MY LORD BROCTON PILES UP HIS ACCOUNT
On the tenth day of my captivity, hope glimmered for the first time. When a man has been penned up in a dull room for ten days, with half-a-hundred-weight of rusty iron shackling his wrists and ankles, with poor food, and little of it at that, to eat, he can extract comfort out of a trifle.
In my case the trifle was a smile, her first smile in ten days. So far she had been as sulky as she was shapeless, bringing me my poor meals either without saying a word or, at best, snapping me up and saying that I got far better treatment than a rebel deserved.
She never told me her name, and I never learned it from any other source, so 'she' she must remain for me and my tale. She was perhaps thirty, perhaps five feet high, the shape of a black pudding, with stony, rather than ugly, features, and cruel, cat-like eyes. I hated her handsomely till she smiled at me.
She was, I suppose, my jailer's daughter, or servant, or something of the sort. I never knew, and my ignorance does not matter. She brought me my food, spake or spake not, according to the degree of vileness in her prevailing humour, and went off, leaving me to my thoughts and my painful shamblings round my prison-chamber.
My ignorance was limitless. I was a prisoner, and my prison was a room in a sizable farm-house with thick stone walls. Where the house was I had no idea other than that it could not be far from the place where I was taken, which, again, could not be far from the town of Penrith. There was one window in my cell, the sill of which was as high from the ground as my chin when standing upright. But I never stood upright, being jammed into a cross made of good, solid iron, foul with rust, and having bracelets at the tips for my ankles and wrists. It kept me a foot short of my full stretch. I could get my eye to the edge of the window and no farther, and then I saw much sky and a little desolate moorland running up into a gauntly-wooded hill country.
I spent my waking hours thinking of Margaret and the others dreaming of her. Now was my chance to learn to do without her altogether. It would not be for long. I was in the Duke's clutches, and he would not let me go till my head rolled off my shoulders. Had I been free and with her, we should have been farther apart than before--by the width of Donald's grave. But here, parted for ever, with the block or the gallows just ahead of me, there was no bar to my lonely love. Time and time again she was so near to me, so vividly present to my imagination, that I stretched out my arms to grasp her. The shackles clanked, and I cursed myself for a fool, but I never cured myself of the habit.
Because this is the dreariest time of my life, I have plumped right into the middle of it to get it over. And, indeed, there is little worth the telling between the top of Shap and her smile. I was in jail because I was no soldier. That, apparently, should go without saying, and if I had come to grief over some piece of important soldier-craft, no one would have been surprised and I should not have been to blame. It galls me, however, to have to confess that I was very properly caught, jailed, and ironed for not knowing what a dragoon was. A man ought to know that after being captain of a troop of the best for a fortnight, but I didn't. Being all for logic, the least useful thing in life, I had arrived at the conclusion that a soldier on horseback is a horse-soldier. So he is, except when he's a dragoon, as I found to my cost. If the bold Turnus or Mr. Pink-of-Propriety Aeneas had hit upon the dragoon idea, I should have known all about it, because it would have been in Virgil. Even the Master has his deficiencies.
My Lord George Murray elected to fight at Clifton, a defendable place between Shap and Penrith. Just south of the bridge the road ran off the moor into the outskirts of the village, with a stone wall on one side and a high edge on the other. The enclosures on either side were packed with clansmen, and our wings stretched beyond on to the moor, here dissected into poor fields by straggling hedges.
The Colonel, the happiest man in England that day, had posted me across the road, right out on the moor, ready to gallop back at once with news of the enemy's approach. It was now quite dark, except when the moon rode free of the dense blotches of clouds that filled the sky. In one such glimpse of light, I caught sight of several bodies of horse on the moor to the east of the road. The regiment nearest to me wheeled to the left, and trotted obliquely across the road. Its direction made its purpose clear. It was feeling its way across our front to our flank on the west of the village. I rode back at once to report.
"Good lad!" said the Colonel, offering me his snuff-box. "It's just what we want 'em to do. Go where there's a bellyful for you! Fine soldiering that! The fool duke ought to pound us out into the open with his guns. Hope you'll enjoy your first fight, Oliver! It's a glorious game. Pity of it is the counters are so costly. Good luck, my dear lad!"
I went back to my men whom I had left in the covered way between the wall and the hedge. It being clear that the exact whereabouts of the regiment I had particularly observed was of great consequence, I rode out again with a couple of men, at the request of one of the chiefs, to see if I could make out what was happening. There was no trace of it. It should by now have been visible on my right, the moon being out again, but there was not a single trace of it. I could see the line of one hedge and beyond that another. The other regiments had not advanced and this one had disappeared.
