The Yeoman Adventurer
"Oddsfish, as my great uncle used to say, I've come to save your life,
Master Wheatman!"
"You need not trouble, sir," said I, "to save what is freely yours to
throw away."
"Very well said, sir," he answered, "and I shall not forget it."
"Good lad, Oliver!" said the Colonel, dipping for his snuff-box.
"Still, I must prove my point!" said Charles, smiling merrily. "My Court
consists of precisely seven ladies and an unlimited number of gentlemen,
the latter, for the most part, fiery chiefs who slash off men's heads as
if they were tops of thistles. Yet here are you, sir, keeping two of them
all to yourself. And such a two! Lady Ogilvie, whose charms are without
blemish--"
"Nay, sir," said I.
"May I pull his ears, Your Highness?" asked her ladyship tartly.
"You may," said Charles, "unless he proves his point. A Prince must be
just, you know!"
"That's fair," said Margaret.
"Of course," retorted Lady Ogilvie. "He'll be right if he says I've an
eye like an ox and a mouth like a frog."
"Save your ears, Master Wheatman!" said Charles, grinning at me. "What's
the blemish?"
"Davie!" said I.
The Prince rocked with laughter, and her ladyship enjoyed it quite as
fully.
"It's the smartest hit I've heard since I left Paris," said the Prince.
"Sir," said I, "be good enough to explain. Who is Davie?"
"Her ladyship's husband," he replied.
"Damme!" I ejaculated. "I thought he was only an ordinary Scotchman."
Whereat everybody laughed.
"A most delightful interlude in a heavy day's work," said the Prince. "I
am unfeignedly vexed, ladies, at having to rob you of so agreeable a
cavalier, but I need Master Wheatman myself."
* * * * *
Half an hour later the Colonel stood with me at the town's end to give me
my final instructions. I was on Sultan, with urgent letters in my pocket
and important work on hand.
We took a pinch of snuff together very solemnly. Then he snapped his box,
rubbed Sultan's velvet nose, shook my hand, said good-bye gruffly, and
strode back townward. I cantered on into the open road and the night.
CHAPTER XVII
MY NEW HAT
Here was what I had dreamed of. Here was the dearest wish of my heart
gratified. I was twenty-three, and I had three-and-twenty's darling
equipment--a magnificent horse, a pair of unerring pistols, a fine rapier,
a pocket full of guineas, the memory of a woman's grace and beauty, and a
tough job in hand. The only material thing I really wanted was a new hat,
for yester morning's milk and subsequent bashings and bruisings had ruined
my old one. I had not bothered about it as long as it had bobbed alongside
the grey woollen hood of Margaret's domino, but, cheek by jowl with her
new hat, it had become an offence, and must be remedied.
The black shadow flitted in and out of my mind. I was clean and clear of
all blood-guiltiness. I had struck for Margaret as he would have struck
for Kate. Fate had been too strong for us, but whatever penance life
should lay upon me should be paid to the uttermost farthing. I had this
comfort that, could Jack ride up to me now, there would be no change in
him. There would be for me the old hearty hand-grip and the boyish,
affectionate smile, just as when he had run in to me on the town-hall
steps.
I had been commissioned by the Prince to do three things: first, to
deliver a dispatch to my Lord George Murray, wherever I should find him,
which would probably be at Ashbourne, twelve miles ahead along a good
road; second, to carry a letter to Sir James Blount at his house called
Ellerton Grange, somewhere near Uttoxeter; third, to make a wide circuit
west and south of Derby, picking up all the information I could as to the
feeling of the populace and the disposition of the enemy's forces, and to
report on this to the Prince in person at Derby at six o'clock the
following night. On this third commission the Prince and Colonel Waynflete
had laid great stress. An independent and trustworthy report was, it
appeared, of the utmost importance.
Finally, as a dependent commission arising out of the first of the duties
imposed on me by the Prince, I bore a letter to my Lord Ogilvie from her
ladyship. She had summoned me willy-nilly to her room privily.
"Tell Davie yonder that I'm very well and very, very guid," she said, as
she handed me the letter.
"With infinite pleasure, my lady," I replied.
"It will be true, ye ken," she asserted, as if there was a corner for
dubiety in her own mind regarding the matter.
"Solemnly and obviously true, my lady," I agreed.
"Oh, thou incomparable Oliver, I wish you were a lass," she said, lifting
her merry, girlish face level with mine, and putting a hand on each of my
shoulders.
"Why, my lady?" I said, straightening at her touch.
"Then you could give Davie this as well!" which said, she pecked lightly
at me with her sweet lips and kissed me.
It had flustered me greatly, but she only laughed ringingly and
delightsomely as I backed out of the room. And when, door-knob in hand, I
made my last bow, she had wagged her finger at me for emphasis and said,
"Dinna forget to tell Davie I'm very guid."
Good she was, as beaten gold, and she kept her spirits up to this high
pitch to the very end. You can read in Mr. Volunteer Ray's history of the
whole affair of the 'Forty-five' how, after Culloden, she was taken
prisoner while dressing for the ball which was to crown the expected
victory.
I smiled a young man's smile as I thought of it. Experience was writing
some items on the credit side of my new account with life. I had met a
winsome lady of title and she had kissed me. Margaret, behind my back and
to a third party, had called me an "incomparable" something. What, I knew
not,--"servant" probably, but I cared not what.
