’ome alone by a short cut across a little plantation there was, very thick and dark, just the place for a murder. Well--I told you I was half drunk--I raced home and got something to do it with--a meat chopper--to be particular----”

The old man opposite put his hand nervously to the back of his neck.

“Ay, Mister, it takes you just there, does it? You look a regular bundle of nerves, you do. Well, as I was saying, I went round by a short cut that I happened to know of, and got in front of him and hid in the hedge. Ten mortal minutes I waited for my man to come by. Lord, how my hand did tremble! I’d have knocked off for two pence. I was as nervous as a cat, but all the same, it didn’t prevent me from striking out for wife and children with a will when my chance came. I caught him behind with my chopper, and he fell like a log. Never lifted a hand to defend himself--hadn’t got any grit. Ladies, I don’t suppose I hurt him much, for he never even cried out when I struck or groaned when it was done. Then I looked him over, turned out his pockets and collared his watch and season ticket and seals and money. Money--hah!--I had been fairly done over that. Would you believe it of a rich fellow like him, he hadn’t got more than the change of a sovereign on him.”

“Shame!” ejaculated the taciturn man in the corner.

“I admit it was hard on you,” the man in grey observed kindly. “Very hard, for I believe the retribution came all too quickly. You foolishly left your chopper about to identify you, and were apprehended at once by our excellent rural police. Yet the law is so dilatory that you lay in gaol a whole year before you were free to join your victim here?”

“Right you are, mate. Yes, I swung for it, sure enough. Short and sweet it was once I stood on the drop, but it still makes my poor old throat ache to think of it.”

He wriggled and twisted his neck in its ruddy cincture.…

“Now, governor, I’m done, and if you’ve no objection we’d all like to hear how you came by that ugly gash of yours? It wasn’t no rope did that. Common or garden murder, I’ll be bound.”

“Certainly, my man, it was a murder--a murder most _apropos_. The circumstances were peculiar. I have often longed to get the ear of the jury who tried a man for relieving me of my light purse and intolerably heavy life, and tell them--the whole hard-working, conscientious twelve of them, trying their best to bring in an honest verdict and avenge my wrongs--my own proper feelings, surely no negligible factor in the case! They could not guess, these ignorant living men, whose eyes had not yet been opened by death to a due sense of the proportions of things--that I bore the poor creature no malice, but instead was actually grateful for his skilful surgery that had severed the life-cord that bored me, so neatly and completely.”

“It isn’t every one would take it like that!” remarked the smart woman. “Yet that is, more or less, how I feel about these things myself. Only in my case it is impossible to speak of skilful surgery! I was disgracefully cut up. I couldn’t possibly have worn a low dress again!”

“Have you ever heard?” said the man in grey thoughtfully, “of the Greek story of the Gold of Rhampsinitos, and the inviolable cellar he built to store it in? According to the modern system, my gold was hoarded in my brain, where fat assets and sordid securities bred and bred all day long. The laws that govern wealth are hard. You must give it, devise it, you must not allow it to be taken. But for my part I would have welcomed the two sons of the master builder who broke into the Greek King’s Treasure House. In the strong-room of my brain it lodged. With one careless calculation, one stroke of a pen, I could make money breed money there to madden me. I was lonely, too. I had no wife to divide my responsibilities. She might even have enjoyed them. But I dared approach no woman in the way of love--I did not choose to be loved for my cheque-signing powers. I was not loved at all. I was hated. Unrighteous things were done in my name, by the greedy husbandmen of my load of money. Then I was told that I went in danger of my life, and I condescended to take care of that--for a time--only for a time!

“One dark winter evening--I forget what had happened during the day, what fresh instance of turpitude or greed had come before me--I was so revolted that I kicked away all the puling safeguards by which my agents guarded their best asset of all, and gave the rein to my instinct. I disregarded precautions of every sort--with the exception of my faithful loaded stick, and the carrying of that had come to be a mere matter of habit with me--and I walked home from the station alone and unattended, up to my big house and good dinner which I hoped--nay, I almost knew--that I should not be alive to eat. And indeed, as luck would have it, on that night of all nights the trap was set for me. The appointed death-dealer was waiting--he took me on at once. I got my desire--kind, speedy, merciful, violent death. I never even saw the face of my deliverer.”

“By George!” softly swore the man in corduroys. “This beats all. Are you sure you aren’t kidding us?”

“No indeed, that is exactly how I felt about it, and if I had known of knowledge, as I knew of instinct, what was going to happen, I would have thought to realize some of my wealth before setting out to walk through that wood, and made it more worth the honest fellow’s while. But as you are aware, a millionaire does not carry portable gold about with him, and my cheque-book which I had on me would, of course, be of no use to him. Alas, all the poor devil got for his pains was exactly nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I had changed a sovereign at the book-stall to buy a paper, and out of habit, had waited for the change.”

The man in corduroys was by this time in a considerable state of excitement. He had rent the red handkerchief fiercely from his neck, and now made as if to tear it across his knee.…

“Why, governor!” he exclaimed passionately, “do you mean to say it was through you that I got this here”--he put both hands behind his head and interlocked them, “in return for giving you that there cut at the back of your neck? Well, how things do come about, to be sure!”

