With a cheery nod and a laugh that might mean anything, Blake left the other wondering "what devilment this mad fellow was bent on," and rode out into the beauty of the summer's night that lay beyond the outskirts of Banbury. Here, again, the nightingales assailed him. They could not rest for the love-songs in their throats; and ancient pain, deep where the soul beats at the prison-house of flesh, guided his left hand on the reins until, not knowing it, he was riding at a furious gallop. Then he checked to a sober trot.
The land was fragrant with the warmth of wet soil, the scent of flowers and rain-washed herbage. The moon shone blue above the keen white light of gloaming, and the road ahead stretched silver, miraculous, like some highway of the old romance that was waiting for the tread of kings and knights, of ladies fair as their own fame.
Old dreams clambered up to Blake's saddle and rode with him—wild heartaches of the long ago—the whetstone of first love, sharpening the power to feel, to dare all things—the unalterable need of youth to build a shrine about some woman made of the same clay as himself. They were good dreams, tasted again in this mellow dusk; but he put them by at last reluctantly. He had a live ambition before him—to bring a company of riders, bred in his own stiff Yorkshire county, for the Cavaliers of Oxford to appraise.
He slackened pace with some misgiving. The two Metcalfs, when he bade farewell to them in Oxford, had been so sure that one of their kinsmen would have reached the outskirts of Banbury, would be waiting for him. The horseman, they had explained, would not approach the town too closely, knowing its fame as a place of Parliament men who watched narrowly all Oxford's incoming and outgoing travellers; but Blake had travelled three miles or so already, and he grew impatient for a sight of his man.
Through the still air and the complaint of nightingales he heard the whinny of a horse. His own replied. The road made a wide swerve here through the middle of a beech wood. As he rounded it and came into the open country, he saw a broken wayside cross, and near it a horseman mounted on a white horse as big and raking in the build as its rider.
"A Mecca?" asked Blake, with the indifference of one traveller who passes the time of day with another.
"Nay, that will not serve," laughed the other. "Half a sixpence is as good as nothing at all."
"A Mecca for the King, then, and I was bred in Yorkshire, too."
The freemasonry of loyalty to one King, to the county that had reared a man, is a power that makes all roads friendly, that kills suspicion and the wary reaching down of the right hand toward a pistol-holster.
"How does Yoredale look," went on Blake, with a little, eager catch in his voice, "and the slope of Whernside as you see it riding over the tops from Kettlewell?"