The Yeoman Adventurer
"On the contrary, you turn them admirably. See!" She held up my sopping
cap, and laughed merrily.
"It's ruined for best," said I, "but it will do for market days. And now,
madam, it's cold enough to freeze askers, as Joe Braggs says, and for
toilet you must e'en be content with first a shiver and then a shake. I
will await you at the yard gate, and pray close the door behind you. The
quicker the better."
She rejoined me in two or three minutes. I closed the gate cautiously
behind me, and we started our journey. From the farm we got away quite
unobserved, but I looked behind me at every other step to make surer, till
we turned the top of the knoll, and it was with great relief that I saw
the chimney-pots sink out of sight.
For a time we walked along briskly and in silence. So far I had carried
everything with a high hand and successfully, but the cold grey of the
morning began to creep into my thoughts as I looked ahead over miles and
miles of dreariness and danger. Houses were few and far between; every
village was a source of danger; the high roads were closed to us by our
fear of the troops. Further, the object we had in view was vague and
unformed, if not impossible of achievement, for even if we arrived at the
very place where Colonel Waynflete was held prisoner, what could we do to
help him? We should be safe from immediate need and danger if we could
reach the Prince's army, but where that was, and which way it was
travelling, were unknown to us. Certain it was that between us and any
real help ranged some thirty miles of cold, bleak country packed with
enemies for miles ahead. And here we were, on foot, penniless and hungry.
I had longed for a man's work; this was a regiment's.
A sidelong look at my companion drove all the mist and frost out of my
heart. Something about her made me feel a sneak and a traitor even for
harbouring such thoughts. From the first she had asked for no help of
mine. I had forced it on her, or circumstances had forced me to help her
in helping myself, as when I cut our way from Marry-me-quick's cottage.
The more I was with her, the better I began to understand Brocton's
madness. It was the madness of the mere brute in him to be sure, and a man
should kick the brute in him into its kennel, though he cannot at times
help hearing it whine. Her majestic beauty had dazzled him as a flame
dazzles a moth, but at this stage, at any rate, it was not her beauty that
made me her thrall. That I could have withstood. Because she was so
beautiful, so stately, so compelling, she made no appeal to me. What I
mean is, that I did not fall in love with her at first sight, simply
because the mere stupidity of such a thing kept me from doing it.
Glow-worms do not fall in love with stars or thistles with sycamores. She
was something to be worshipped, served at any cost, saved at any
sacrifice, but not loved. No, that was for some lucky one of her own class
and state, not for a simple squireling like me. Her comradeship, her
graciousness, her sweet equalizing of our positions, were, I felt, just
the simple, natural adornments of the commanding modesty which was her
spiritual garment.
Manlike, however, I had an evil streak in me, and thence, later, came
madness. In any company I must be top dog. I had been head of the school,
not because of any special cleverness, but because I would burst rather
than be second to anybody in anything. I had fought and fought, at all
hazards, until not a boy in school or town dare come near me. So now,
since my Lord Brocton--and many a lord beside, I doubted not--had failed,
I must needs step in and say, "I will please her, whether she like it or
not." And so, plain countryman as I was, I had done my work ungrudgingly
but not, I feared, too modestly, and since I could not speak court-like, I
had been over-masterful, and given her mood for mood, and turned no cheek
for her sweet smiting. And as I had of old time licked every lad in
Stafford, so now neither Staffordshire nor all the King's men in it should
turn me back. Through she should go, and in safety and comfort, so that
when the time came for me to hand over my precious charge to a worthier,
she should say that the yokel had done a man's work and done it
gentlemanly. Therefore, when Mistress Waynflete looked up to me from the
bleak uplands with serious, questioning eyes, I said, as calmly as if we
were pacing the garden at the Hanyards, with Kate and Jane active in the
kitchen behind us, "Ham and eggs for breakfast!"
"I don't see any," she said, in answering mood, scanning the fields
around us. "Not that that matters. I didn't see the steps, but they were
there. You make me think, Master Wheatman, of a Turk I saw in a booth at
Vienna, who drew rabbits and rose-bushes out of an empty hat.
Staffordshire is your conjurer's hat. And I do like ham and eggs."
My assurance and her comfortable belief in it made us both brighter, and
we stepped out merrily. She gave me an entertaining account of Vienna,
where she had spent some months, and which was then the great outpost of
Christendom against the Turk. When this talk had brought us on to the
field of Hopton Heath, I gave her the best account I could of the battle
there in the Civil War time, and of the slaying of the Marquis of
Northampton. And this led me on to my pride of ancestry, and I told her of
Captain Smite-and-spare-not Wheatman, a tower of strength to the
Parliament in these parts, who fought here and later on Naseby Field
itself. Many tales I told of him that had been handed down from one
generation of us to another, and how so greatly was he taken with his
incomparable lord-general that he had named his first-born son Oliver, and
ever since there had been an Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards. Then I told
how one of these later Olivers, which one a matter of no consequence, had
written verses and put them into the mouth of the doughty
Smite-and-spare-not, sitting his horse, stark and strong, at the head of
his men on Naseby Field, and gazing with grim, grey eyes on the opening
movements of the fight. And, nothing loth, I trolled them out roundly
across the meadows, till the peewits screamed and a distant dog began to
bay:
"Princelet and king, and mitre and ring,
Earl and baron and squire,
Oliver worries 'em, harries and flurries 'em,
With siege and slaughter and fire.
