“I thought I should never get out!” he replied. “But for the poor horse and his owner, I should not have minded.”
“How did you get out of it, uncle?” I persisted. “Lady Cairnedge smothered a splendid black horse not far from there. Through the darkness I heard him going down. It makes me shudder every time I think of it.”
“I cannot tell you, child. I suppose my gray was such a skeleton that the bog couldn't hold him. I left it all to him, and he got himself and me too out of it somehow. It was too dark, as you know, to see anything between the flashes. I remember we were pretty deep sometimes.”
He went back to London after that, and had come and gone once or twice, he said. When he came he always lodged with his gypsy friend. He had learned that his father was dead, but took the Mr. Whichcote he heard mentioned, for his elder brother, David, my father.
I asked him how it was he appeared to such purpose, and in the very nick of time, that afternoon when lady Cairnedge had come with her servants to carry John away; for of course I knew now that our champion must have been uncle Edmund. He answered he had that very morning made up his mind to present himself at the house, and had walked there for the purpose, resolved to tell his brother all. He got in by the end of the garden, as John was in the way of doing, and had reached the little grove of firs by the house, when he saw a carriage at the door, and drew back. Hearing then the noises of attack and defence, he came to the window and looked in, heard lady Cairnedge's shriek, saw her on the floor, and the men attempting to force an entrance at the other side of the window. Hardly knowing what he did, he rushed at them and beat them off. Then suddenly turning faint, for his heart was troublesome, he retired into the grove, and lay there helpless for a time. He recovered only to hear the carriage drive away, leaving quiet behind it.
To see that woman in the house of his fathers, was a terrible shock to him. Could it be that David had married her? He stole from his covert, and crawled across the moor to the gypsy's hut. There he was consoled by learning that the mistress of the house was a young girl, whom he rightly concluded to be the daughter of his brother David.
In making a second visit with the same intent, he had another attack of the heart, and now knew that he would have died in the snow had not John found him.
CHAPTER XXXVI. THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
We returned to England the next day. All the journey through, my uncles were continually reverting to the matter of John's parentage: the more they saw of him, the less could they believe lady Cairnedge his mother. Through questions put to him, and inquiries afterward made, they discovered that, when he went to London, he had gone to lady Cairnedge's lawyer, not his father's, of whom he had never heard—which accounted for his having on that occasion learned nothing of consequence to him. When we reached London, my uncle Edmund, who, having been bred a lawyer, knew how to act, went at once to examine the will left by John's father. That done, he set out for the place where John was born. The rest of us went home.