“Gently, gently! my man,” the elder soothed him. “Don’t be so melodramatic about a very ordinary coincidence. See, the ladies are quite upset. It doesn’t do to allow oneself to get excited here--it’s not in the rules. If I had made the little discovery you have done, I don’t think--no, I really don’t think I would have made it public. This undue exhibition of emotion of yours strikes me as belonging to the vulgar world we have all left. But since you have allowed it to come out, and every one is now aware of the peculiar relation in which we stand to each other, you must let me tender you my best thanks, as to a most skilful and firm operator, and believe me to be truly grateful to you for your services in the past.”

“Quite the old school!” said the smart woman.

“I must say, Sir,--I consider you the real gentleman,” said the baby farmer.

“I am a gentleman.”

“And a fairly accommodating one!” said the rough man, wiping his brow where, however, no sweat was. “It isn’t every man as would give thanks for being scragged!”

“Every man isn’t a millionaire,” said his victim calmly.

The smart woman, leaning forward, tapped the old gentleman amiably with her jewelled pince-nez.

“But we belong to the same world, I perceive,” she said, “and I am quite able to understand your refined feeling. It is as I said in my own case. Indeed if those two good people, who shall be nameless, had only dealt with me a little more gently, I don’t know that I should not forgive them absolutely. I shall at any rate be perfectly civil when I do meet them--only perhaps a little distant. But that Monte Carlo existence I was leading when they interrupted it, was really becoming intolerable! No one who hasn’t done it, thoroughly can realize what it is. Glare, noise, glitter, fever--that heartless, blue, laughing sea they talk of in the railway advertisements----”

The baby farmer, left out in this elegant discussion, obviously took no pleasure in it, but staring straight before her, muttered sulkily--

“Cote d’Azur and Pentonville! There’s some little difference, isn’t there, between one life and the other? Yet I enjoyed my life, I did, and as for gratitude, I can’t say as I see all those blessed infants a-coming up to me, and slobbering me for what I did for ’em. I may meet them, but they’ll not notice me. It isn’t in human nature. Their mothers’ thanks was all I got, and they thanked me beforehand in hard cash for what I was a-going to do. Lord, what’s a ricketty baby more or less? I say, we’re slowing up! Going to stop perhaps, and a good thing too!”

“Yes,” said the man in the grey frock coat, still enouncing his curt sentences to the unheeding listeners, “I am able to cordially thank the man who rid me with one clean scientific blow of my wretched life and all its tedious accessories. A skilled workman is worthy of his hire.”

“Mercy!” muttered the baby farmer. “Is he never going to stop? If it was for nothing else, he ought to have got scragged for being a bore!”

But being fully wound up, though in the excitement of arriving at the depôt no one was attending, the man in grey continued, “Suicide I had thought of, but abhorred, though on my soul I had nearly come to that, and then it was merely a question of courage--you spoke truly, Sir. Mine was a thin, pusillanimous nature, as you said. You came by, a kind Samaritan, and sacrificed your own good life freely to rid me of my wretched one. I think I told you that when you were being tried, I followed urgently all the details of the trial, and made interest with the authorities here to allow me to appear to the judge in his sleep, say, and instil into his mind some inkling of the true state of my feelings towards you. I do not know, however, if you would have thanked me, for life may have been no sweeter to you than it was to me--you spoke of an uncongenial helpmate, I think? Still one never knows. I might have been the means of procuring you some good years yet, in the full exercise of your undeniable vigour and remarkable decision of character. But it was apparently not to be. You followed me here, after a long interval of waiting, and now we have met, face to face. The introduction on that dark night was worth nothing. I like your face. We shall probably never meet again--their ways are dark and devious here, so I am the more glad of this opportunity of opening my mind to you on a delicate subject, perhaps, but one that has always been very near my heart. By the way”--he lifted his stick with its shining ivory crown into view. “Did you notice this? You read the papers, you said, and they told you it was heavily weighted and that I carried it always as a precaution. Well, on that eventful night for both of us--perhaps you were too hurried to notice?--but I never used it. Accept it now, will you not, as a memento?… I think, from sundry truly unearthly bumpings, that we seem to have come at last to our journey’s end.… I am right, the coachman has got down from his perch and taken his head under his arm.… We part. Mesdames, I salute you. Again, Sir----” He addressed himself more particularly to the shamefaced man in corduroys--“Farewell. Very pleased to have met you!”

One by one, the passengers faded away into the distance. The polite old man paused in the semblance of an inn yard where the coach had drawn up. A pale proud woman’s face, shining up by the step, had touched him. She was an intending passenger, and she was alone. She wore white dog-skin gloves, but no hat. Unusual, he fancied, in a woman of her class. On looking closer, he saw that she had a hat, but that it hung disregarded over her shoulder by an elastic, and was much battered and destroyed. He decided to speak to her.

“You are the lady we killed, I think?” he asked gently.

