Norton chuckled gleefully.
“Ha! that’s good hearing. You are carrying his letters no doubt. Here string him up, men, and we’ll turn out his pockets afterwards, and save him the discomfort of a struggle. These Puritans have such consciences, he would doubtless scruple to part with his trust.”
“Sir, sir,” pleaded poor Tobias. “They can be naught to you—they be no despatches—they be but private letters, and both of them only to ladies, sir.”
At this, Norton burst into a roar of laughter. The two scouts, hating both the work and the officer in command, took advantage of his convulsions of merriment, to loose the prisoner.
“Chuck the despatches and run,” whispered one of them. And Tobias needed no second bidding.
Flinging the letters on the ground, he ran like a hunted hare to the shelter of a little coppice, and though Norton swore at the scouts as they made a feint of rushing in pursuit, and sent more than one shot after the terrified messenger, he was too eager to seize on the letters before the wind whirled them away to trouble much about his victim. Tobias gasping for breath ran madly down the slope, till at length catching his foot on a tree stump he fell violently to the ground, severely spraining his ankle. But a sprained ankle means little to a man who has been at death’s door; he lay patiently enough in the wood till next day, and then limped down to Claverton to learn from the villagers that Waller had retired to Bath, and that the Royalists had abandoned the Avon, and were to attempt the capture of Bath from the north.
What with skirmishes and intricate manoeuvring, it was not until the Royalist forces had encamped at Marshfield that Norton had time to open the letters he had seized. But his satisfied chuckle as he read the first, and the malicious merriment in his eyes, showed that the capture had been worth making. The Major’s letter was short, and ran as follows:
“Dear Nell,—Captain Joscelyn Heyworth hath returned from London, where, at my request, he visited your godmother, Madam Harford. Strangely enough, she proves to be a kinswoman of Lieutenant Harford, your trusty rescuer. Madam Harford desires that at the earliest opportunity you travel with Cousin Malvina to London, and that you make her house—Notting hill Manor—your home until these calamities be overpast. Mr. Bennett and Alderman Pury will let you know when the journey may be attempted, and will find you a proper escort. I write in great haste; a battle is imminent, Sir W. Waller hoping thereby to save Bath, and to prevent the army of the West from joining the King’s forces at Oxford. I am just exchanged into Sir Arthur Hazlerigg’s new regiment, known as the ‘Lobsters,’ and you would smile to see how fine we look, most thoroughly encased in armour, like the knights of old. Truth to tell, I find it mighty cumbersome, but it may serve. God keep you from all ill, and grant us in peaceful times a happy reunion. I could wish to have seen you safely wedded to such an one as Lt. G. H., but have not as yet broached the subject with him.
“Your loving father,
“George Locke.