John Garnet was in utter perplexity. Such a phase in his affairs he had never contemplated, yet there seemed something so ridiculous in his position, bound on a political adventure thus attended, that he could not forbear a laugh.
"Nonsense, my lass!" said he kindly enough. "You must go back; indeed you must. I won't have you come a step farther. You ought never to have followed me at all."
The tears were in Waif's dark eyes, and she raised them to his face with the pleading, reproachful look of a dog that you chide when he knows he is doing right.
"Not follow you!" she repeated. "How am I not to follow you, when you are going into danger? I can share it even if I cannot keep it off; and you tell me I must go back to London! You cannot mean it. I don't think you quite understand."
"That's the truest word you have said yet," was his answer; "but I do understand that, for your own sake, you ought not to be here now. Still, if you persist in accompanying 'a beggar on horseback,' you ought to have your share of the saddle, till we get down."
With these words, he took her by the hand, and braced his foot in the stirrup to afford a purchase for her ascent. In one bound she stood on his instep, light and buoyant as a bird; in another, she was seated before him with her arm round his neck, and her comely smiling face very near his own. It might have been the exertion, or the novelty of the position, or something he whispered, with his lips close to hers, that turned Waif crimson, and then deadly pale. She seemed more out of breath now, clinging to the rider, than she had been awhile ago walking beside his horse. Katerfelto, in obedience to his master's hand, broke into a canter; before she spoke another word, they were nearing a hamlet, of which the smoke was visible above the trees, when she made shift to ask in a trembling voice if she might not be set down, and taken up again when they had passed through? For answer, John Garnet laughed, and increasing his pace, dashed along the street at a gallop. When he relapsed once more into a walk, the startled villagers had been left two miles behind.
Waif's nerves were of the firmest, and she had now recovered some of her self-possession, no easy matter for a woman who finds herself seated on the same horse with the man she loves. Her heart beat fast indeed, and the colour came and went in her cheek; but she could review the situation calmly, and resolved that now was the time to explain all she had done, all she intended to do in John Garnet's behalf. Even those women, whose station renders them slaves of custom, like other slaves, assume the wildest freedom when they have elected to throw off the yoke; but this gipsy-girl, an unsophisticated child of nature, had no scruples to vanquish, no social laws to break, found nothing to restrain the ardent expression of her feelings, save the innate delicacy of a proud and loving heart.
It was not, therefore, without such a blush and downward glance, as few men could have withstood, and none, perhaps, less firmly than John Garnet, that she announced her resolution.
"I shall hold by you to the last. I shall never desert you till you have performed your task in safety. It is right you should know it. But—but—I cannot expect to accompany you like this. Only promise that you will not try to leave me behind, and never fear, but I can find my way from place to place, and be at hand when I am wanted, without shaming you by my presence. The gipsy-girl is proud to give her life for you, though you may blush to acknowledge one of my people as your friend!"