The Yeoman Adventurer
together.
The current of her thoughts now ran and glittered in the opposite
direction. She made me for the moment her intimate, lifting up the veil
over her past life, and giving me peeps and vistas of her wanderings and
experiences. She jested and gibed. She sang little snatches of song in
some foreign tongue. "You're sure you don't understand Italian?" she
demanded, stopping short half-way through a bar, and quizzing me with her
eyes, now blue as sapphires in the bright sunshine.
"Not a word of it," said I.
"A grave disadvantage," she said airily. "It's the only language one can
love in." And off she struck again.
Now she sang something soothing and sad, with a wistful lilt in it that
died into a low wail. It needed no Italian to be understood, for it was
written in the language of human experience. A woman's heart throbbed in
the lilt and broke in the wail.
This sweet interval of intimacy verging on friendship was ended by our
close approach to the main road. We had been travelling, heedless of roads
and tracks, across a champaign country, and the slope up to the top of
Yarlet Bank now lay before us. I led the way, skulking behind such poor
cover as the gaunt hedgerows provided, and, when only a hundred paces from
the top, I asked her to crouch down, awaiting my signal to advance, while
I crept forward on my hands and knees to the edge of the road which here
climbed the brow of the hill through a deep cutting, along either margin
of which ran a straggling hedge.
To my relief, the road down the hill, both to right and left, was
completely deserted. I joyfully waved my arm to Mistress Waynflete, who
was soon by my side, looking down the road. To the right we could see for
nearly a mile. On the left our view was cut short by a bend, and I walked
a score of yards in that direction and shinned up a stout sapling. Our
luck was absolute. Not a soldier, not a living soul, was in sight.
"We might have had to skulk here for hours, waiting for an opportunity to
cross unseen," said I, on rejoining her, "but our gods above are
victorious, and we share their victory. So now for the 'Ring of Bells.'
There's a gate at the bottom of the hill. Come along, Mistress Waynflete!"
She followed me down the hedge-side. I turned once or twice to look at
her, carefully pretending that it was only to see how she was getting on.
The last time I thus stole another memory of her splendid presence we were
only a few paces from the gate, and when my reluctant eyes turned again to
their rightful work, they looked straight into a pair of fishy eyes set in
a face as blank and ugly as a bladder of lard.
Face and eyes belonged to a big, sleek, sly man, perched on the top bar
of the gate. He had a notebook in his hand in which he had been entering
some jottings. He suspended his writing to examine us, picking his nasty,
yellow teeth meanwhile with the point of his pencil. His horse was hitched
to the post on the Stoneward side of the gate, where the stile was. He was
well enough dressed, and, as far as I could see, unarmed.
It was a most exasperating thing to have pitched into him, whoever and
whatever he was, and indeed I much disliked the look of him, and would
gladly have knocked him on the head. True, travellers were not rare on
this road, since it was part of the great highway from London to Chester,
and the little thoroughfare town of Stone, some three miles ahead, had a
noted posthouse. However, I kept, or tried to keep, my feelings out of my
face and voice, and accosted him cheerily.
"Good day, friend! What may be the price of fat beeves in Stafford market
to-day?"
"Dearer than men's heads will be at the town gates after the next
assizes," he replied, stroking his notebook and grinning evilly.
"You'll never light on a Scotsman, dead or alive, that's worth as much as
a Staffordshire heifer," said I, leading the way past him to the stile,
over which I handed Mistress Margaret into the road.
"They won't all be Scotsmen, my friend," he replied, still stroking his
notebook.
"No?" said I, eager at heart to knock him off his perch.
"Nor men," he added, leering at Margaret.
"Come along, Sal," said I to her laughingly, "before the good gentleman
jots you down a Jacobite."
So we left him, and when, fifty paces down the road, I looked back at
him, he was jotting in his notebook again.
"I think he knows something about us," said I.
"Very likely," she replied calmly. "I've seen him once before in London,
talking to Major Tixall. Who could forget a face like that?"
"He's uglier than the big-mouthed dragoon."
"The dragoon was at any rate a soldier."
"And the worst of soldiers has, no doubt, some savour of grace in him."
"Quite so," she retorted. "His calling makes it necessary."
"And, so reasoning, you would say, I suppose, that the best of farmers
was to seek in the higher reaches of manliness."
"Have I not told you, Master Oliver, that between man's logic and woman's
logic there's a great gulf fixed?"
"Minds are minds," said I.
"And hearts are hearts," replied she, and so shut me up to my thinking
again.
We turned into a cart-track on our left leading in the direction of
Eccleshall. As we turned I saw that Bladder-face had mounted his horse and
was coming on toward Stone. There was no doubt that we should be pursued
from that quarter before long, and I grew heavy with anxiety as I saw how
hardly we were being pressed. The encounter had not, however, disturbed
Mistress Waynflete. On the contrary, she became gayer than ever, so gay
that, fool-like, I got quite vexed at it, for it was clear that something
had relieved her anxiety, and I knew it was nothing that I had done. I
worried over it, and at last hit on the explanation. She was rejoicing in
the help of the new partner.
"What do you make of Master Freake?" said I boorishly, cutting short a
lightsome trill, more Italian maybe.
