Patricia at the inn

by J. C. Snaith

Again the landlord enclosed her with his cold eyes. They fascinated her, they pinned her helpless, they changed her blood into stone; they were the eyes with which the snake holds the fragile bird. The same bale and venom crept into them as he gazed upon the frightened creature, and as she cowered and shrank away, a smile and a sneer crept together round his mouth slowly. The moment to strike the victim was at hand.

“So you cannot give them, madam,” he said, with a suave mockery. “So you cannot give them. I do not know, madam, that I am surprised. I should have been more surprised had you been able to do so. In the very hour of your coming, I formed my own opinion of you. I am not altogether a blind man, madam,—I am not. And when in that first hour of your coming, madam, in a most unholy and exceptional season that is not very usual for simple honest travellers to employ, you had recourse to a lie——”

For an instant the woman’s chin went up imperiously, and a spark kindled in her eyes.

“I repeat, madam,” said the suave landlord, “in the very first hour of your coming you had recourse to a lie. You said your husband suffered from an incurable disease. More correctly, you should have said a bullet wound obtained a few weeks ago at the battle of Worcester.”

It was a shot in the dark, but it found its mark. The woman fell back against the stairs with a face the colour of snow.

“No, madam,” the landlord went on, “I can confess to no surprise at the course you have taken. It is hardly to be supposed that the wife of a proscribed cavalier, who hath come a fugitive to a lonely inn on the seacoast, in the hope of slipping over to France on a dark night, should be willing to publish his name to all and sundry. But it is a fortunate circumstance that old Gamaliel Hooker hath a few wits in his head, otherwise a notable traitor to his country might have escaped his deserts, and there would be one malignant more than there should be in the world.”

The landlord had trimmed his cruel words, and, uttered them slowly. Each one sank like a sharp-pointed knife into the very flesh of the woman. She shrank away from him, torn, bleeding, trembling.

“Happily,” said the landlord in the same clear-cut, long-drawn, formal tone, “Gamaliel Hooker is not a man to shirk his plain and manifest duty. A few hours prior to your appearance a band of soldiers called here, and told me where I might find them should any malignants appear. I will send an information to them the first thing in the morning. And now I give you good-night, madam; I think after our nocturnal wanderings we shall both welcome a return to bed.”

The landlord made to go upstairs. He would reserve the question of what she was doing in the dead of night, and her highly singular conduct towards his serving-man, until the morrow. He must not exhaust all his weapons at once; he would save a few with which to amuse himself at his leisure. But he had enjoyed using these vastly. He would teach her to take him trapesing in the dead of the night through the winter gale!

However, as the landlord made to retire the woman sprang forward with an appeal. She clung to his coat with her frozen hands.