Chapter IV (3)

“Right. Women have no call to meddle with politics. And your cousin?”

“You can try him. But I fear he’s stubborn. These sullen fits last for days. Here, Luke, drink to please me and the kind captain.”

She held the cup to his mouth and whispered, “_Return here as soon as may be_.”

Aloud she sneered, “Look you, the great baby! He is suffering me to spill the good liquor. His lips are close shut----”

“Waste no more time on the lout that will not drink when a lady begs him,” the captain said. He wiped his lips. “Well, good-bye, then.… You were so glad to see me, you’ll not refuse me a kiss at parting?”

“What are you thinking of, Captain Butler?” she minced affectedly. “And before your men, too.”

“Be hanged to my men! They’re busy getting off. You’re the prettiest picking I’ve seen since I left my barracks at Hounslow and I cannot leave it unkissed!”

He forced her lips. The man in the chimney corner stirred.

“Touches him nearly,” said Butler, whose eyes shone.… “I could do with another, given freely. Maybe, if we were alone----”

She shook her head.

“No good, eh? Your promise, Madam, was finer than your performance. But I’m a gentleman. Come, my lob-lie-by-the-fire, stump up!”

The man in the ingle nook, with one reproachful glance at Christina, rose. He tottered a little, and appeared dazed. Captain Butler, in sudden haste to be gone, clapped him on the back.

“Come, my little fellow, don’t keep us waiting. We’re bound to catch our gallows-bird before dark!”

The haggard eyes of the fugitive were fixed now on Christina, and now on the stained kitchen knife that lay on the table.

“It’s the money,” she said hastily. “I was forgetting.”

Opening a shabby little leather bag that hung at her girdle, she produced a silver coin.

“Here, take it, Luke. For all that Betty Candlish would have given us credit. There goes! Don’t drop it, ye daft goneril! And, mind, you’ll have to come back by the bridge up Marske way, for these kind gentlemen won’t be coming back, I fancy. It’s saving him a matter of two miles, Captain, thanking you kindly, and my mother pining for her drops.”

The troopers in the yard were all mounted now, their bridles clinking, their horses pawing. Christina, standing by Captain Butler’s stirrup, bickering with him gaily to the last, watched her lover out of the corner of her eye, as he doggedly passed out, and hoisted himself up behind the man called Tim. He seemed woefully stiff. Christina supposed him to have a hurt somewhere, or was it merely the result of two nights’ exposure? If it was the former, she promised herself a month’s delicious nursing. Yet not a look did he cast in her direction as he rode away, uncovered, leaving one of Luke’s old caps, which she had reached down from a nail for him, on the table beside the kitchen knife and the carrot scrapings.

She saw it when she went in again. His negligence of any head covering must have looked odd and indifferent, but then his sullen and cross demeanour had tallied exactly with her account of him. She was proud of the part she had played.

Yet the first thing she did when the sounds had died away was to catch up a rough cloth, not over clean, that lay there, and rub her lips with it till the blood came.

Then she sat down for a little while with her head buried in the self-same cloth, crouching low in shame, remembering bitterly the indignities to which she had submitted in order to secure her false lover’s safety.

Half an hour she sat like this. Then the old clock in the corner struck wheezily. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

She remembered her mother. She ought to go and see and comfort the old woman. Perhaps the rough troopers had frightened her. Heavy-footed, hating herself, loving Charles, she ascended the crazy stairs.

The troopers had frightened her mother indeed. She was dead!…

The daughter, dry-eyed, left alone with death, did what was necessary. She washed the body of her beloved, and dressed it, and laid her arms across her breast with a little sprig of marjoram out of her garden between the fingers, and covered up the cracked dim looking-glass with a fair white cloth. She went downstairs and procured a plateful of salt, which she laid on the dead woman’s chest to fend off the evil spirits. She drew down the blinds of the windows that looked out over the garden on to the ford, and sat down near the horribly yawning hole in the flooring to await Luke--or Charles. Neither of them might come for a good hour or more. She did not know which would be the first. Charles might not come for days, but when he did he would be of good comfort, and grateful to her for saving his life at the expense though it were of half an hour’s desperate but not irremediable degradation. It was nothing to her, considering the result, perhaps as little to him, and yet more than once during the ordeal she had fancied he was on the point of interposing and forbidding, at the risk of his life, the desecration of the lips that were his, and his only. He might not, perhaps, be willing to kiss her.… No matter, she would dress his wound, and shelter him and be a mother, not a mistress, to him a while. He had not slept in a bed, nurse-tended by kind white hands, since Preston fight.… He would kiss the hands sometimes?… So she dreamed.…

About five o’clock she heard the thud of a horse’s hoofs, trotting briskly towards her from the ford. Charles had been in luck, and had somehow or other managed to get hold of a horse?…

She ran down, leaping, in her haste to go the nearest way, over the gaping chasm that shelved in like the hangman’s drop, in the middle of the floor.