She acknowledged with a bow that it was so.

“We could none of us do anything,” he apologized, “or I hope you will believe----”

“Certainly, Sir, it was no fault of yours, or indeed of the company’s, I am sure. The accident was inevitable!” so she assured him, smiling faintly. He looked at her kindly. There was blood on the hair, he was able to convince himself.… “But Rory--our pony--never can pass things, at the best of times, and the look of your conveyance was certainly rather unusual. And at that time of night we rarely meet anything at all on the Great North Road. We choose that time on purpose, my sister and I--we had been staying away for a week with friends, and we were going home. When we saw you coming, Lucy said, half in jest--she is older than I--‘Suppose that thing in front were the Coach of Death the foolish country people talk about? They say it travels this way once a year, with its cargo of souls, on St. John’s Eve.’ I bade her not be superstitious, but I confess I thought the vehicle looked odd myself, and I did wonder how Rory would stand it. When it came nearer I saw distinctly that the coachman was headless, and I laughingly told my sister so. She bade me not disturb her, for death coach or live coach, she meant to do her best to get Rory past it. She failed----”

The man in grey looked nervously around. He was alone with the young lady in the dull inn yard. The headless coachman was preparing to ascend to the box seat again.…

“Where is your sister now?” he inquired.

“She lies at the bottom of the ditch. Rory has galloped home. She fell on her head, but she is alive still. When they find her in the morning, she will be dead, I know that. For now I know all things. I am at peace… you need have no care for me.…”

“Let me at least put you into the coach,” he begged. “And you will prefer the corner seat?”…

She took it; he went on--

“It looks, however, as if you were going to have all the accommodation to yourself, for this stage at all events.”

He raised his hat; she bowed.

“I am grieved that I cannot have the pleasure--that I cannot offer to accompany you, but I have my marching orders.…”

He raised his hat again.… The coach moved on out of the yard. Soon it was lost in the mists.… The summer dawn was just breaking.

THE BLUE BONNET

“… _a little spark in a blue bonnet, who fought like the devil at Preston._”--Boswell.

The tourists peered past the grey stone pillars of the gateway into the courtyard, paved with round cobbles, grass-grown in between. The low sculptured doorway gave admittance to the old manor house that had so fascinated the lady of the party from the first moment she had cast eyes on it.

“Oh, this is a bit of the real thing!” she had exclaimed fervently, when, five miles out of Richmond, the road had ceased to follow the course of the Swale, mantled all the way with heavy oak and hazel copses. They seemed to hang like hairy beards from the beetle-browed face of the cliffs that shelter the east bank of the river. “The very real thing!” she had continued, as the wagonette turned out into the open moorland, and their town-bleached cheeks were bathed at once in the pure sullen airs that roamed over it, softened and suffused with the tears of an April storm gone by. “This is the real Yorkshire moor I’ve read of, bare and empty, with not a single dwelling to be seen. Yes, there’s one!”

For as their conveyance dived down into the scarp of a hill, she sighted beyond the now familiar river which wound again into view, directly crossing their path, and the low bridge of quite modern construction which spanned it, the square mass of a house commanding the river bank. It seemed to stand, bull-dog like, on the slight acclivity, posing as guardian of the ford at that place, which was certainly all that had served for crossing a hundred years ago. So her instructive companion remarked to the eager lady. She grew more and more enthusiastic.

“John, I can’t possibly pass it! I couldn’t reconcile it with my historical conscience to go by without an attempt to see it. It’s like a grey-haired woman standing stranded on the edge of the world, an old Ariadne of a house, waiting for ever by the side of the flood.… Ask the driver what they call it?”

“Wallburn Old Hall,” said the stolid Yorkshireman, flicking a fly off his horse’s ear.

Three blind hopeless windows which had been closed up for the tax looked over the old garden garth. The eyes of the persons looking thence could have swept the stream and the narrow neck which formed the ford. The stone flagged courtyard of the house was enclosed by buildings on all sides but one. On the west, looking towards the river, was a ruined battlement on which a man might still walk and survey the country round for miles. But it was now insecure, the inner rubble exposed. Clumps of wild mustard and garlic sprang from every cranny and crevice and made a yellow blaze that lit up the grey substance of the pile. The lady unable to contain herself longer, requested the driver to pull up and let them have a look. Her companion took out a guide-book and read aloud, as they sat in the break in the streaming sunshine.

“Wallburn Old Hall… fortified manor house… dismantled.…”

“I should think it was!”

“_Et pour cause._ _The_ old Cause of all! Listen! Family of Daunet. There’s the shield on the door, evidently--see all that _répoussé_ work?--only we can’t read it from here.”

“The book says: ‘The ancient family of Daunet, who beareth sable gultie, argent and a canton ermine.…’ Yes, Guy Daunet’s tomb is in the church at Redmire--remember it?--His feet are cased in brass-toed sollerets. Above his lady’s head are three shields of arms. She appears to have been a Conyers. Well, they seem to be pretty well extinct now. The last Daunet was out and killed in the fifteen. There were Daunets in the Great Rebellion, Daunets in the Gunpowder Plot--in the Rising in the North----”

“Poor romantic dears!”

