The Yeoman Adventurer
I laughed lightly and was glad, for was not this calm, brave, splendid
woman thinking of how we two had met?
From the first cock of the sorrel's ears to this so characteristic remark
of Margaret's could not have been five minutes, and now, although owing to
the downward slope to our left I have mentioned, and its corresponding
slope to the right, neither body was yet in sight, they were so nearly on
us that differences between them became obvious. The southern troup was
small, was not travelling beyond a smart trot, and was, so far as the men
were concerned, absolutely quiet. The body from the north was large, was
forcing a hot gallop, and much noise and shouting came from the troopers.
It was plain that we were in for it. The men from Newcastle were no doubt
coming north as a reinforcement, but it was absurd to suppose that they
had not been told of our doings and of our escape northwards. They had not
overtaken us, and we must be on the road somewhere. The men from the north
had not met us. Never since the world began had two and two been easier to
put together. There was only one place for us to be in and this was it. A
short parley, a glance our way, and an overwhelming force would dash at
the picket of pines.
The bare road lay there in the moonlight, half a mile of it in clear view
on either hand. The two bodies came in sight within a few seconds of each
other, and the Colonel snapped his fingers and chuckled.
From the north a wild rush of spurring, flogging, shouting, cursing
horsemen, about a hundred of them. No order, no discipline, no
soldiership--nothing but mad haste and madder fear.
The mare began to plunge, and the Colonel, leaping off, nearly strangled
her in the coat. The sorrel got uneasy but gave me no real trouble. Sultan
took not the slightest notice of the din behind him, and leisurely cropped
the tough bussocks of grass at his feet.
I looked to the road again. The southern body was small, not more than a
score, compact, riding smartly but with military order and precision. The
man at their head, the officer in command, no doubt, spurred on and began
to shout at the oncoming northerners. He might as well have spoken fair
words to an avalanche, and the men behind him began to waver and most of
them pulled up. It was useless. The torrent swept into them and bore them
backward, tumbling some of them over, men and horses together, but
incorporating most of them in its own madness. In less than five minutes
the last batch of dragooners had cursed and spurred themselves out of
sight, and the bright moon shone down on a road once more bare and white
save for a few scattered patches of black.
The Colonel uncovered the mare's head and nuzzled her. All he said was,
but that very gleefully, "Geordie, my boy, I'll be routing you out of St.
James's within the fortnight. I'll learn you to neglect the King of
Sweden's Colonels! Damme, Oliver, it made me think of Pharaoh's kine--one
lot eating the other up. Now, sweetheart my Madge, we'll have your pretty
eyes a-bye-bye in no time."
"I never saw anything so funny in my life," said Margaret. "On with your
coat, Oliver, before you take cold."
From all of which I learned to take, as they did, the fat with the lean
in soldiering, and not to care a brass farthing which it was. Still, I was
as yet so young at the game, that, though I was careful to swagger it out
and say nothing, I did wonder why the body from the south was so small.
And I wonder as I write whether it was or was not the mistake of my life
merely to wonder then.
CHAPTER XIV
"WAR HAS ITS RISKS"
I slept unsoundly and in snatches. Margaret was in the room beneath me,
"dreaming in Italian," thought I, in unhappy imitation of her dainty gibe
at her father. A problem was on my mind, and that was ever with me an
enemy to sleep. I meant being the best of soldiers, and this that worried
me was a military problem. To be short, I could not help asking myself,
"Were the dragoons from the south intended as a reinforcement to the horse
from the north?" And somehow I could not think they were. As the top-dog
spirit in me put it: "It was like sending Jack to reinforce me. _Quod
est absurdum_."
Time the Explainer permits me to be frank. There was this other side to
my problem that I could not bring myself to be sure the Colonel's escape
had come merely by happy chance. He was no party to contriving it, of that
I never doubted, but it did look like a contrivance. We had been at the
"Rising Sun" for six hours or more. Stone, the nearest head-quarters of
Cumberland's forces, was only nine miles south of it, yet no attempt had
been made to follow the fugitive. No, thought I again, that's wrong. Weir
was sent on his track and actually found him. But this was as useless, so
it seemed, as sending twenty dragoons, hundreds being available, to
reinforce a thousand stout horse. There was no proportion between the ends
proposed and the means adopted.
If the handful of dragoons were not a reinforcement, it was a pursuit of
us, and this posed another problem. Why had the pursuit been allowed to
flag all the afternoon and evening, to be taken up again far on in the
night? What fresh fact, if any, had determined it? I could think of none,
nor, on reflection, was one wanted, since both Master Freake and Jack had
last night witnessed to the worn-out state of Brocton's horses.
Consequently his dragoons would have been sent after the Colonel earlier
had they been fit. Their coming, when fit, proved their anxiety to retake
him. Therefore he was not allowed to escape, and the conclusion of my
argument hit its major premise clean in the teeth.
"Oliver, my boy," said I to myself, "say a bit of Virgil and go to sleep.
These matters are beyond you."