“My beloved!”

A man stood, sheepish, in the house place. It was Captain Butler.

“You!” she stammered, and reeled.

“Yes, ’tis I, poor fool, come back to know more of you and your wiles, my beauty. For that you are; and may be, now that I’ve given my men the slip for an hour, you’ll let me have that kiss?”

Christina was holding on to the high back of the settle.

“Ay, there’s no doubt about it, you’re a gay piece, and no one could call you kissing shy. I like it. But that poor lad who sat there--he couldn’t stomach so much freedom, I fancy. You made his poor heart ache, and lost him his wits, now, wasn’t it?… Well, well, he’s the best judge of his own feelings, may be he’s as well out of this troublesome world.…”

“What do you mean, Captain?”

“Only that that cousin of yours slipped off from behind Tim Jobling crossing the ford, and was washed away almost before we in the front knew what was happening. It’s my belief he did it on purpose.”

“Drowned! Charles!”

“Is that his silly name? I thought you mentioned some other. He said something to Tim, I believe, before he let go----”

“What was it?”

“Oh, if you care to hear! He said that he found the woman he loved was no better than a harlot, and he didn’t care for his life any more since ’twas so. He just slipped off behind----”

“And didn’t any one lift a finger to help him?” she wailed.

“Couldn’t, I tell you, he was a deal too quick for Tim, seeing as he did it o’ purpose. No, Miss, make no bones about it, his death lies at your door.”

She tottered, and he held out a clumsy hand.

“Come, put it all behind you. Why should a fine girl like you sorrow for a half-witted yokel like that? You broke his heart, but what right had he to cast those bleary eyes of his on you? You are for a better than he. Come now--be pleasant! You didn’t use to look bashful. One would think it was a different woman I’ve come back to. You’re handsome enough, though, in all conscience, even with that face of thunder on you. Will you or won’t you, Mistress Daunet? Will you come to me--my pretty?”

He took a pull at the stoup of liquor that was where he had put it down, and held out his arms.

Still the woman stood, dazed, dumbfounded, her ordinarily quick brain acting slowly. She began to realize, by a series of successive shocks, that there was no one left to be helped or saved by diplomacy. She kept her distance, still eyeing the dark wet knife on the table.… She spoke at last, sombre, taciturn.…

“My mother lies dead upstairs.”

“Does she so? Well, ’twas her time to die, wasn’t it? We’ll bury her decently. Come.”

He sat there, glorying in his work, his legs well apart, smiling fatuously, waiting for the fair sulky girl to forget her immediate griefs and fall on his neck for solace and comfort.

“Dawdling! Playing the maiden, eh? You’ll come in the end. What if your mother is dead? Eighty, I think she was? Trooper Tim gave her a fright. Finished her off.…” He was slightly drunk. “I’ve left my men at Scanwood. I fancy its master is likely to seek the old earths after all.… Come, still thinking on your mother? Devil, don’t I tell you she was old and ripe for death? We’ll give her Christian burial, and do all things in order.…”

He fumbled in his pockets. And Christina’s hand made a quick outward movement.

“And will you bury me decently too?” said she, advancing at last. With the dignity of a queen she sat down on the knee of the amorous captain, who fancied the hour of surrender had come. Indeed, he had some small excuse for thinking so, for with a gesture of abandonment she flung one long arm round his neck.

“Ay, but don’t strangle me!” he whispered, his chin buried in her bare neck. Christina’s other hand was busy at his coat lapel.

She found the place, just over the collar bone--she had no science but she just happened on it,--and drove the long kitchen knife in straight. Its work was not done then. With an effort she drew the knife out and used it again. Captain Butler, before he fell off the chair, saw her eyes glazing, and for one moment held a dead woman in his arms.

* * * * * * *

“And that, I think, was the way it was,” said the romancer to his patient listener, as they sat together on the bare hillside sloping to the Bridge on the other side of the ruined battlement, and let their hands run through the cool straggling grasses that clothed its sad bleakness a little. He raised his hand, that had been fumbling negligently in the ground beside him.

“Look here! A daffodil! This must have been poor Christina Daunet’s garden!”

THE WITNESS