Perplexed, I halted my men, pulled the sorrel's head round and cantered slowly towards the nearer hedge. Then I learned that dragoons are horse-soldiers who fight on foot, behind hedges for choice. Half a dozen carbines rang out, the sorrel rolled over, and though I escaped the bullets and jumped clear of my horse, I was pounced on by a body of men and pulled ignobly through the hedge. I did everything doable, but they swarmed over me like ants, bore me down by weight of numbers, and sat on me.
"It's him right enough," I heard one of them say. "Fetch the sergeant! There's a bit of fat in this, lads!"
A minute later, I was hauled on to my feet. A seared face, with a dab-of-putty nose on it, leered delightedly into mine.
"Got you, by G--!" he said.
I had been captured by Brocton's dragoons. Now we should come to points.
Without another word to me, and after a savage injunction to the men to see I did not escape on peril of their lives, he went off and fetched his lordship. They came running back together as if the greatest event imaginable had happened.
"Ha! Master Wheatman," cried my lord very happily, "this is indeed a sight for sore eyes."
"To be sure," said I, "your lordship's were pretty bad the last time I saw them."
He made no retort, being indeed too excited to notice pin-pricks, but ordered the sergeant to take me to the rear under a strong guard. "Make sure of him!" he cried, and added in a lower tone, as I moved off under the combined pull and push of my captors, "Make sure of it." He then went off to his own place in the line.
The sergeant did not come with us, and I had been tugged nearly to the second hedge before he overtook us. To my astonishment he was carrying my saddle on his head, where, in the dim light, it looked like a gigantic bonnet. He swore at the men for loitering, and on we went to the second hedge. We struck it at a point where there was neither gate nor gap, but the dragoons bashed it down with their carbines and trampled it down with their boots, and so made a way.
Two of the men were through, and I was being hauled through, when there was a spattering of shots from behind. Over the noise a stentorian voice called out "Claymores!" It was the Highland warcry, and, with reverberating yells, the clansmen poured out of the nearer enclosure to attack the dragoons lining the hedge.
The sergeant drew his sword, and, as we raced on again, struck viciously with the flat of it at his men to make them run faster. A queer figure he cut in the moonlight as he raced along, swearing and slashing, with the skirts of the saddle flapping against his lean ribs. At last we got out on a poor road lined with trees and turned south along it. There was urgent need for him to haste now, for Brocton's dragoons had been cut out of their cover and were being pushed back to the hedge we had just left. The sergeant halted a moment to take stock of the situation, and then we hurried on again. Every time he struck a man for lazy running, the man in his turn paid me with punch or kick. After a mile or so, the avenue made an abrupt turn to the east and brought us out on the main road in the rear of the Duke's army.
The moon showed us a little cottage, standing off from the road in a poor plot of ground. The sergeant led the way up to it, turned the cottager and his family out of it into a shed, and set two men without as sentries. He then made the others strip me to the skin and examined every shred of clothing, ripping out the linings and even cutting my boots to pieces. Finding nothing, he flung me the rags to put on again, and then cut the saddle to pieces and searched that. I knew now why William had so nearly lost his vail and Donald had been obliged to steal me another saddle. The sergeant wanted, the letter and papers I had taken from him at the "Ring of Bells." He was so keen that he omitted to pouch any of my belongings, and I retained my money, Donald's watch, and the priceless strip of bloodstained linen. My tuck and pistols were naturally taken from me on my capture.
"Any luck?" I asked quizzingly, when he at last gave over the search.
Too furious or too cautious to reply, he brutally kicked a dragoon whom he caught smiling.
After a miserable drag of some two hours, a fresh dragoon came with a message, whereon the sergeant conducted me to the presence of the Duke, who was quartered in a large house in the village. The Lord Brocton, the Lord Mark Kerr, and other officers were with him, and also several ladies who would have been more at home in Vauxhall. For a minute or two I was unheeded, and the sergeant could hardly keep himself sufficiently stiff and awkward. His Grace was in the sourest of humours for, as the talk showed, he had been beaten. The claymores had taken the conceit out of him finely. He finished the subject with a string of oaths and then made an unprintable inquiry of Brocton concerning me. The ladies tittered profusely, and the most powdery one vowed that His Grace was a great wag. In further proof of this he snatched a feather near a yard long out of her pompom, and fanned himself with it while he examined me.
This ducal waggishness gave me time to observe that the sergeant's uneasiness was icy coldness in comparison with his lordship's. He was uncertain of speech; his face was the colour of pea-soup; he looked anxiously, almost affrightedly, at me. He grew plainly more comfortable as the Duke failed to get any information out of me beyond the fact that the weather was cold. Finally, when the sergeant was ordered to keep me at his peril till such time as I could be lodged in Carlisle jail, Brocton greedily tossed off a bumper of wine and laughed aloud at some vulgar sally from a lady in a green paduasoy. On leaving I bowed to the Duke. He was a vigorous, able man with the manners and morals of a bull.