With the arm of the Flesh and the sword of the Spirit,
Push of pike and the Word,
Smiting and praying, and praising and slaying,
Oliver fights for the Lord.
With the sword He brought the work is wrought,
We finish here to-day.
When yon rags and remnants of Babylon
Are blown and battered away.
Hurrah for the groans of 'em, soon shall the bones of 'em,
_Steady!_ Hell-rakers at large,
Rot under the sod. _Pass the word: 'God_
_Is our strength?'_ There goes Oliver. _Charge!_"
When I had done she applauded so that my face burned until I was
discommoded and fell into her trap.
"I wish you'd written them, Master Wheatman."
"Well, I did," said I grumpily, not liking to be bereft of any little
glory in her eyes.
"What, you?" Her eyebrows arched and her lips curled. "You, oh, never.
'Smiting and praying'? 'The arm of the Flesh and the sword of the
Spirit.'" She mouthed the words deliciously.
"But, doubtless, when you see my Lord Brocton again, you'll put in the
Word and the praying." Here her sweet voice trailed off into a dainty
snuffle: "'My dear lord, since out of the mouths of babes and sucklings
proceedeth wisdom, hearken, I pray you, unto me, Oliver Wheatman, to wit
of the Hanyards, and amend ye your ways lest I hit you over your cockscomb
again, and very much harder than before. Repent ye, my lord, for the hour
is at hand, and if you don't, I'll thump you into one of our Kate's
blackberry jellies.' And here endeth the goodly discourse of that saintly
rib-roaster, Master Hit-him-first-and-then-pray-for-him Wheatman of the
Hanyards."
It was simply glorious to be so tormented by this witch with the dancing
blue eyes.
"For this scandalous contempt of the Muses," said I soberly, "I shall
punish you by frizzling your share of the ham to a cinder."
During my schoolboy days I had roamed the countryside till I knew it as
an open book, and this minute knowledge was our salvation now. The
immediate need was food, and food obtained without price and without our
being observed by anyone. At seven o'clock on a hard winter morning in
open country, this seemed to require a miracle. As a matter of fact, it
was as easy as shelling peas.
Since crossing the heath we had been travelling nearer to one of the main
roads, that leading out of the east gate to the town, and now we got our
first glimpse of it lying like a broad, brown ribbon half-way down the
slope of a very steep hill. In the upper half, this hill was pretty well
wooded and the road cut clean through the wood, but between us and the
wood there lay the level crest of the hill, cut by hedges into several
fields, and crossed by a rough cart-track leading past a roomy,
one-storied cottage, grey-walled and brown-thatched, and on through the
wood into the main road. The cottage, with its outbuildings, made a
little farmstead, and here lived Dick Doley and his wife Sal, who did a
little farming, but mainly lived by huckstering. Today was market-day at
Stafford, and unless they had broken the routine of half a lifetime, they
would now be packing their little cart with marketables and soon be off
for the town. They had neither chick nor child, lad-servant nor lassie,
and they would leave the cottage empty and at our disposal. At this time
of the day I could, of course, have trusted both, but they were very human
bodies of a sort to rejoice the business side of the heart of Joe Braggs,
and it was best not to give them the chance of blabbing later in the day
when, for a moral certainty, they would both be market fresh. Besides, it
was unfair to thrust myself on the kindness of anyone. I had more than
once wondered what had happened to poor little Marry-me-quick.
I scrambled through the hedge and peeped down the road. I was right. Dick
and his wife were busy loading up. So we waited behind the hedge till they
had cleared off, and indeed did not move till I saw them and their cart
pass along the road at the foot of the hill.
Time has not blurred the memory of a single detail of our stay in this
welcome house of refuge, but the telling of what was moving and charming
to me would, I fear, bore others. There was a ham, two indeed, and
flitches beside, in the rack hanging from the ceiling, and there were
eggs--three, to be precise--in the larder, to which, by equal good luck
considering the time of the year, I added two more by a raid into the
hen-house. It was all natural and simple enough, but Mistress Waynflete
hailed their production almost as amazedly as if I had indeed drawn them
out of my hat. But how I fetched and carried, chopped wood and drew water,
swept the floor and laid the table, fried ham and boiled eggs, doing all
these things with music in my heart and a noisy song on my lips--is
everything to me and nothing to my tale.
Mistress Waynflete had disappeared into one of the three or four rooms of
which the house consisted, to make herself presentable, as she absurdly
put it. When the table was laid and the ham cooked, I halloed the news to
her, and rushed off to the shed to attend to my outward appearance. I did
want it, being indeed not far short of filthy.
Perhaps I hurried unexpectedly. At any rate, on returning I found
Mistress Waynflete bending over something on the hearth. Straightening
herself hastily, and with a pretty confusion, at my approach, she cried,
"Oh, Master Oliver, the ham was burning, and you threatened my share of