Mile after mile passed without incident of any kind until, at a second's
notice, I rode into a ring of muskets which closed round me out of vacancy
as if by magic. It was the outermost picket of the army at Ashbourne. I
gave the parole, "Henry and Newcastle," and demanded a guide to my Lord
George Murray's quarters. There came a Gaelic grunt out of the gloom; men
and muskets disappeared, with the exception of a single clansman, who
seized Sultan's bridle and led me into the town.
The General was quartered at the "Swan with Two Necks," a very
respectable hostelry, where my first care was to have a cloth thrown over
Sultan, and to order for him a bucket of warm small beer with three or
four handfuls of oatmeal stirred into it. While this was adoing, and I was
awaiting a summons to his lordship's presence, I took a nip of brandy in
the public room of the inn, and over it amused myself by reading a crude
fly-sheet nailed on the wall, offering a reward of fifty guineas to anyone
giving information leading to the arrest of one Samuel Nixon, commonly
called 'Swift Nicks,' a notorious highwayman, six feet high, of very
genteel appearance, well-spoken, but a cruel, bloody ruffian with it all.
The Highlander interrupted my reading by beckoning me to follow him.
Upstairs we went, and he ushered me into a room where were two gentlemen
seated on opposite sides of a table on which were a small map and two
large glasses containing a yellowish liquid.
The younger of them was of much the same general appearance as
Maclachlan, though by the look of him a simpler and sweeter man. The
other, a middle-aged, domineering man with a powerful face, looked angrily
at me as I handed him my dispatch.
He read it impatiently, threw it down beside the map, and said, "They're
coming on to-night, Davie." Then, curtly to me, "Your name, sir?"
"Wheatman of the Hanyards."
"Hanyards? Humph! Are you an Irishman?"
"No, my lord. Not even a Scotchman!"
He glared at me, but his companion laughed, and said, "That's one under
your short ribs, Geordie!"
"Damn the Irish!" cried Murray. "They're the ruination of the whole
business, Davie, and ye know it."
"Of course they are," he replied, "but that's no reason for telling it to
an English loon who thinks less of a Scotchman than he does of a pickelt
herring."
"That may be, my lord," said I to him, "but I think so well of one
Scottish lady that I'm proud to be her humble courier." And I handed him
his letter.
"Man! man!" he said ecstatically, as he ripped it open, "ye're welcome as
sunshine in December. It's from Ishbel. God bless her pretty face!"
He read the letter eagerly and then thrust it into his bosom.
"I am, further," I went on, "entrusted with a message from her ladyship."
"God bless her! Out with it, man, out with it!"
"I was to inform you that she was very, very good," said I, soberly as a
judge passing sentence.
"What do you think of that, Geordie Murray? Very, very guid! Eh, man,
isn't she a monkey? God bless her!"
"I'll send the whole lot of 'em packing off back to Edinburgh," said
Murray. "Women are a nuisance on a campaign. Your Ishbel, be hanged to
her, wants a carriage all her own and another for her fineries."
"Ye ken a lot about soldiering, Geordie," retorted Ogilvie, "no man more,
but ye ken less about soldiers than a lad of ten. At Gladsmuir I said to
MacIntosh, 'Let's get the damn thing over, Sandy, and be back to breakfast
wi' the leddies!' And we did."
"You did so," acknowledged Murray. "Now, Davie, take our courier out and
feed him. I thank you, sir! You have ridden speedily. Your pace is faster
than your tongue."
"My lord," said I, "although I am doing his Royal Highness such poor
service as lies in me, I am not yet duly acting under his commission and
authority."
"What of it?" he asked.
"Hence I am not an officer under your command, my lord!"
"Excellent logic! And the therefore, my beef-eating friend, is....?"
"That I would as lief knock your head off as look at you!"
"When you are an officer," cried he, "by gad, sir, I'll teach ye the
manners of an officer. Till then, my birkie," rising and holding out his
hand, "guid luck to ye!"
We shook hands heartily and so parted.
"He's a grand man is Geordie Murray," said Ogilvie, as he led me to
another room across the landing. "Just a wee bit birsy, maybe, but these
damned Irish have got his kail through the reek. They're o'ermuch on his
spirits of late."
All his other talk was of his lady, though he looked well enough after
me, and I made a good meal of the better half of a cold chicken, a cottage
loaf, and a tankard of poor ale. Ashbourne is noted, say the wise in such
matters, for the best malt and the poorest ale in England.
I am overmuch English, as is often the case with us who live in the very
heart of England. The famous Mr. Johnson is a shire-fellow of mine, and
very proud I am of it, and reckon it among the greatest events of my life
that he has bullyragged me soundly for differing from him, and being
right, about a line of Virgil he had misquoted in my hearing. Like Mr.
Johnson, I love men and loathe dancing-masters, and these Scotsmen were
men indeed, my Lord Ogilvie, as I came to know later, one of the choicest.
He was a spare-built man, in years thirty or thereabouts, with a face all
lines and angles, and dotted with pock-marks. For a lord, his purse was
very bare of guineas, and nature had made up for it by giving him a belly
full of pride. For him, the Highland line had been the boundary of the
known world, so that his mind was a chequer-work of curious ignorance and
knowledge.
From the first I liked him for his joy in his dainty lady. She was the
daughter of a cadet of a distant branch of the famous Bobbing John's
family, and had spent nearly all her life in France till, on a chance
visit to Scotland, she had been snapped up by Ogilvie. They were a
strangely matched pair, she from the gay _salons_ of Paris, he from