The Yeoman Adventurer
it, you know!"
I could not reply. Down to her hips her rich amber hair flowed like a
bridal veil, and from amid a wealth of snowy lace, fluttering on the orbed
glory of perfect womanhood, her neck rose smooth and stately as a shaft of
alabaster. Her cheeks crimsoned with maiden shamefastness, but the blue
eyes met mine without a hint of maiden fear, and for that thanks as well
as reverence filled my heart as I bowed to her. Maidenlike, she drew her
golden veil more closely over her bosom, and tripped back to finish her
toilet, leaving me amated and abashed by the vision I had beheld. I think
it was from that moment that my joy in my work began to be mingled with
the despair of my love. Certainly it was a chastened Oliver Wheatman who
placed a chair for her when she came in again for breakfast, and helped
her to the good things a kindly fortune had provided.
It is my belief that each of us was secretly amused at the steady zeal
with which the other attacked the meal. We wrangled over the odd egg, each
insisting on the other having it, she because I was strong, and needed it,
I because I was strong and could do without it, and finally adopted the
usual compromise. We had more than gone round the clock with barely a
mouthful, and we ate as those who know not where the next meal's meat is
to come from. Frankly, I, at any rate, gave myself a fair margin before
the pinch should come again, and Mistress Waynflete averred that she had
never in her life before eaten so much or so toothsomely.
Our meal over, I stacked the fire with fresh logs, asked and obtained
permission to smoke a pipe, and made my sweet mistress cosy in the
chimney-corner. Then we began to take stock of our position.
"There's no good to come of hurrying," said I. "Here we are both snug and
safe, and your night's rest was but short. Let us see where we stand."
I did not really believe that any amount of talking would help much, but
repose would do her good, and I had a big idea running in and out of my
mind. Our first difficulty, food and rest, had been overcome, and I was
bent on mastering the next. No amount of discussion gave us any key to the
one great mystery. When Brocton had captured Colonel Waynflete at Milford,
the obvious thing to do with him was to send him prisoner to the Duke at
Lichfield. Though the Colonel carried no papers which made his purpose
clear, Brocton knew well what the object of his journey was, and the
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act put the Colonel in his power. Or, he
might have carried him before a justice of the peace, his friend Master
Dobson for choice, and had him committed to the town jail. The course
actually taken, that of sending him ahead, under guard, in the very van of
the royal army, was to us utterly inexplicable. His mad lust for Mistress
Margaret explained the separation of father and daughter. The thought did
occur to me, though I took great care not to hint at it, that he intended
to make away with the Colonel, and looked to finding tools among his
blackguardly dragoons and an opportunity when in actual conflict with the
Highlanders. I hesitated, however, to believe that Brocton was such a
villain as to commit an unnecessary murder. The plan he had adopted had,
anyhow, this advantage to us that, when we did come into touch with the
prisoner, our chances of assisting him were far greater than if he were in
jail in Stafford or Lichfield.
Whatever my lord's motives were, it was clear that he was not acting in
the plain, straight-dealing manner to be expected of one in his position.
There were other signs of crookedness, slight but not without weight. I
could understand his joy on finding me at Marry-me-quick's. It meant that
I was a rebel, and as a loyal man, who had gone to expenses to prove his
loyalty, he might easily get the Hanyards as a reward, and thus round off
the family property in our neighbourhood. His reference to a "solatium"
puzzled me, but it did not seem anything of consequence. What had I but
the Hanyards to solace him with? A more important puzzle had been his
behaviour at Master Dobson's. To find me on the royal side, as he then
supposed, and to hear my reason for it, had clean dazed him. Then there
was the look, a signal-look beyond a doubt, which I had surprised him
giving his bully, Major Pimple-face, and which was followed by the
latter's attempt to embroil the stranger from London in a row.
"It is useless, Master Wheatman, to speculate further on what Lord
Brocton is doing," said my mistress at last. "He has his ends. I am one of
them. Another is, no doubt, to fill his pockets, somehow or other. It was
common talk in town that he was head over ears in debt."
While we had talked and had rested, I had not been idle. Dick Doley's
roomy kitchen had two windows, one overlooking the cart-track, and another
the slope of the hill. The hill was so made and the house so placed that
from this second window we could see the strip of road at the bottom of
the hill where it curved on to the level again. I had kept a sharp look
out on that bit, but had seen no one pass along it either way as yet.
In one corner of the room Dick kept an ancient fowling-piece, more of a
tool of husbandry than a weapon, since his only use for it was to scare
birds. It was a heavy, unhandy thing, with a brass barrel down which I
could have dropped a sizable duck egg, and round its thick-rimmed nozzle
some one had rudely graven, "Happy is he that escapeth me." I fetched it
out of its corner, and cleaned and oiled it. I now loaded it, for
powder-horn and shot-bag hung near it on the wall, putting in a handful
of the biggest sort of shot, swan-shot as I should call them. During this
task, Mistress Waynflete watched me narrowly, but made no reference to it.
"Now," said I, "our main requisite is the stuff, the ready, the rhino,
the swag--call it what you will. How do you fancy me as a knight of the
road? The first copper-faced farmer I come across shall surely stand and
deliver. Here's an argument he cannot resist."