Brocton followed the sergeant out. There was a consultation between them of which I heard nothing, but the result was that the sergeant picked up a man as guide who was waiting at the front door, obviously for the purpose, and took me through and beyond the village to a house on the roadside. The place was of fair size, built of rough slabs of stone, and evidently a farm-house. The owner was a lumpish, ungainly fellow, astonishingly bow-legged. He had a little yapping dog, which jumped backwards and forwards between his knees like a trick-dog through a hoop.
Preparations had been made for my coming, "by his lordship," as the farmer blabbed out. I was taken upstairs to a back room, ironed, in the way I have described, by the parish constable, who had been prayed in aid for the job, and locked in in the dark. I heard a sentry posted without the door and another beneath the window. It was some consolation, and I needed all I could get, to know I was so prized. There was a rough bed in the room. I tumbled on it, wondered for a few minutes what Margaret would be thinking of it all, and then went to sleep.
Next morning I made her acquaintance to this extent that she brought me a jug of thin ale, a lump of horse-bread and a slab of cheese. Her looks froze my affability, but she does not become important till she smiled, and I need say no more about her at present.
I saw no other person till nightfall of the third day, when the door opened and the little dog hopped through his accustomed gap into the room, and was followed by his master carrying a lighted tallow candle in a rusty iron candlestick. This imported something unusual, as I was not allowed a light, and it turned out to be a visit from my Lord Brocton. He ordered the sentry to follow the farmer downstairs, and examined the door carefully to see if it was closed thoroughly. I sat on the edge of the bed and hummed a brisk air with a fine pretence of indifference.
He sat down on the one chair there was, placed his hat on the table, and said, "I am sorry to see you in this place and condition, Mr. Wheatman."
"Thank you," said I.
"Of course you know there's only one end of it."
"Yes," I replied, and hummed a stave of "Lillibullero."
He leaned forward and said impressively, "The gibbet, Mr. Wheatman!"
"Draughty places!" said I, smiling, as I thought of Nance Lousely. "I can feel the wind whistling through my bones."
"You are pleased to be facetious, sir. It does credit, I must say, to your nerves."
"You are pleased to be sympathetic, my lord," I riposted, "whereby you do no credit to my common sense."
He took short breaths and then reflected a minute or two, during which I clinked a soft tattoo with my iron wristlets, and eyed him joyously. He was there--a free lordling, I was here--a chained rebel, but I had him set.
"I have a proposal to make to you, Mr. Wheatman," he said at length.
"I am indeed honoured, but be careful, my lord! It's not in the least likely, I fear, to be a proposal which you would like the sentry beneath the window to overhear."
"You are plain and blunt," he said, leaning forward and speaking in a low tone, "and I will be the same. Return me all the papers you took from my sergeant at the 'Ring of Bells,' and I will see that you escape and get clear of the country."
"The different personal ends for which you are anxious to turn traitor seem innumerable, my lord!"
He met the taunt as if it had been a flip with a straw, and only said, "Is it a bargain?"
"It is not," I replied emphatically.
If his life rather than his lands had depended on the recovery of the letter he could not have been more eager. For a long time he pleaded and wrestled with me; arguing, bullying, imploring, threatening, turn and turn about, but to no result. I would not go back on my casual word to Master Freake. The letter was important to him, and he would save Margaret and the Colonel, and me too, when the inevitable hour of need should come at last. Money was power, and lands were more than money. Acres meant votes, and with votes at your command you had ministers at your beck. I was sure of Master Freake. Why bother about my lord Brocton?
At last he played his last card. "You shall have the Upper Hanyards back again, Master Wheatman," he quavered.
The rascal earl, his father, had juggled more than a thousand acres of the Hanyards away from my father by some musty process of law and a venal bench. The reference angered me, and I cried loudly, "You shall not have it back at any price!"
He looked at the window, and paled as he thought of the sentinel ears without. Then he went off, vomiting curses.
That day week, she brought me a shepherd's pie for dinner, very well made too, and a mug of ale not wholly unworthy of the name. She put them down, looked at me in a measure womanly, and smiled. It was a root of promise and fruit would follow. Any change would be welcome. I was ragged, dirty, galled, cramped, and bearded with a red stubble. She called me 'Carrots' in derision.
I was right. At evening she brought me up a dish of tea, and when I lifted it off the table to take a drink of it, there was beneath it a paper folded letter-fashion.
