Sarah Carewe shook with creaking laughter, holding her hands to her sides as she looked at her angry descendant.
“Why, I mean as how you shot the right chap when you potted the big ’un,” she said. “That’s the one she’s set her mind on.”
“Who? That Pritchard cove? He’s left the place, and gone to the Cranstoun Arms and then to London——”
“A lot you know,” she cried, in her shaky treble. “He went to the Cranstoun Arms right enough, and Stella visited him there twice. The morning of the day that cursed Sir Philip’s mort went to glory, Stella was nabbed by her father, chatting with her spark, with his arm still tied up from your shot.”
“Hang him! I wish I’d killed him!” muttered Stephen. “And I would if I’d known what was coming. Something told me as he caught Zephyr’s rein, and stared up at her, that he’d be after her; that’s why I fired. But why didn’t you tell me all this before, mami Sarah? It’s all along of your promise to me about her that I’m working for you. You know right well you swore by your tricks and magic to make her come to me, and love me, and choose me for her mate before every one. And here I stand by to see her in love with one man, and married to another. I haven’t done your bidding, and your spying, ay, and your choaring and thieving too, if it comes to that, in the pay of a man whose throat I’d like to cut, all these years, to be hocused and laughed at now. I tell you, mami Sarah,” he added, starting from the stool, and stamping heavily upon the ground, having worked himself up to a frenzy, “I won’t be made a fool of any longer!”
The man by the fire rolled over, and looked up at him, speaking for the first time.
“You talk of wanting to cut Philip Cranstoun’s throat,” he began, slowly. “What call have you to hate him, like I have, and mami here? For eighteen years, come last October, we’ve been waiting, mami and me, to get our knife into him, and our chance has come at last! You’re young and green, lad; we don’t let you into all our secrets. You follow orders, and do as the nais nort tells you—she’s got her head screwed on right. Do you think a man forgets to pay a debt like mine? Think of it, lad! I was younger than you are now, and I loved my sister Clare—Sarah here can tell you how I loved her. When she was brought up grand as a regular been rawnie, she used to steal away to see brother Jim on the sly. The girl Stella you’re so sweet on ain’t a patch on her mother—my sister Clare. She’d a pair of eyes like stars dancing in a pool at moonlight, and teeth like little round dewdrops. And he married her, and broke her heart, and swore he’d shoot down any of her relations as he should find loitering about his place. But that night, which was to be my last in England afore I sailed to America, to a splendid opening there with uncle Pete, that’s long ago dead, says I to father, ‘I must have one more look at Clare, for maybe I’ll never come back again.’ Father was against it at first, but I’d take no advice, and he wanted badly to speak to her, seeing she’d written to say she was breaking her heart; so we went. Oh, you’ve heard the story of how, so soon as she’d crept over the grass to us, her father and brother, by the moonlight, all in white silks and satins, to wish us good-by, she was seized and blindfolded, and dragged away, while he, that double villain, that cursed Philip Cranstoun, shot my father down where he stood by my side! No call to tell you how I fought to punish them, nor how, when they’d nabbed me, being three to one, they made a pretence of a trial, and give me five years—five years in prison for seeing my father murdered in cold blood, and trying to get at them as shot him down. Well, I’ve lived through them five years; I’m a tough un to kill. You think of it, lad—you as lives as I lived for the most part, under the sky, with the free air blowing in your face all day—think what prison is: Four bare walls, a dog’s work in front of you, and a slave-driver to see as you do it; and all the while eating your heart out with knowing it was unjust, the cruel injustice of a titled scoundrel as had broken your sister’s heart, and made a jailbird of you, and murdered your father. And all for what? For his own dirty pride—pride of his family, as are no older than us Carewes; pride that I’ll humble in the dust yet, if I spend the rest of my life in quod for it.”
“There ain’t no talk of quod for this business of ours, dearie,” put in the old crone, as she stirred the fire with a bent iron stick. “You shall have your revenge, sure enough, and so will I. Your dadi Hiram was my own first-born, that I’d seen grow up from the stoutest and prettiest kinchin to the finest man in the country-side. And my eyes have seen what yours have not: your sister, my bonny Clare, as she lay dying in my arms, making me swear on her child’s head that I would punish Philip Cranstoun. ‘He swore he would break my pride,’ she said, with the death-rattle in her throat. ‘Mami, break his. Disgrace is worse than death to him. He has brought death upon me; bring disgrace upon him.’ I seem to hear her voice now, and to see her glazing eyes light up for the last time as she said the words.”
She sat still for a while, staring into the flaming logs over the outstretched figure of James Carewe. A wonderful Rembrandtesque study they would have made, those three generations of gypsies, had any Dutch painter been there to fix the scene on canvas, with its sombre tone lit by the ruddy firelight. The woman, in her heavy cloak, the hood fallen back, and disclosing a faded red and yellow silk handkerchief wound round her head, from which scattered white elf locks fell over her wrinkled brow and sunken cheeks. Only a great artist could have reproduced the look in her glittering black eyes, a look that took in a past of wrongs and sufferings, and brooded in cruel, anticipative joy over a future of revenge.
The man at her feet was himself a model of rugged power and a certain swarthy beauty. His coal-black hair and beard were plentifully streaked with gray; his dark skin was unnaturally pallid, and in his sunken black eyes there lurked an expression not good to see, the look of a strong man deeply wronged, at war with society, and ripe for revenge. His dress was careless and dirty; long ago he had ceased to have any pride in his appearance, and those years of prison life, followed by the misery of police supervision, had changed him from a handsome, gallant lad, full of strength and possibilities, to a surly and brooding loafer, whose hand was against every man’s and whose whole nature was in sullen revolt against the established order of things.