"Make of what?" said she lightly.
"Master Freake."
"Forgive me, Master Wheatman," she replied, "but I didn't take you as
quickly as I ought to have done. I like the look of him. How pretty, pluck
them for me."
I stopped to gather the spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied,
saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
or what?"
She seemed much more concerned with her berries, which she praised
rapturously, and placed carefully in the bosom of her riding-dress before
replying.
"He's no doubt a grave and prosperous citizen of London. I've seen many
such, and he looks sworn brother to worthy Alderman Heathcoat. Moreover,
he talks merchantlike."
It seemed pretty certain that she had hit the right nail on the head. Her
explanation fitted his account of the large sums he was carrying and his
stay with and hold over Jack's father. True, Staffordshire seemed the
wrong place for such a man. Both he and his money would have been far
safer in Change Alley. If her explanation was acute and probable, her
manner of making it had convinced me that my explanation of her gaiety was
wrong. Of him she certainly had not been thinking. Then there was only one
thing left to account for it. What makes a maid as merry as a grig? Didn't
our Kate sing all morning when Jack was coming in the afternoon?
It was no concern of mine, and as a man sometimes makes his right hand
play his left hand at chess, so I now made stern Oliver lecture paltering
Wheatman, but without doing him much good. Naturally all this made me a
poor companion on the road, and for a long time Mistress Waynflete bore
with me patiently. Then she turned from her tra-la-la-ing to waken me up,
roundly declaring that I was bored with her company; and I had no defence,
ridiculous as the charge was.
"I've sung every song I know, and sung them my best, too, and you've
never once praised me. You'll have to learn, you know, Master Oliver, to
smile at a lady even when you really want to smack her. What do you do?
You just write on your face as plainly as this"--and here her dainty
finger toured her face, ending up where the tear of milk had
trembled--"S-M-A-C-K." I roared aloud, she did it so frankly and mirthfully. What
a treasury of moods she was! She had stepped across our house-place like a
queen, she had fronted that devil, Brocton, like a goddess, and now she
was larking like a schoolmaid.
Long as the way was, we seemed to me to be getting over the ground too
rapidly. Mistress Waynflete did not tire, and did full credit to her
father's soldiership. We circled round the red-tiled roofs of Eccleshall,
and at length took shelter in the pines that ringed the great pool. Across
the mere lay the road, and on the far side of the road from us was the
"Ring of Bells," standing well back, with a little green in front, in the
centre of which a huge post carried a board bearing the rudely painted
sign of the ale-house.
I scouted ahead, dodging from tree to tree along the edge of the mere, in
order to keep out of view of anyone moving on the road. Over against the
ale-house I crept still more warily through the wood to the edge of the
road. There was no one moving in or about the ramshackle little place, but
there was one unexpected thing in sight which gave me pause. Hitched by
the reins to a staple in the signpost was the finest horse I had ever set
eyes on, a slender, sinewy stallion, champing on his bit and pawing
nervously on the stone-hard ground.
Here was the shadow of a new trouble, though, indeed, there was nothing
to be surprised at, seeing that the countryside far and near was buzzing
with enemy activities. A rat in a barn might as justly complain of being
tickled by straws as I of jostling into difficulties. The horse without
betokened a rider within, and probably some one in the Duke's horse. I
beckoned Mistress Waynflete, and by signs indicated that extreme caution
was necessary. During the moments I was awaiting her I examined the
birding-piece to make sure it was in order. Caution, however, she flung to
the winds, for the moment she set eyes on the horse she joyously shouted
'Sultan' and made a wild, happy dash to cross the road.
I stopped her sternly, and in a brief whisper asked, "Who's Sultan?"
"Father's horse."
"We do not know for sure that your father is in the inn because his horse
is outside, and by your leave, madam, we'll make sure first. Keep right
behind yon thick tree, and await my return."
She looked calmly at me, but even before she could glide off, there came
from the ale-house an appalling volley of oaths and curses. It was a man's
voice, yelling in agonized blasphemy, and a woman's shrill treble floated
on the surface of the stream of virulence.
I caught Mistress Waynflete's wrist and steadied her. "Not your father,
apparently?" I said in a cool voice, though my head was whirling a bit
under the strain. "Here," I went on, fetching a fistful out of my pocket,
"are some guineas. Follow me, unhitch the horse, and if I shout to you to
be off, mount him from yon horse-trough, and away like lightning. That's
the road to Eccleshall, along which Master Freake is bound to come."
I thrust the guineas into her hand, gripped my weapon, slipped out of the
pines and across the road, circled the horse, and made to peep round the
jamb of the open door into the guest-room of the ale-house. As I did so,
the man yelled, "God damn, I'm on fire!" and the woman shrieked back,
"Burn, you foul devil, burn, and be damned!"
This was enough, and I burst in on a spectacle, strange, serious, on the
point of becoming terrible, and yet almost laughable. In the middle of the
room, a stout, shock-headed, red-elbowed woman stood, a pikel in her
strong outstretched hands. The sergeant of dragoons, with his back to a
roaring fire, was pinned against the hearthstead by the pitchfork, the