I steadied myself, drank my tea with only moderate haste, and then cautiously palmed my treasure and walked to the window. Standing with my back to the door, so that the sentry, who was given to popping his head in to have a look at me, could not catch me unawares, I opened the paper. It was a letter. It was written by a woman. The woman was Margaret.
"You will be taken to-morrow to Carlisle. On the way friends will rescue you and bring you to me. Fear nothing, say nothing, and all will be well. Till to-morrow, dear Oliver. Destroy this. MARG. W."
It went hard against the grain to destroy this precious missive. I hid in the corner, and kissed it ravenously a hundred times. How straight and true the pen had ploughed its way across the paper! It was just such writing as I had expected of her, the resolute escription of her sweet, resolute self. Nor was the problem of destroying it easy to solve, since I had no fire, and there was no sure hiding-place accessible to my manacled hands. I mastered the difficulty heroically by eating the letter with my bread and butter.
It was even harder to pretend to be dull and sluggish with such a whirl of happy thoughts in my mind. I was her "dear Oliver," dear enough to make her risk her own life in saving mine. That she would plan wisely and execute swiftly, there was no shadow of doubt. This time tomorrow we should be together again.
The night dragged through at last, and the first glimmer of dawn found me alert and hopeful. She brought my usual breakfast at the usual time, and smiled again, but put her finger on her lips to warn me to be silent and careful.
She went downstairs, and left to myself again, I grew furious to think that Margaret would see me so, a regular wild man of the woods--quantum mutatus ab illo Hectare. But my ravings ceased at the sound of preparations without. My room was at the back of the house, but I heard the noise of wheels, and hoof-beats, and the harsh swearing of the sergeant. By and by he came noisily upstairs, burst into my room, and curtly ordered me downstairs.
Blithely I followed him. Try how I would I could not hide my joy, and, seeing that he noted it, I said in explanation, "Anything for a change, sergeant!"
"You'll wish yourself back here soon enough, blast ye!" he growled. "We'll stretch your neck for you till your eyes drop out, you swine!"
"You dear, good, Christian soul!" I simpered.
For answer, he kicked me savagely, and then bundled me downstairs, out of the house, and into the road. Here a two-horsed coach was in waiting, with two dragoons and a corporal in front and two more behind. One of the rear men was holding a horse, and to my annoyance the sergeant got into the coach after me, bawled out a command, and off our party started.
I stumbled into a corner and sat huddled up, straining my eyes ahead to catch what was to come. Margaret's information was clearly correct. We took the road north, passed through Penrith without a halt, and out again, still on the turnpike, proof that Carlisle was to be our destination. The city was obviously now in the Duke's power.
Mile after mile we covered apace, and at every curve and cross-road I peered ahead and around with my heart in my mouth. One point in my favour was the desolate nature of the country, exactly fitted for such a stratagem as was in hand. On the right the gloomy sky was blotted out by jagged masses of gloomier hills. On the left the country varied between flat and upland, but was hardly less uninviting.
"Where d'ye think y're going?" asked the sergeant, joggling me with his spurred heel to make me look at him.
"No idea," said I.
"Blast ye. I wish y'had," he growled viciously, and I turned away to smile.
We passed through a village littered with the Duke's baggage wagons and pretty full of soldiery. This chilled my spirit somewhat, for it looked as if we were about to run into the rear of the Royal army. Outside the village, however, we again had the road to ourselves, and a mile farther on dropped to a walk to climb a long slant of road.
Whenever the road curved my way I had seen the corporal and his two men riding from fifty to a hundred yards ahead of us. Not very far up the slope we came on a farmstead lying flush on the roadside. In the yard were some thirty head of shaggy black cattle, of the northern kind seldom seen in our parts and therefore attractive to a farmer's eye. A farm-hand leaning over the gate had some noisy gossip with the dragoons as they passed, and bawled his news to a group of men sitting at meat under a hovel. It was a poor enough place to support so many men, for the farm-wife, who came to her kitchen door to see what the clatter was about, was of no better seeming than a yokel's wife with us. My eyes were on her curiously when the man on the gate skipped off and flung it open right across the muzzles of our horses.
In the tick of a clock the whole scene changed. The men under the hovel rushed out, fell on the cattle, thrashed them mercilessly with great battoons, yelled at them like maniacs, and drove them in a shoving, bellowing, maddened mass into the road, which here had a stone wall on the side opposite the farm. When the torrent was fairly going, two of the supposed yokels snatched up carbines, climbed on to the hovel, and opened fire on the dragoons in our rear.