“Yes, that’s the plague of lost causes. They swayed the emotions so forcibly and through the emotions the very lives of the old families--those that had any good in them. One imagines them, up to the very latest day, having an indistinct glimmering of their own original _raison d’être_, that is, lands given in exchange for service.… Their modern representatives have lost even the glimmering. Well, oughtn’t we to be driving on?”

“Oh, no. After what you’ve been making out, I must have a try to see over it. I want to make out that blurred shield over the door. Gules argent and canton ermine, was it? They can but refuse us.”

The young couple alighted, under mute protest from the driver, and entered the courtyard, the lady bold, the man nervous, deprecating. They received forthwith a Teniers-like vision of an interior. Farm-hands were sitting round a wooden table, placed in the oak-panelled greasy blackness of a low raftered hall. All looked up, and ceased pulling at their mugs. A frowsy young girl of eighteen, wiping her mouth, came forward.

“Could we see over?” The glint of a silver coin in the lady’s hand pleasingly accentuated her request.

A voice came from the interior as the girl stood hesitating and shy.

“Mind, hinny, thou’st not take the lady anywhere it isn’t safe. Keep out of the room the captain’s leg came through. And mind, the stairway beyont isn’t much to crack on.”

The girl thus admonished, turned and led the enthusiastic pair in and up the rich darkness of the stair.

“That’s the best part of it her mother told her to leave out!” whispered the lady. “That about the captain’s leg. It sounds most exciting. Ask her--or I will.”

The girl, questioned, replied over her shoulder.

“It’s a tale, ma’am. A long while back it were--ages and ages. They do say a man’s leg came through the floor, and he’s always called the capting. The boards is rotten just there, and was then. That whole end o’ the house is fair gone to powder. My grandfeyther used for to say that a man’s leg made it coming through. But it was long before his time, and he were a very old man. The ceilings of that part of the house is that powdery, would you believe it, that we can always scrape the plaster and get a bit for baby.”

“How funny and utilitarian! And is it haunted?”

“Grandfeyther always said ’twas.”

“Who by?”

“They do say a poor man went clean daft there--came home and found every one lying dead about the place.”

“But what had they died of? Plague?”

“The smit? Naw. Grandfeyther allus said ’twor a tragedy, same as they has in the papers now-a-days.”

“Where is your grandfather now?”

She jerked her finger over towards the north.

“Churchyard. But he knew all about this place. His feyther before him was ostler about the inn at Redmire--you’ll pass it on your way to Bolton. He always said there was a hiding hole here, and mor’n that, a secret way, but teacher says that’s all nonsense and we mustn’t waste our time looking for it, besides it isn’t safe. We shut oop this part, and just pack into the other, where it’s still pretty good, and at Michaelmas we’ve all got to go out and Lord Scrope is going to pull the old place down.”

“Shame!”

“Oh, I dunno. It’s fair rotten.”

“Are you sure you can’t take us into the rotten part--just for once before it all goes?”

“That I cannot. The worst room is the one the man’s leg came through--they call it the Lady Christina’s room. And it’s there Grandfeyther says the priest’s hole was.”

“It was generally out of the principal room in the house,” said the man. “They wanted him under their own hand and to be able to feed him at night. Come along, Mary, you really can’t see it.”

“I suppose not.” She sighed. “But I do somehow seem to see Christina--the Lady Christina. I suppose her spirit is about? Why ‘Lady’? The Daunets had no title.”

“These people always dignify ghosts and raise them to the peerage. Let’s see if we can’t make up a story for her. Christina Daunet and her lover--was he the man who went mad or the priest she hid?”

They were descending the stairs. Their cicerone broke in suddenly.

“Nay, that weren’t the way. The real heir was troth-plight to the Lady Christina, and he was drowned one day here in the ford, here under her very eyes.”

“Another touch!” said her companion eagerly. “So legend grows. Let us go and sit out on the hill, here, and look towards the ford, and I’ll try to reconstruct her story for you. I’m not a novelist for nothing. This is how the man went mad when he came home.”

* * * * * * *

There was no priest. The lover was that “little spark in a blue bonnet that fought at Preston” Boswell speaks of. I’ve always wanted to connect him up with a story. Miss Christina Daunet--not Lady--was tall and pale, and a fine girl, so long as she had enough to eat, and nothing to brood on. But her adolescence and greatest need of nourishment happened to coincide with Jacobite times of stress, when loyal subjects starved in order that the Stuarts might come by their own. The females of her family were used--even hardened to the more domestic consequences of the males’ unfaltering loyalty. When the fuss was about priests, Christina’s own grandmother had successfully concealed one in the hiding-place in her room--that very room that we were not permitted to investigate, looking towards the ford and the road to Richmond. To-day her own mother lay there, eighty, bedridden, daft and doited.