I picked on a passage and started mumbling it to myself. It was a lucky
hit, for when I had in solemn whispers rolled off the great lines in the
sixth Aeneid which foretell the work and glory of Rome, I thought of my
Lord Ridgeley, thiever by cunning process of law of most of my ancient
patrimony, and his blackguard son, my Lord Brocton, lustfully hunting the
proud, gracious woman beneath, and I said grandiosely to myself, "Rome's
destiny is thine too, Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards, and these betitled
scullions are the proud ones you shall war down."
The notion was so soothing that I fell asleep again.
I have leaped over uninteresting but by no means unimportant events. We
were staying the night at a wayside hostel, called the "Red Bull,"
situated at the point where a cross-road cut the main road. We were still
in Staffordshire, a matter on which Margaret had laughingly placed the
utmost importance, though an urchin, standing by the rude signpost, could
have flung a pebble into Cheshire. Houseroom was of the narrowest, and I
was tucked away in the attics, in a room I had to crawl about in
two-double, walking upright being out of the question. It was the grown-up
daughter's room, and she had been bundled out to make place for me, a fact
I did not learn till it was beyond need of remedy. The lass had a good
pleasant woman to mother, but her father, the host, was an
ill-conditioned, surly runt, whose only good point was a still tongue.
Margaret was in the room below, and her father next to her along a narrow
gangway. From my attic I got down to this gangway by means of a staircase
hardly to be told from a ladder. The gangway, just past the Colonel's
door, became a little landing whence three or four steps led down to a
larger landing, from which one could mount up to the other and
corresponding half of the house or descend to the entrance hall with which
the various rooms of the ground floor connected.
I awoke again in a dim dull dawn. Tired of these bouts of wakefulness I
got off the bed--for I was lying full-dressed even to my boots--and crept
softly to the window. I would keep watch and ward for Margaret, as a true
knight oweth to do. Then, if my obscure misgivings were unfounded, I
should at any rate have done my duty.
There had been a slight fall of snow, enough to cover the ground and
bring everything up into sharp relief. My window was a dormant-window, its
sill being about four feet from the eaves. I flung it open, careful not to
make a sound, pushed out head and shoulders, and took stock.
I dipped my fingers in the snow and found there was near an inch of it.
The "Red Bull" stood back from the road, and on each side of the inn
proper, outhouses and stables jutted out to the wayside. Drawn up under a
hovel on the left was a huge wagon piled with sacks, probably of barley
bound for Leek, a town renowned for its ale.
Without was silence and stillness, as of the grave, and it was nipping
cold, but my mind was happily busy, having so many delicious moments to
live over again. If by some unhappy chance I never saw her again and lived
to be a hundred, I should never tire of my memories. She had as many
facets as Mr. Pitt's diamond, as many tones as the great organ in
Lichfield Cathedral. To know her had enriched my life and opened my mind.
What Propertius had said of his Cynthia, I repeated to myself of my
Margaret, _Ingenium nobis ipsa puella est_. 'My' Margaret! Well, it
did her no harm for me to think it, and, after all, the sly, silly
babblings of my under-self could be shouted down by the stern voice of
common sense.
Here, under the stress of a new force, my thoughts flew off at a tangent,
and I said to myself, "Bravo, Romeo! You shall find me a rare Juliet."
I had, indeed, much ado to keep from laughing aloud, as my situation was
delicious, not to say delicate. For, on a sudden, noiselessly as the beat
of a bat's wing, two feet of ladder had shot up above the eaves, and even
now an ardent lover was hasting aloft, dreaming of lispings and kissings
to come. I mustn't frighten him too soon or too much or he'd drop off, but
as soon as he was fairly on the slope he should sip the sweetness of lips
of steel. So I crept back, got a pistol, and stood to the left of the
window.
I waited till his body darkened the room and then took a furtive look at
him. It was no village lover climbing up at peep of dawn to greet his
lass. It was one of Brocton's dragoons, one of the five who had been at
the Hanyards.
In a twink I shot him. Without a word, he slithered down the tiles,
leaving a mush of blood-red snow. His right leg slipped aslant between two
rungs of the ladder, and his body, checked in its fall, swung round and
dangled over the eaves.
In the room was a large oaken clothes chest. I dragged it to the light,
tilted it on end, and jammed it into the gable of the window, which,
luckily, it fitted completely, and so blocked any further attack from the
roof. Snatching up my weapons, I tumbled down the ladder, only to hear the
heavy tramping of feet upstairs. Standing by Margaret's door, I waited
until the head and shoulders of the first man came in sight. He carried a
lantern, and its yellow rays lit up for me the ugly face of the sergeant
of dragoons. I fired my second pistol at him, crashing the lantern to
pieces. Down he went, whether hit or not I did not know. In the darkness I
heard the rush of a second man who came on so fearlessly and fast that he
was far into the passage before I met him with a fierce thrust of my
rapier. I thrilled with the zeal of old Smite-and-spare-not as, for the
first time, I felt the point of my rapier in a man's body, and drove it
home with a yell. Down he went too, with a gurgle of blood in his throat,
and Margaret, coming out of her room, stumbled over his body as she raced
after me along the passage.
The Colonel was at the stair-head before me, but there was, for the
moment, no work for him. The enemy had tumbled noisily downstairs into the