The master hand of the Colonel was in this beyond a doubt. With a loud curse, the sergeant, who was on the side away from the farm, opened the door and was for leaping out. He bethought himself and half turned, one hand on the door and one foot on the step, to look an evil inquiry at me. That half-turn was his undoing. Part of the living, struggling torrent of cattle was shoved round our way and came sweeping by. One beast brushed the door open even as he glared at me and tumbled him outwards. As he twisted in his fall another drove her sharp horns clean into him, and shook and twirled him off again like a terrier playing with a rat. The rearguard turned tail and fled. The vanguard had simply been swept off the scene, and I saw them spurring up the slope with the cattle surging after them. The plan had been thought out to a nicety and had worked to perfection. I was free, free for Margaret. I sat down again dizzied and happy.
My rescuers took no notice of me but ran down the road in a body and stood round the sergeant. After some excited talk they carried him back, called on me to aid, and rammed him into the coach, where he lay huddled on the seat in front of me. Without so much as a word to me, the commander pulled our driver off the box, ordered a man up in his place, climbed after him, and said briefly, "Go like the devil!"
The carriage turned up a rough lane which ran eastward out of the high road opposite the farm, leaving most of my rescuers standing uncertain in a group. The driver cut his horses savagely with his whip, and we went at a hard gallop. The jolting tumbled me about in the coach, and I had hard work, shackled as I was, to keep the sergeant on the seat. He was still alive, though so hideously injured that death could only be a question of minutes. Where we were going and why they were carrying him along with us, were questions it was useless to bother about. Margaret would explain everything when we met. I could make little of the men who had rescued me. They were clearly not farm-hands, for they were well armed, the guns I had seen looked to me to be military carbines, and they had carried through their business briskly and intelligently.
I heard the men on the box talking, but their speech was only about the road and the speed. The country got rougher and wilder; the distant hills were losing their clear-cut, rolling outlines, and becoming neighbours and obstacles. The horses were thrashed unmercifully, but at times even the well-plied whip could get no more than a crawl out of them.
The sergeant's end was at hand. He rallied, as men commonly do before they put foot in the black river, and looked at me unrecognizingly. He closed his eyes again, and began to writhe and mutter strange words. Suddenly he cried plainly, "Curse the swine! Another wedge, ye damned chicken-heart!" He looked at me again, and this time made out who I was, and cursed loathsomely in his disappointment.
"D'ye know where y're going?" he ended, leering wickedly.
"No," said I.
"Blast ye! I wish ye did!" He gurgled this almost jocosely, as if it were a pet bit of humour.
"Do you know where you are going?" I asked solemnly.
"To hell," he cried, and, after a spout of blood that spattered me as I leaned over him, went.
The carriage stopped and, before I could rise to see why, the door was opened and some one without said politely, "This is indeed a pleasure, Master Wheatman!"
It was my lord Brocton.
It would be foolish to pretend that I was not bitten to the bone, and I can only hope that I did not give outward expression to a tithe of the chagrin and dismay that possessed me. Being commanded to do so, I got out of the coach without a word and looked around.
The rough road along which we had been travelling ran on through a slit in the hills. Where we stood a bridle-path parted from it at a sharp angle and made its way over the lower skirts of the hill country. It was a desolate, dreary spot where, as I suspected, the king's writ ran not and where, therefore, a man might be done to death with all conveniency. Master Freake would be useless to me now, and my chiefest enemy had me at his will.
There was no delay. A long cloak was put over me, so disposed as to hide my fetters, and I was lifted on a spare horse led by one of the new-comers. The skill with which the affair had been planned was shown by the fact that this horse, to accommodate my shackled legs, had been saddled as for a lady.
"You know exactly what to do?" asked his lordship of the men on the coach.
"Yes, my lord," said one of them, "but what about--" He finished the sentence by a jerk of his thumb towards the dead sergeant.
"Leave him there! Egad, Master Wheatman, is not that a touch of the real artist?"
"The key of these things is in his breeches' pocket," said I, speaking for the first time, and waggling my fetters as I did so.
"Get it out, Tomlins!"
The man who had asked the question climbed down and obeyed the order with the callousness of a dog nosing a dead rabbit. Then our parties separated. The coach continued along the main road, if so it may be called, and we took to the track. I looked curiously after the coach, wondering where it was bound, and with what object.
"More art," said his lordship. "A coach is a seeable, trackable thing, and it will throw everybody off the scent. I'm glad the ruffian's dead. He was overmuch wise in my affairs."
As we rode on into the interminable wastes, he rallied me gleefully, but soon tired of my moroseness.
"His arrival will make an affecting picture," he said mockingly to his men. He was feverishly excited, and must boast to some one. "No pliant damsel to rush into his longing arms! He is to be embraced though, my masters, if need be."