These two women were the widow and daughter of the last Daunet of the direct line. Since the great Guy of the canton ermine, the race had continually dwindled. So many of them had been strangled, so many hanged and drawn and quartered, a half-dozen desiccated heads belonging to the strain had rotted on Temple Bar. Cold steel and a touch of poison had been responsible for some others, and thus the foolish, forlorn race had been cleared off to make room for persons of finer judgment and less realistic ideals. Acts of attainder, recusant fines, had impoverished their estates, and mulcted them of their goods, till of all the broad lands, castles and noble manor houses that had bred and sheltered and maintained Daunets for the King’s service, only the austere, embattled farm-house on the Richmondshire moors remained, and therein the two women that alone bore the fine fighting name slowly pined and withered away.

They had not enough to eat. Yet their appetites were no larger than feminine appetites are reputed to be. Sir Christopher Daunet, Christina’s father, was killed at Sheriffmuir when his little daughter was a year old, and her mother, grown doited with the shock, lived on to give very little trouble, and represent no great charge on the family finances. She lay always in her big room in the south-west wing. Her heavy four-post bed, too mighty and perhaps too rotten to be moved, remained firm in its old place on the safer part of the flooring; the tester was hung by heavy rings to the ceiling. Her daughter, ministering to her slight wants, had learned to walk warily round the bed.

Christina Daunet was loyal--as women are loyal. She realized very fairly that this task of the reinstatement of the Stuart dynasty on the throne of England had been set by Providence on her and hers, incidentally carrying with it the doom of extermination set on the race. Their blind inherent loyalty clustered as it must, round the losing side which sucked in, naturally, these people who always went where their advantage was not--and the losing side had drawn in her father, her uncle, even the man she loved.

She loved her cousin, Charles Daunet of Scanwood. Scanwood House lay three miles hence on the Richmond Road. Charles was the only son of her father’s only sister. Christina and this young man were early troth-plighted--they were about to wed--but the Stuarts came first. It was the Cause that intervened and forbade the innocent banns. Charles Daunet allowed the just impediment and went out as a matter of course. He was more eager for the day of the stranger’s crowning than for the morn that should usher in his wedding with Christina whom he knew and loved. He had left her too easily. Folk in the neighbourhood said he was slack. Christina herself admitted that Charles was more of a fighter than a lover. But the Stuarts called! What was a Daunet to do?

She cried sometimes and mourned over her baulked betrothal with her only confidant, a certain Luke Daunet. Her father had had a son, but he was not her mother’s child. Luke lived with them--his mother had been innkeeper’s daughter over at Redmire, a good girl enough till Sir Christopher Daunet came her way. He lived so near, at Wallburn, and he was not the man to leave so fair a flower ungathered.

Madam Daunet was not a hard woman. She undertook the child’s maintenance when its mother died and Sir Christopher fell at Sheriffmuir. Luke grew up. He was not “all there,” but he was an honest, kindly, gentle fellow, and for the two lonely women he did a man’s work about the place. There was not much to do. There was not a beast left in the stable, except a wall-eyed, knock-kneed pony that Luke rode into Redmire or Marske now and then to buy necessaries. They could afford no other servant. The white-handed proud Christina tended her mother, cooked, and did the inside work of the house. It was all one. When the Prince should come into his own, Christina would do so likewise.

Of that she had doubts sometimes, especially when the wind whistled over the moor, and the stream ran heavy and turbid below the garden, so that the ford was ill to cross. The Prince’s final triumphing then seemed surer than her own. Charles had been away now a long while. He had not been assiduous about her for many months before his departure to join the Prince. He had sent her no message first or last. She had even heard of another lady.…

For rumours flew. The news of the brief Stuart apotheosis at Edinburgh, tidings of the Prince’s meteoric Court at Holyrood, had filtered down to Redmire, and the bar of the inn there. Preston fight, too, was mentioned. She thought, but was not sure, that Charles had been noticed there. Now the Prince was marching south… had marched.…

On that day of December, mild and calm and presageless as it seemed, Christina was ill at ease, peevish, apprehensive. She went about the houseplace and courtyard with her ears pricked to the free roving wind that might have brushed her Charles’s bonnet in passing, as he marched south with his troops? Or, weary of this fairy listening, she would droop her eyes, till they rested dreaming on the waterway below the dip of the hill where Wallburn Hall stood. Then she would raise them slowly to look a little higher on the level where the turrets of Scanwood were just visible nestling in their encompassing woods. Scanwood was a fine place, and would it be hers some day?