At last my scrutiny of the road was rewarded. A solitary horseman came in
sight from the direction of the town.
"Mistress Waynflete," said I, picking up the fowling-piece, "there's a
traveller yonder coming from Stafford. It will be well if I go and ask him
a few questions."
She almost leaped at me, red anger flashing in her eyes but her face
white as milk. "Sir," she said, "you shall not turn thief for me. I will
not have it."
"Pray, madam," replied I huffily, "expound the moral difference between
stealing ham and stealing guineas. I'm all for morality."
"I cannot, Master Wheatman, but you must not, shall not go." She caught
hold of my sleeve. "Say you won't! If you are found out it means--"
"I shall not be found out. You may take that for sure. Think you that I
cannot pluck yon chough without being pinched? It's no more robbery than
our eating Dick's ham and eggs. We are soldiers in enemy's country, and we
plunder by right of the known rules of war. As a concession to your
prejudices in favour of the jog-trot morality of peace, I will e'en ask
him whether he be for James or George, and borrow or command his guineas
in accordance with his reply. Loose my sleeve, madam!"
I loosened the grip of her fingers, and led her back to her chair. "You
overrate my danger, sweet mistress, and under rate our need. Without
money, we might as well lie under the nearest hedge and leave Jack Frost
to settle matters his way, and a cold, nasty way it would be. Your guinea
is a good fighter, and we need his help. It must be done, and, never fear,
I'll carry it through safely."
So I left her, white hands grappling the arms of her chair, and white
face turned away from me.
CHAPTER IX
MY CAREER AS A HIGHWAYMAN
I left the cottage from the rear and struck slantwise across the fields
to reach the shelter of the trees and undergrowth that covered the slope
down to the road. I ran hard so as to shake irresolution out of my mind,
for I found myself half wishing that Mistress Waynflete had pleaded with
me at first instead of trying to thrust me out of my plan. After all the
highwayman's was hardly my calling in life. So I ran hard, saying to
myself that it must be done, and the sooner it was over the better. Then I
laughed. With my rusty old birding-piece I was as ill-equipped for
highwaymanship as I was for farming with my Georgics. "Stand and deliver,"
quoth I to myself, "or I'll double your weight with swan-shot." Were the
unknown horseman a resolute man armed with a hair-trigger, I was as good
as done for.
Arrived in the shelter of the wood, I began picking my way through the
thick undergrowth towards the road. Fallen branchlets snapped beneath my
heedless feet and the sounds rang in my ears like pistol-shots. A saucy
robin cocked his care-free eye on me from the top of a crab-tree, and I
could have envied him as I stumbled by. It was perhaps fourscore yards
through, and half-way I stopped to listen. Yes, there came to my ear the
slow trot-ot-ot of hoofs on the hard road. I went on again until, through
the leafless tangle, I began to get glimpses of the highway. My fate was
dragging me on. In a month's time my shrivelling carcase might be swinging
in chains on the top of Wes'on Bank, an ensample to evil-doers. The
thought made me shiver, and I jerked out a broken prayer that my intended
victim might turn out some fat, unarmed farmer, as easy a prey as an
over-fed gander. Then I cursed myself for a fool. No man can mortgage past
piety for present sin. Who was I that I should be allowed to steal on good
security?
Trot-ot-ot. Trot-ot-ot. He was within easy shot now, and I stopped to
make sure of my rickety old weapon. A dragoon's musket would not have
needed such constant care. "Life turns on trifles," said Mistress
Waynflete.
In lifting my eyes from the priming to move on again, something in the
line of vision made me start. On my left, less than a dozen paces from me,
there lay on the ground, on a clean patch beneath a conspicuously-forked
hawthorn, a man's jacket and plumed hat.
A lion playing with a lamb would not have given me pause more abruptly. I
stole silently up to them. They were fine but somewhat faded garments,
modish and even foppish, and, so far as I could distinguish any
peculiarity, military in appearance, and evidently belonged to a person of
some quality. Nor had they been flung there in haste, for the coat was
neatly folded and the hat disposed carefully on top of it. How long had
they been there? I picked up the hat, and there was still the gloss of
recent sweat on its inside brim.
This, however, was no time for idle problems, a very urgent one being on
hand. Forward I crept to the side of the road, and, lying flat down on the
ground, pushed the stock of my gun on to the short grass, and peeped
cautiously to my right down the hill. I was about thirty or forty yards
from a bend in the road, and had intended to be much less, but my
discovery and my confused, half-conscious thinking about it, had deflected
me a little from my course.
Trot-ot-ot. He would be in sight in a few seconds. Trot-ot-ot, plainer
than ever, and there he was. The moment that he was in full view I made an
astonishing discovery, and saw an astonishing sight.
The discovery was that the solitary horseman, walking his powerful grey
with a slack rein, and lost in thought, was Master Freake.
The sight was the rush of three men from their lurking-places in the
brushwood. Two of them were soldiers, and Brocton's dragoons at that, a
sample of the town-sweepings Jack had complained of. One seized the reins,
the other held a carbine point-blank at the horseman's head.
These were plainly deserters or freebooters, acting after their kind, and