What this obscure threat might portend, I could not see, but it chimed in with the delirious cruelty of the dead sergeant. Threats for the future mattered not, the present being so unendurable. A man in Brocton's position must be hard put to it to turn traitor in this strange fashion. He had "rescued" me with his own men, and, lord or no lord, he would hang for it were it once known to a lover of the gibbet like the Duke's Grace of Cumberland. What on earth was the letter about? Master Freake had definitely said lands, and therefore lands it must be, though nothing less than the whole Ridgeley estates could be in question. The thousand and more acres of the Upper Hanyards, sweet meadows stretching a mile along the river and a snatch of the chase at its wildest and loveliest, the prize that had fallen to the rascal earl in the great lawsuit, had been promised me as readily as a pinch of snuff. I gloated over the revenge I was winning for my race, a race rooted in those darling Hanyards a century before the Ridgeleys were heard of, for the first earl, the grandfather of the old rogue, started as an obscure pimp to Charles the Second, and was enriched and ennobled for his assiduity.
But no familiary pride could cheer me for long. The dead landscape around chilled me. The chiefest misery was to remember the hope with which I had started that morning. Margaret was the fancied end of my journey, and the real end was this! I had to bite my lips till I felt the trickle of blood in the stubble on my chin to keep back unmanly revilings.
At last we came out on what was by comparison a made road, and now his lordship grew plainly anxious and haggard. We rode madly along it, so that, riding shackled and woman-fashion, I had hard work to keep my seat. Brocton's head was incessantly on the turn to see if we were observed, but his luck was absolute. We saw no one on the road, and, after a hard stretch, we turned up a gully to our left and were once more buried among the hills.
After much turning and twisting we came in sight of a small house of grey stone which, from its appearance and situation, I judged to be some gentleman's shooting lodge. We cut across the valley, on one slope of which it stood, and I caught a glimpse of cottage roofs beyond it. We worked round to the rear of the house, and, in a favouring clump of trees, his lordship called a halt. The horses were tethered, and I was lifted down, and the rings round my ankles were unlocked. The men took one each, and carried their carbines in their free hands. Brocton drew his rapier, and said, "Forward! Make a sound, show the slightest sign of resistance, and I run you through."
There was no sense in disobeying, and I accommodated myself to his design, which was clearly to get into the house unobserved from without. In this he was successful, or at any rate I saw no one during our crawl from one point of vantage to another up to the back entrance. Now his lordship skipped gaily from behind me and opened the door. He stepped softly in, and I was pushed after him by his dragoons.
"'Friends will rescue you and bring you to me,'" he quoted, jeering me. "There's no Margaret for you, Farmer Wheatman. I shall have her yet!" Then, beast as he was, while the men kept me back, nearly tearing my arms out of their sockets, he stuck the point of his rapier over my heart and babbled half-delirious beastliness.
We were in a big, bare kitchen, the other door of which was closed. There was no sign of anyone about, and Brocton, still with his sword ready for me, bawled out, "Where are you, you old hag?"
The door opened at once. Brocton dropped his sword in his fright and I clapped my foot on it. The two men fled like rabbits. Familiar as the picture is to my mind, it is hard to find words to fit this crowning moment of my adventures.
Margaret walked into the room.
For a second she was minded to rush at me, but thought better of it, and walked up to his lordship. She towered over his limp, cringing figure, and said coldly, "You are too poor a cur to be struck by a woman or I would strike you."
She was not alone. Master Freake was now wringing my shackled hands delightedly, and a little, deft man, whom I knew on sight to be Dot Gibson, was searching his unresisting lordship's pockets for the key of the irons. A minute later he banged them on the floor and said, "And how do you find yourself, sir?"
There's no more to be said about Brocton. He was as good as dead for the remainder of the business, and no one heeded him any more than if he had been a loathsome insect that a man's foot had trodden on. And what killed him was the presence of a third man, a perfect stranger to me. He was an old-looking rather than an old man, with rheumy eyes that looked through narrow slits, and a big unshapely nose; the skin of his face was brown and crinkled like a dried-up bladder; his whole appearance as a man was mean and paltry. What distinction he had was given him by gorgeous clothing and the attendance of a pompous ass in a flaming livery. Yet Brocton dared not look at him again, as he shuffled forward on his man's arm to speak to Master Freake.
"Mr. Freake," he piped, laying an imploring hand on the merchant's arm, "you will not be too hard on my foolish son?"
It was the old rascal Earl of Ridgeley. I had not seen him since the trial, when I was but a lad. In the meantime vice had eaten out of him such manliness as had ever been in him. Rascaldom was still stamped on him, but he was now in a state of abject terror. He and his son were indeed, as Jane puts it to this day, two to a pair.