Puzzled, like a fox that is hunted, she snuffed the air and could not tell which way danger, or perhaps bliss, might come. Had the Prince’s army passed them on its way south? For indeed the last news Luke had brought had been that the Stuart heir was marching on his own capital, with his victorious rabble of Highlanders. King George was quaking. Would not Charles, if this were so, have to pass by Scanwood to see to his domestic concerns? Her mother babbled for ever of drums; the old woman would have it that she heard them.…

“They’ve gone by, my dear, they’ve gone by. Oh, the bonny lads!… The Prince has gone into England, never to leave it again, dearie. Listen to the old doited woman, for she speaks truth. Rub-a-dub!… Rub-a-dub!…”

“Whisht, whisht, mother!” Christina now and again murmured softly but not imperatively, as she stood by the window and herself with her slight long fingers performed the manœuvre known as drumming on the pane. Yes, her heart lifted; he had passed, at a point perhaps miles away, too far for him to get leave to call in and see his sweetheart. She must have patience. One day soon she would be looking out of this very window and she would see Charles on his fine horse crossing the ford at the old place, coming to her, with a light heart, and all his troubles and hers behind him, cast aside, healed, over and done with. She could discern the very spot now where the bottom was nearest and the water shallowest, even exposed at times in drought. The waters flowed glumly over it now, there had been much rain to swell them. Sometimes, to the excited girl, who stood there, her nerves wrought by the faint vocal rub-a-dubbing that came from the bed behind her, it seemed that the water gathered itself up into shapes--shapes of horses and men. The little waves seemed to rise obediently under the harsh wind, and form themselves into the semblance of uncanny humanity. They massed themselves and menaced, yes, she came to fancy that one figure rose again and again from the sullen flow to shake a quivering fist at her. She stared the silly vision down. Soon the water ran by as usual, huddling, lumping itself into small ridges under the wind, but nothing so tall as a man.

She turned to receive and divert the mother’s peevish voice. The old woman had ceased to imitate the drums; she was now convinced in her senile way they had passed. She talked strange nonsense, used strange names. “Bound for the South, they are.… The Bridge.… Swarkstone! Swarkstone.”

“Where’s that, mother?”

“Bad luck! Bad luck! The Bridge.… No further.… Swarkstone. No further. Back! Back! I’m cold, Christina. I’m cold.…”

“The day’s changing and you feel it,” said Christina sadly, altering the position of the coverings. It was all she could do.

“Nay, ’tis the smit of death I’ve got, Christina! I know it.”

“Oh, mother, not now, just when we are going to be so happy.” But her heart did not back her words. “Look here, I’ll have Luke go to Redmire at once and get you some of Betty Candlish’s cordial. She promised me some for you the moment I wanted it, and you seemed low as you do to-day. We won’t let you die just yet.”

“Ay, but can you keep me?” said the voice from the bed gently. “It’s that I’ve got and no mistake. I’ve felt it all day.… Come back and kiss me, Christina. You’re a good girl--a very good girl.… The Bridge at Swarkstone--I saw him there--the Prince.… Remember that, Christina.”

“Yes, mother, I will, though I never heard of such a place in my life!” cajoled the girl as she went downstairs to seek the half-witted Luke and confide her errand to him.

He sat, as usual, on the oak settle, swallowed up in the glooms of the chimney corner. She roused him up, and told him what she wanted. She helped him to saddle the pony and watched him potter slowly up the hill towards Bolton. Then she re-entered the house and cut up, on the corner of the big seamed oaken table, some vegetables which she had fetched from an outhouse. Into a pot on the fire she threw the sliced turnips and carrots. There was not much fire to hang over, but her forehead got hot, her cheeks flushed, and her hair escaped a little from its binding.

Presently, having put the mess to one side on the hob, she walked slowly out into the courtyard to get air, of which she suddenly felt a violent need. She languidly ascended the few broken steps that led up to the old battlement. At that time one could still walk along it without having one’s attention too much distracted by the necessity of picking one’s way among the rubble. She strolled backwards and forwards, enjoying the fresh moorland air that caressed her reddened cheeks and blew her pale yellow hair away in an easterly direction.

Holding her hand to her forehead instinctively to restrain it, though there was no one to be seen for miles, she scanned the country to the south. Her blue eyes roved over the low rolling hills that let her see a very long way. But not as far as that bridge at Swarkstone, six miles south of Derby, where the lines of her fate had been converging for several days past, and were now radiating away from thence in ragged streaks and strands of fugitive soldiers and brutal complacent pursuers.

She was overcome with a sudden trepidation, a rush of feeling that somehow impelled her to get back to the room where her mother lay, and see for herself how the helpless woman was getting on. But she sat down on the parapet, which at the point where she was still stood firm at the side of the battlement next the road. Overcome by a sudden faintness, she hid her face in her hands. She had eaten very little to-day. Her back was to the road, and her eyes, should she uncover them, would have rested on the empty grass-grown courtyard.

It was not empty. A noise like a dead leaf twisting startled her. Luke come back on foot, without the pony! She had pressed her knuckles into her eyes until her eyes had grown hazy and suffused, and it was a second or two before she saw there was actually a man in the courtyard below her. A man, not Luke.…

His bonnet, faded by sun and wind and rain, had once been blue. She heard his breath that came quickly, and, very drily, scenting a beggar and a demand for alms, she asked him his business.

He raised his drooping head.

“Charles!”

“Christina, quick! Who else is here? Can you harbour me?”

“What? What?”

