Patricia at the inn

by J. C. Snaith

It was a piece of good fortune that the bed was facing the window. The landlord was the better able to regard its occupant. He was half prepared to discover that the young man was the victim of no malady whatsoever. He would not be surprised to find him quite hale and hearty. Nay, so little faith had he in this young man’s condition, that should he prove to have left the chamber secretly already, and gone away in stealth, he was not likely to be astounded. It so befell, however, that the landlord had no grounds for his suspicions. For there confronting him the sufferer lay. By the mellow light of the candles he saw him prone in the bed, as ghastly as death. He was wide awake, but lay with glazed eyes and a face convulsed with agony. The woman was binding a cloth steeped in water about his forehead.

In spite of the night’s bitterness, the landlord had so intense an interest in that which was passing before his eyes, that he betrayed no desire to leave his perch for the present. Looking down upon these unconscious persons from his high situation, he felt fairly secure from discovery. And was it not exhilarating to see without being seen! He must contrive to hear too. A chance phrase might reveal their identity.

Thus, notwithstanding that poor Will Jackson was shivering in the cold below, the landlord took his jackknife from his pocket and began to whittle away a piece of the wooden window frame. Already rotten with decay, it yielded readily to the silent deftness that was brought to bear upon it.

There was soon a hole big enough for Gamaliel’s ear. At once he could detect the gasps and low groans of the man in the bed. And he heard the woman say, in her soft low tones that thrilled to the heart like music:

“We can delay no longer, mine own; it must be done. Canst thou not trust me?”

The man clung to her outstretched hand, and drew his head away from her, like a child that is shy, farther back into the pillows. His pale lips were seen to move, but any words they framed the landlord could not hear. Thereafter for a time he lay with closed eyes, pallid and helpless, whilst the woman knelt down by his side and buried her beautiful head in the coverlet of the bed.

Presently she rose as one quickened by a sudden resolution. Tears she had not, but her eyes were filled with an anguish deeper even than the man’s. She crossed the room to where a broad settle stood with a tumbled heap of clothing upon it. The landlord observed, with a desperate dismay, that two cocked pistols lay there, whilst beside them was a case of embroidered leather. The lady opened this, and drew therefrom a dagger with a delicate point.

Concealing this in her hand, perchance that the man might not see it, she approached the bed again. The landlord felt his limbs totter and begin to fail him, whilst his straining eyes seemed inclined to start from his head. What, in the name of the fiend, was the woman about to do?

The man in the bed turned his eyes up to her; they had the look of a wounded animal.

“Can it not stay?” he said, and his hoarse tone penetrated to the listener’s ears. “It can make no difference now; the game is played.”