"Your lordships will be pleased to wait on me in the room yonder," said Master Freake, in his grave, decisive way, "and I will tell you my will on the matter."
He bowed ironically towards the door. Their unlordly lordships went off together, and he followed and closed the door behind him. Dot sensibly hustled off the lackey, and so we were alone together.
As ever, I had my full reward. She turned to me, took my hands in hers, and whispered, "My splendid Oliver!"
"What, madam?" said I, laughing lest I should do otherwise and most unbecomingly. "In a red beard?"
"You look like a Cossack!" she declared, laughing in her turn.
So, in the way we had, we kept ourselves at arm's length from each other and dropped at once into our old footing.
Then, bit by bit, and unwillingly, and mainly in answers to my questions, she told a tale that made my heart bound within me. This is the mere skeleton of it, for I have no skill to give body and soul to such devotion.
The Colonel brought the news of my capture by Brocton, pieced together from the stories of my men, who got back unhurt, and of one of Brocton's dragoons who was luckily taken prisoner in order to be questioned. Margaret had immediately started on horseback for London, with one English servant in attendance, going by Appleby to evade the Duke's army, and across the mountains to Darlington. There she had travelled flying post down the great north road, getting to London in five days thirteen hours after her start from Penrith.
Master Freake had started back with her within five hours of her arrival. They travelled post through Leicester and Derby, and then on over ground that was familiar. No wonder I had thought her near, since she had passed within fifty paces of me as I shambled about dreaming of her. Part of the five hours' delay in London was taken up by a visit paid by Master Freake to the Earl of Ridgeley. He had gone forth stern and resolute. What had happened she did not know, but as they sped north the Earl sped north a mile behind them, as if they were dragging him along by his heart-strings. At Carlisle, now in the hands of the Duke, they drew blank, for Brocton was unaccountably absent from military duty. Fortunately Margaret, from the window of her room, saw the sergeant ride by. Dot was sent on his track and learned that Brocton was here, the house being a hunting-lodge belonging to a crony of his who was an officer in the Cumberland militia. They had ridden out that morning to see him, at which point her tale linked up with mine and ended.
"I am greatly indebted to you, Margaret," said I, very lamely, slipping out her name at unawares.
"Nonsense!" she cried. "May I not do as much as your pet ghostie did for you without being a miracle? Do not you dare, sir, to offer me a pinnerfull of guineas!"
She looked at me with a merry twinkle in her eyes, and I feel sure I knew what she was thinking of. But Nance Lousely was a simple country maiden, such as I was born and bred amongst, and at that time I had no vile red stubble, rough as a horse-comb, on my chin.
We were interrupted by the lackey, who came with Mr. Dot Gibson's respects to his honour, and would his honour like the refreshment of a shave and a bath as both were at his service? Like master, like man. This resplendent person was for the nonce humility's self. I went with him and was made clean and comfortable, and my rags trimmed a little.
This was preliminary to being summoned by Master Freake to a discussion with their lordships, with whom was Margaret, aloof and icy.
"At the 'Ring o' Bells,'" began Master Freake, addressing me, "you took from my lord Brocton's sergeant, now dead, a bundle of papers?"
"Yes, sir."
"Among them a letter addressed simply, 'To His Royal Highness'?"
"That is so, sir."
"You gave that letter to me, unopened, in the presence of Mistress Waynflete?"
"I did," said I, and Margaret nodded agreement.
"Several attempts have been made to recover the letter from you?"
"At least three such attempts were made by the late sergeant, and two by my lord Brocton," I replied.
"Their lordships' urgent need of recovering the letter is thus proven, and the Court will attach due weight to the facts," said Master Freake. Brocton turned white as a sheet, and the old rogue shook as a dead leaf shakes on its twig before the wind strips it off. There was in them none of the family pride which keeps the great families agoing.
"I opened the letter. I mastered its contents. I still have it," continued Master Freake, every sentence, like the crash of a sledge-hammer, making these craven bystanders shake at the knees. "It is deposited, sealed up again, with a sure friend, who has instructions, unless I claim it in person on or before the last day of this year, to deliver it in person to the King. At present no one knows its contents except my lord Brocton who wrote it, and I who read it."
"Thank God!" ejaculated the rascal old earl fervently.
"Egad," thought I to myself. "It's the Ridgeley estates no less."
"We will call it, for the purposes of our discussion," said Master Freake soothingly, "a letter about certain lands."
"Yes! Yes! Certainly! A letter about lands! So it was!" cried the Earl eagerly, and Brocton began to look less like a coward on the scaffold.
"Would you prefer any other designation or description, my lords?" inquired Master Freake.
"I'm quite satisfied, my good Master Freake," babbled the Earl.