“I come from Derby--the rout at Derby. We got six miles beyond and turned back.… I am pursued. Quick, can you hide me, will you? They will search my house at Scanwood, they are there now.…”

Christina was not looking at him. She had half turned when he spoke of Scanwood, and her eyes pried into the bosky mazes lying between.… The fugitive thought that the brusque movement had its occasion in a natural change in her sentiments towards himself. He deserved no better, he had practically deserted her, he had never written--a woman scorned!… Yet in his urgent necessity he must needs appeal to her again.…

“Christina, an answer, I beg of you! Shall I go further for a shelter?”

“Take off that cap--reach it up to me here. Now go in to the chimney corner--you know it--sit down--at ease. Not another word.”

While speaking she had taken the blue cap and flung it down into the chapel garth on the other side of the wall. The cluster of “ramps” and fronds of wild garlic parted and opened to receive it and came together again. Meantime such was the power of insistence in her voice that the fugitive obeyed her as he would obey the military word of command. Heavily walking over the stones of the courtyard, he took his place on the settle in the chimney nook and crossed his legs negligently. He could still see Christina standing on the battlement looking down towards the ford. She stood first on one leg and then on the other; she agitated her body strangely, she made signs. Then faint sounds, voices, the clink of bridles, came to his ears from the direction in which she looked. His pursuers most likely, for the noise came from Scanwood. He stretched his legs, stiff from two nights’ exposure, further out in an attitude of ease as she had bidden him. He did not know what Christina meant to do. She was revengeful--then she would give him up? She meant perhaps to save him? Well, his life belonged to her. He waited.

Five minutes ago Christina had seen his enemies taking the ford, a well-found troop of horse, and a stoutish personable man riding at their head. Charles Daunet, from the ingle nook, could not see them but he could see his Christina make a trumpet of her white hands and hear her bawl--yes, bawl--to them over the battlement--

“Good gentlemen, hear me. Will you please to take some refreshment? I cannot allow you to go by me, for it is lonely here at Wallburn Hall.”

“Is that what you call it?” said a clear voice. “Wheel, men.”

Charles Daunet saw the speaker ride into the little courtyard at the head of his troop, and dismount. He was a fine florid man of forty or so. He wore a high fixed cap with upon it the White Horse of Hanover; his gaiters were white and at his saddle he carried a dead turkey. Christina had descended from the battlement, and had gone to the horse’s head. The man spoke breezily.

“Captain Butler at your service, Mistress. We will eat a crust with you, the more so because we come to search you in the King’s name.”

“Do you say so?” Christina replied, setting the tone of the interview in a way that made Charles Daunet shiver. “Come you then in, in the King’s name. George or James, ’tis all the same to me, a woman. It’s long enough since a man came this way. I was wearying for the sight of one.”

The Captain laughed heartily.

“Business, first, Miss, if you please. We have a warrant to take a certain Colonel Charles Daunet of Scanwood, who fought for the Pretender at Preston and gave us honest ones a dance of it.”

Christina looked faintly bored.

“My cousin of Scanwood! Is he not at home?”

“We have spent two hours ferreting for him there, and the housekeeper bade us come here. She said he was a good friend of yours.”

“She is chary of her information,” said the girl composedly. “I was more than friend, I was once sweethearts with him, for my sins. But I have no care for the fellow now.” She tossed her head. “Come in, come in, you and your men, as many as the roof will shelter. The wine cask is low, but we will do what we can. I am alone here--nearly.”

“My men--some of them--must search the house.”

“Ay, let them search closely! I was always one for formality. But see they take heed of the flooring of the upper rooms, which is indifferent and might let one of them through, especially if he be a fine man like yourself, Captain!” She giggled. “Shall I go along with them, and indicate the places where the maggots cling and the mouse gnaws, and all is gone to fine powder?”

“No, they must shift as best they can, and you shall stay here and talk with me. Our man should be here, without your knowledge, perhaps, since you say you and he have fallen out?”

“We fell out,” said Christina carelessly, “when he chose to leave me to go and fight for a man I had never seen and didn’t care for. He should have stayed here and taken care of his own.”

“I am with you, Mistress. Little as he is, though, he fought us like the devil at Preston. His blue bonnet was everywhere, and he fairly swinged our poor fellows! The Duke is wild to have him strung up. Well, men, off with you! Thoroughly, mind. Every corner! Is there a cursed hiding hole here?”

“Yes, in my mother’s room,” said the hostess languidly. “She lies there bedridden. Speak her fair and gently, and she will instruct you to find the way in. On the left-hand side of the fireplace--a bolt shaped like a beetle. Only it’s iron, and if Charles is there--so much the worse for him.”

“You’ve got a spirit--nasty at that. Well, let’s in. ’Tis hot, and your liquor comes not amiss.”

Christina led the way under the low-browed doorway to the kitchen, where Charles Daunet was sitting. She made straight for the corner where he was, and lifting up a wooden flap of the settle, rummaged for a bottle of spirits. Aloud she said--

“Get thy great foot out of the way, Luke, wilt ’a!”

“Ay, who’s that?” asked Captain Butler, apprehending the sullen inmate of the chimney corner for the first time.

