Patricia at the inn

by J. C. Snaith

He could not sit still. He rose from his chair and went hobbling up and down the kitchen as before. All his physical infirmities had gone out of him. They had been replaced by those of his mind. He said again he was no coward; but he was certain that in his present shaken state anything might happen to him. If those soldiers began to whirl their pikes or discharge their pieces, or the woman began to scream, or particularly if he saw so much as a drop of blood, he must run forth out of the house, and hide his eyes and his ears until all was over. It was a pity that soldiers were concerned in the business at all. They were so ruthless; their wicked profession left them absolutely destitute of a sense of delicacy. He had always had a rooted aversion to soldiers.

It was now twenty minutes past seven. The wretched clock in the corner seemed to stand still. His heart ticked out the minutes, but the clock in the corner seemed to refuse to record them. Its inaction mocked him. Still, after all, he was not sure he was not relieved to find the hour was not later. He was not fit to grapple with the worst. A respite was not unwelcome.

At this moment there came a knock on the kitchen door. The landlord inwardly cursed his visitor, whoever he might be. This was not a night for visitors. There had been one already; a pretty undesirable one, too. True, he had proved more than a match for him; with this one he must prove the same. Still, it was a little unreasonable for anyone short of Captain Culpeper, who, to be sure, would not have stayed to knock, to obtrude himself at such a crisis in his life—nay, at such a crisis in the destiny of nations.

Filled with the unction of his previous success, the landlord hobbled boldly to the door and opened it. The apparition waiting upon the threshold seemed to have stepped bodily out of one of Gamaliel’s wildest nightmares. It was the elderly mariner in the dogskin cap. There he stood, with the earrings in his ears; the same malignant, humorous leer in his face. The scar across it shone white in the brightness of the kitchen fire; the naked knife at his waist was shining too. And, above all, his two great brown paws looked more knotted and gnarled than ever.

“A pleasant evenin’ to you, mate,” said Diggory Fargus.

“Same to you,” said the landlord, awkwardly.

With no better invitation, the sailor lurched into the kitchen, assumed a seat by the fire, as on the previous occasion of his coming, and asked for a go of rum. The landlord ordered the serving-maid to bring it to him. The sailor tasted it deliberately when it was given to him, warmed his hands, and then cocked his one ugly eye across at the landlord. In spite of himself Gamaliel shivered. His awe of this rude mariner was in the last degree absurd; but there it was. His native delicacy was doubtless too great for him to be entirely at his ease in the society of these rude characters.

“I am here, mate, about that young man I mentioned to ye the other evenin’,” said the mariner. “Have ye seen him yet?”

In an instant the landlord, afraid as he was of this fellow, arrived at the conclusion that his presence in that house was not at all required. The sooner he was quit of him the better. The young man he sought might very possibly be upstairs; he might prove to be either my Lord Farnham or the King; but things were very well as they were. This Diggory Fargus could not improve them; he might very possibly undo them though.

“I have seen no young man,” said Gamaliel shortly. “And I don’t much want to see one. This is a peaceable and honest inn.”