"What lands?" I burst out, unable to hold in my curiosity any longer.
"The lands known as the Upper Hanyards in the county of Staffordshire," replied Master Freake.
"Well I'm ----," cried I, in amazement, but pulling up in time, and Margaret's blue eyes were as wide open as mine.
"You are, Master Oliver Wheatman," said Master Freake, "the future, rightful owner of the ancient estate of your family in all its former amplitude; and all arrearages of rents and incomings as from the thirteenth of April, one thousand seven hundred and thirty-two, with compound interest at the rate of ten per cent per annum, together with a compensation for disturbance and vexation caused to you and yours, provisionally fixed in the sum of two thousand pounds. The Earl of Ridgeley, smitten to the heart by the remembrance of his roguery and knavery, has agreed to make this full restitution. Am I right, my lord?"
"Absolutely, Master Freake, if you please," whined the rascal old earl. "My God, I'm a ruined man!"
"Well, my lord," said Master Freake, "if you lose your lands and moneys, and I will not bate an acre or a guinea of the full tale, you and your son will at least retain what, as I see, you both value more highly. The restitution is to be made by you to me personally, so that we can avoid quibbles about Oliver's legal position, he being a rebel confessed, and the day after he is inlawed I will in my turn convey the property in both kinds to him. When the restitution has been fully and legally made, without speck or flaw in title, and passed as such by my lawyers, the letter will be returned to you sealed as now, and of course I shall be rigidly silent on the matter. Your lordships," he ended coldly, "may start for London at once to see to the matter."
The old earl started for the door eagerly, calling down on his son dire and foul curses. Brocton looked poisonously at me before following, and I knew I had not done with him yet.
"I've got you your lands, Oliver, but there has been no time to get you pardoned. The King was at Windsor; every moment was precious; and there was no use, in the temper of the town, in dealing with underlings. It will not do to run any risk of your being retaken, for Cumberland loves blood-letting, and is no friend of mine. We shall take you to a little fishing village on the Solway and get you a cast over to Dublin, whither my good ship, "Merchant of London," Jonadab Kilroot, Master, outward bound for the Americas, will pick you up. When we all meet again in London, in a few months, you will be pardoned. Margaret and I must now follow her father. The Stuart cause is smashed to pieces."
Late that night I stood with Margaret on the end of a jetty in a little fishing village on the Cumberland coast. Master Freake was giving final instructions to the owner of a herring-buss that was creaking noisily against the side of the jetty under the swell of the tide. Dot was busily handing to one of her crew of two certain packages for my use.
We stood together, and she had linked her arm in mine. We who had been so close together for a month were now to have an ocean put between us. Not that that mattered to me, already separated from her by something wider than the Atlantic, a lonely unnamed grave away there in Staffordshire.
Suddenly she called to Dot, and he, as knowing just what she wanted, brought her a box. She loosed her arm from mine and took it from him, and when I would in turn have relieved her of it, she gently refused.
"Oliver," she said, in quiet, firm tones, "you met me when I was in grave danger and immediately, like the gallant gentleman you are, left mother and home to do me service."
"It was the privilege of my life, madam," I said earnestly.
"You have sweetened your service by so regarding it, giving greatly when you gave. And, sir, that service put me in your debt. You see that?"
"It is like you to say so. What of it?"
"The time came when you were in danger, and I, in my turn, left my father and rode hard to save you. I am not boasting, you understand, sir. I am merely stating a fact. I rendered service for service, like for like, did I not, sir?"
"You did, madam, and did it splendidly," said I.
"Then, sir, when we meet again," she said, and she was now speaking very clearly and sweetly, looking me full in the eyes, potent in all her beauty and queenliness, "when we meet again, we meet on level terms."
"Are you ready, lad?" called Master Freake.
"Coming, sir!" I cried, almost glad at heart of the escape.
"One moment, Oliver!" said Margaret. "So anxious to be rid of me? Nay, I jest of course! I've a little present for you here, Oliver. It will, I hope, make you think of me at times."
"It will not," I replied, smiling. "It will make me think oftener of you, that's all."
She handed me the box, and we walked up to the boat.
The half-moon was bright in an unclouded sky, and it showed me tears on Margaret's cheeks, as I bent to clasp and kiss her hand. Then I said good-bye to Master Freake and Dot, and was helped into the boat.
So we parted, and I set my face toward the New World. For ten weary months there is nothing to be said that belongs of right and necessity to my story.
Except this: The first thing I did when I was alone in my cabin on the good ship, the "Merchant of London," was to open Margaret's box. It contained a full supply of books wherefrom to learn "the only language one can love in," and on the fly-leaf of a sumptuous "Dante" she had written, "From Margaret to Oliver."