“Run, ma’am, run and get into the lodge!”
At that instant the note of the post-horn rang out upon the air; the Bath and Devizes coach was passing through the village.
The younger of the two discontented gentlemen who occupied damp outside seats on the coach that day and had been looking forth in dudgeon upon a world of dudgeon, never ceased in after years to recall the tale of that ride as one fit for walnuts and wine.
“It was raining cats and dogs, and by ill-luck (as I thought then), I and an elderly old buck had to put up with outsides: it was packed inside. Well, sir, I was cursing pretty freely by the time we were drawing Devizes. And when the coachman said he had to pick up a passenger at the gates of Bindon-Cheveral, I was getting a curse out of that, for an irregularity—when, gad, the words died on my tongue!
“A woman, sir, the loveliest woman these eyes were ever laid upon (my good lady is not here, I can say it in your ear), running, running for her life, bare-headed in the rain! By George, that was hair worth gazing at! She held a cat in her arms, like a baby, her cloak, half-torn from her back, flying behind. She was making for our coach. After her, an overgrown gawk of a lad, with a bloody sconce, lugging her bundles anyhow, the most frightened hare of a fellow it has ever been my lot to see—turned out afterwards, to be a kind of natural, deaf and dumb. But she, gad! she was brave for both! A grand creature, ’pon my word! Inside the park there was a prodigious deal of shouting and scuffling, and two or three big devils with pitchforks yelling something about a witch.
“‘Pray, gentlemen,’ says she, looking up at us, her eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, her face as white as this napkin, but as calm as you or I, ‘help me up,’ says she, ‘or they will kill me.’ And would you believe, it, she hands the cat up first before she’d let any one extend a hand to her? And the boy, he must come too! ‘I can’t leave him behind,’ says she, ‘they would tear him to pieces.’ And, zounds, sir, if it had not been for a keeper fellow with a gun who ran up and locked the wicket gate in their very faces, some of those lads meant murder or I never saw it written on a human face. Then it was: ‘On with you John!’ Off went the horn. Off went we, the inside females screeching like mad, and the devils at the gate bellowing like wild beasts after their prey....
“‘Well, this is a rum go!’ says the coachman, as he tucks the cat between his boots. ‘I always thought this here place of the Cheverals was asleep; dang me if it hasn’t wakened up with a vengeance!’
“A witch, sir, they’d called her. Not so far wrong there! Between you and me and the bottle I’ve never been able to forget her. A strange creature—all the women I’ve known would have gone off in a screaming fit or a swoon. Not she. The first thing she does is to whip open one of her little bundles and out with her handkerchief, and wipe and bind the boy’s broken head as he squatted beside her; and then she turns to me on the other side and hands me a scarf, and says she: ‘Would I be so kind as to tie it round her arm, as tight as might be.’ And then I saw an ugly gash in the pretty white flesh. ‘A hit with a stone,’ she says. And not another word could I get, nor the other old boy (who was green with jealousy at her speaking with me), nor John the coachman, though he called her ‘my dear,’ and was as round as round with her, a fatherly sort of man that any young female might confide in.
“She just pulled her hood over her face and lay back folding her arms, the sound one over the hurt one, and sat staring at the gray wet walls of Cheveral park as we skirted them. Her face looked like a white rose in the black shadow, and by and by, I saw the great tears begin to gather and roll down her cheeks one by one. I tell you, sir, my heart’s not a particularly soft one, but it made it ache.
“Well, we set her down and her cat and her boy at York House. She paid the boy’s fare and thanked us. I thought she was going in at the York—but she went up without another word by Bartlett street. And I never saw her again, nor heard more of her story.—Pass the bottle.”