“That! That’s a poor foolish cousin of mine,” she replied, rising from her knees with the bottle, a little flushed with stooping.…

“You seem full of cousins----”

“Yes, but this one’s on the wrong side of the blanket. He’s not over quick, but he’ll answer a civil question, no doubt. Now then!” She took Charles Daunet roughly by the wounded shoulder, and he winced. “Look up, speak to the captain, can’t you?”

“What’s your name?” asked that personage humorously, entering into the spirit of the thing, but he got no answer. Christina shrugged her shoulders.

“Truth, he’s got no name, by the rights of it. Or if he has, it’s the same as mine. Luke Daunet, at your service. Drat you, Luke, why don’t you stand up and speak for yourself?”

Still the man on the settle did not move.

“He’s taken that way sometimes, Captain. A fit of the sullens. As obstinate as a mule, and you can’t get a word out of him; and another day he’ll rattle away fit to deave you. Poor sort of company for a girl like me! We just have to give him house room and a bite and a sup now and then for kinship’s sake.”

She poured out a glass of mead and the captain took up the glass and raised it to his lips.

“A kiss before I drink!”

He put his hand on her shrinking shoulder. The kiss lit on her ear. The man in the corner looked up sharply.

“Be quiet, Luke. Don’t you see I never gave it?” she said, as if to a froward jealous baby.

“It isn’t to his taste, eh?” said Butler. “Ha! Ha!”

“Never you mind his tantrums, Captain. We never take any notice, mother and I.” She filled his glass again. He sat down near the end of the table. She made shift to sweep the fragments of vegetables away with the carroty knife, but the captain raised his hand.

“Let be!” he said.… “Come and sit here, if this surly fellow will permit it. I shall like to watch his face.” He put his burly arm out, and, not before she knew what she was doing, proud Christina Daunet was sitting on a trooper’s knee and playing with his beard.

There was a sound of feet and much stamping overhead. Presently, with a sharp ugly crash of splintering timber, the booted leg of one of Butler’s men came through the ceiling and dangled helplessly. Christina jumped off the captain’s knee and burst out laughing.

“There! I told you ’twould happen.”

“Bravo, Tim Jobling! I’d know his leg in a hundred. Gad, I can hear him squealing like a pig up there!”

“’Tis in my mother’s room!” exclaimed Christina suddenly. “’Twill frighten her to death.”

“You shan’t go till they come down. They’ll be here directly. Look you, it’s all right now. Tim Jobling has gotten back his leg. They have him by the shoulders, and hoist him up so. He’s still swearing, though I can’t hear. You shall hear me roast him.”

Christina did not sit on his knee again, but leaped away with a coquettish grimace as the members of the search party came downstairs. Sheepishly came Tim Jobling at the tail of the group, minded to avoid Butler’s merriment.

“Found naught, Cap’n, except one doited old woman in bed.”

“My mother!” interposed Christina proudly.

“Ay, Walters, keep a civil tongue in your head, it can do you no harm. Did you put your blade thro’ the bed?”

“We did, ay, and the old body sat up, and talked gibberish. She frightened poor Tim so that he stepped back sharp and through the flooring.”

“His leg came out just there,” said Butler, pointing to the comminuted fracture of laths and planks that sagged down from the ceiling. “Well, Tim, you’re no worse and you’ve given me and my young lady here very good amusement. Your leg wagged like a mouse’s tail in the trap. My word!… Well, well, there’s meetings and there’s partings, Mistress.… We’ll have to be jogging away. Our man’s still to seek. What’s this place Redmire?” He spoke to Christina, taking her by the chin.

“It’s a lost sort of place, three miles away from here. Marske’s a deal more likely. Yet why should I be helping you to catch the poor escaped fellow? You’ll hang him, I’ll warrant, and though he’s despised me, I don’t wish him that much harm. I was never fond of telling the hunt which way the fox had gone.”

“Do you say so?” He looked judicial, and stroked his beard. After a pause--“Still, I’ll just have the correct name of that last place you mentioned.… You’ve no call to be careful for Charles Scanwood, he’s given you the go-by, you say. A man merits a rope for neglecting a pretty wench, over and above being punished for the hell he gave us all at Preston. That blue bonnet of his was like the clout of the devil himself. Well, well, adieu. Thank you for your mead, and if ever I’m this way again----”

“Go, since go you will,” said she, “I shall see or speak to no man but you here this side of Lady Day. So, Captain, farewell. Grant me a favour?”

“Ask it.”

“My cousin, here----”

“Sulky-face! Ay.”

“He’s got business for me in Marske. The ford’s swollen. We have no horse. Let him ride behind one of your men so far? You’re going to Marske to look for Scanwood?”

“Certainly, Miss, we’ll oblige you. Tim Jobling shall take him behind. Come, men, saddle. We must be off.”

“Give me a letter--so that the next company passes this way don’t trouble me,” she said.

He scribbled something in a pocket-book, and tore it out. She took it.

“Another glass before you go?”

“I’ll not say no to that. Here’s to King George! Will you toast him?”

She drank it down.

“Just a good excuse to get a drink,” she said.