The Yeoman Adventurer

by George W. Gough

If the handful of dragoons were not a reinforcement, it was a pursuit of us, and this posed another problem. Why had the pursuit been allowed to flag all the afternoon and evening, to be taken up again far on in the night? What fresh fact, if any, had determined it? I could think of none, nor, on reflection, was one wanted, since both Master Freake and Jack had last night witnessed to the worn-out state of Brocton's horses. Consequently his dragoons would have been sent after the Colonel earlier had they been fit. Their coming, when fit, proved their anxiety to retake him. Therefore he was not allowed to escape, and the conclusion of my argument hit its major premise clean in the teeth.

"Oliver, my boy," said I to myself, "say a bit of Virgil and go to sleep. These matters are beyond you."

I picked on a passage and started mumbling it to myself. It was a lucky hit, for when I had in solemn whispers rolled off the great lines in the sixth Aeneid which foretell the work and glory of Rome, I thought of my Lord Ridgeley, thiever by cunning process of law of most of my ancient patrimony, and his blackguard son, my Lord Brocton, lustfully hunting the proud, gracious woman beneath, and I said grandiosely to myself, "Rome's destiny is thine too, Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards, and these betitled scullions are the proud ones you shall war down."

The notion was so soothing that I fell asleep again.

I have leaped over uninteresting but by no means unimportant events. We were staying the night at a wayside hostel, called the "Red Bull," situated at the point where a cross-road cut the main road. We were still in Staffordshire, a matter on which Margaret had laughingly placed the utmost importance, though an urchin, standing by the rude signpost, could have flung a pebble into Cheshire. Houseroom was of the narrowest, and I was tucked away in the attics, in a room I had to crawl about in two-double, walking upright being out of the question. It was the grown-up daughter's room, and she had been bundled out to make place for me, a fact I did not learn till it was beyond need of remedy. The lass had a good pleasant woman to mother, but her father, the host, was an ill-conditioned, surly runt, whose only good point was a still tongue.

Margaret was in the room below, and her father next to her along a narrow gangway. From my attic I got down to this gangway by means of a staircase hardly to be told from a ladder. The gangway, just past the Colonel's door, became a little landing whence three or four steps led down to a larger landing, from which one could mount up to the other and corresponding half of the house or descend to the entrance hall with which the various rooms of the ground floor connected.

I awoke again in a dim dull dawn. Tired of these bouts of wakefulness I got off the bed--for I was lying full-dressed even to my boots--and crept softly to the window. I would keep watch and ward for Margaret, as a true knight oweth to do. Then, if my obscure misgivings were unfounded, I should at any rate have done my duty.

There had been a slight fall of snow, enough to cover the ground and bring everything up into sharp relief. My window was a dormant-window, its sill being about four feet from the eaves. I flung it open, careful not to make a sound, pushed out head and shoulders, and took stock.

I dipped my fingers in the snow and found there was near an inch of it. The "Red Bull" stood back from the road, and on each side of the inn proper, outhouses and stables jutted out to the wayside. Drawn up under a hovel on the left was a huge wagon piled with sacks, probably of barley bound for Leek, a town renowned for its ale.

Without was silence and stillness, as of the grave, and it was nipping cold, but my mind was happily busy, having so many delicious moments to live over again. If by some unhappy chance I never saw her again and lived to be a hundred, I should never tire of my memories. She had as many facets as Mr. Pitt's diamond, as many tones as the great organ in Lichfield Cathedral. To know her had enriched my life and opened my mind. What Propertius had said of his Cynthia, I repeated to myself of my Margaret, Ingenium nobis ipsa puella est. 'My' Margaret! Well, it did her no harm for me to think it, and, after all, the sly, silly babblings of my under-self could be shouted down by the stern voice of common sense.