But there were only two ways of re-entering the “Hamilton Arms”—up a gravel-walk that led straight to the front door across a washing green, separated from the high road by a thick close-cut hedge, or through the stable-yard and back entrance into the scullery. This last ingress was effectually closed for the present by the arrival of Captain Bold, rather more drunk than common, swearing strings of new and fashionable oaths, while he consigned his wicked bay mare to the charge of the admiring ostler. Alice heard his reckless treble screaming above the hoarse notes of the stableman before she turned the corner of the house, and shrank back to enter at the other door. But here, also, much to her dismay, she found her retreat cut off. Two gentlemen were pacing up and down the gravel path in earnest conversation. One of them, even in the dusk, she recognised as the inmate of their blue room, who had given her aunt the gold cross. The other was a younger, taller, and slimmer man than his companion. Both were dressed in dark plain garments, gesticulating much while they spoke, and seemed deeply engrossed with the subject under discussion. Foolish Alice might well have run past unnoticed, and taken shelter at once in the house, but the girl had some shy feeling as to her late tryst with her sweetheart, and shrank perhaps from the good-humoured banter of the elder man, whose quiet sarcastic smile she had already learned to dread. So she stopped short, and cowered down with a beating heart under shelter of the hedge, thinking to elude them as they turned in their walk, and glide by unobserved into the porch.
They talked with such vehemence, that had they been Englishmen she would have thought they were quarrelling. Their arms waved, their hands worked, their voices rose and fell. The elder man was the principal speaker, and seemed to be urging something with considerable vehemence to which the other was disinclined; but none of his arguments, pointedly as they were put, arrested Alice’s attention so much as two proper names muttered in a tone of deprecation by his companion. These were “Lady Hamilton” and “Slap-Jack.” Of the first she was almost sure, in the latter she could not be mistaken.
Her experience on a southern seaboard, to which many smugglers from the opposite coast resorted, had taught Alice to understand the French language far better than she could speak it. With her ears sharpened and her faculties roused, by the mention of her lover’s name, she cowered down in her hiding-place, and listened, rapt, fearful, attentive, like a hare with the beagles on its track.
CHAPTER XLVIII
PRESSURE
“Do you suppose I came here to amuse myself?” asked Malletort, passing his arm under his companion’s so as to turn him round on the gravel walk within a yard of Alice’s hiding-place. “Do you think it is agreeable to reside in a pot-house where eggs and bacon form the ne plus ultra of cookery, and if a man cannot drink sour claret he must be satisfied with muddy ale? Every one of us has to sacrifice his own identity, has to consecrate himself entirely to such an effort as ours. Look at me, Florian, and ask yourself, was I born for such a life as this, to vegetate by the wayside in the dullest province of the dullest country in Europe—my only society, that awful landlady, my only excitement, the daily fear of a blunder from that puzzle-headed brigand who calls himself Captain Bold, and whom I can hang at any moment I please, or I would not trust him five yards from my side. If I should be discovered, and unable to get out of the way in time, why it might go very hard with me, but even against this contingency I have provided. You would find all the directions you need drawn out in our own cipher, and consigned to my respectable hostess. I have left the money for her weekly account sealed up and addressed to Mrs. Dodge on my chimneypiece, also the day and hour of your visit, as we have agreed. If we both fall into difficulties, which is most improbable, the packet will be burned, for I can trust the woman, I believe, and with so much the more confidence, that I doubt if any one on this side the Channel has the key to our cipher. So far, you observe, I have provided for all contingencies; and now, my good Florian, what have you done? You tell me you have failed with his confidential servant.”
“What, Slap-Jack!” answered Florian, and the name brought Alice’s heart to her mouth as the two priests again approached her hiding-place. “Impossible! I tell you he is as true as steel. Why, he sailed with us in the brigantine. We were all like brothers. Ah, Malletort, you cannot understand these things!”
“I can understand any scruple, any superstition, any weakness of humanity, for I see examples every day,” replied the Abbé, “but I cannot and will not understand that such imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Bah! You have carte blanche in promises, you have even a round sum to draw upon in hard cash. Will you tell me that man’s honesty or woman’s virtue is not to be bought if you bid high enough? The whole business is simply a game of bouillote. Not the best card, nor even the deepest purse, but the boldest player sweeps the stakes. Florian, I fear you have done but little in all these long weeks; that was why, at great risk, I sent you a note, begging an interview, that I might urge on you the importance of despatch.”
“It was a risk,” observed Florian. “The note was brought by Sir George himself.”
Malletort laughed. “He carried his fate without knowing it,” commented the Abbé. “After all, it is the destiny of mankind. Every one of us bears about with him the germ of that which shall some day prove his destruction. I don’t know that one’s step is the heavier till palsy has begun to tingle, or one’s appetite the worse till digestion already fails. Come, Florian, the plot is nearly ripe now, and there is little more time to lose. We must have Sir George in it up to his neck. He carries this district with him, and I am then sure of all the country north of the Trent. You have impressed on him, I trust, that it is an earldom to begin with, if we win?”