Sampson made a low bow. 'To gratify your curiosity is a pleasure. Elise d'Artois was the most beautiful woman in France. For a spell she did me the honour to accept me among her acquaintance. Then de Delauret came along.... Years passed—more than I care to remember. Then, at Lady Fairfax's house, I was confronted by Simone. Her face began to haunt me. One afternoon, in the coach with Marion she suddenly turned on me with her mother's smile, and I vow I thought the years had turned back, and I was speaking to the peerless Elise d'Artois. Not dreaming that that very night our dear Marion and Elise's daughter would have sore need of me, I took horse and rode into Hertfordshire to my house there. In a secret drawer in my cabinet was the miniature. My plan was to show it to Sir John, and then confer as to what steps should be taken. When I got back after two days, I found the Fairfax house deserted, a letter awaiting me. The rest you know.'
'It is a vastly strange world,' commented Mistress Keziah. She sat musing, turning over the miniature.
'Why do you smile?' queried Sampson.
'I was thinking of my sister Constance, and many things. She has a way of saying that Garth is a wigwam in a forest, where nothing happens save that the sun rises and sets; a desert island where the tide comes in and the tide goes out. I'll wager she will consider attendance on Her Majesty a poor exchange for this day's work.'
Mistress Keziah rose as she spoke, and passed out on to the terrace, while Sampson sought the stables, to arrange details of the unpleasant journey that awaited him.
It happened that at that moment Lady Fairfax was sitting at the dinner-table of the same inn at Postbridge where Marion and Roger had halted in the course of their ride. Captain Beckenham faced her across the board, and the two were listening to mine host's recital of events which had, in his eyes, lent the same importance to the Cornwall Road that marks a field of battle on the morrow of the fight. The fact that the innkeeper had been unaware at the time of the significance of the appearance of the headlong riders, the pursuing soldiers, the chariots and horsemen stopping at his door, and was thus distinctly a day behind the fair, did not in the least take from his powers as a story teller.
The lady and gentleman hearkened as they ate, and forbore to explain that they themselves were, in a manner of speaking, a belated rearguard of the procession, the epilogue to the play. Lady Fairfax listened with a grave expression thoroughly appreciated by her companion across the table. For a considerable distance now, at each inn where they had stopped for food or sleep, they had been regaled with the story which was at heart the same, but disguised according to the particular fancy of each succeeding narrator. The entertainment afforded them was thus akin to an air with variations, each variation a little more tortured than the last, so that it was a matter for considerable skill on the hearers' part to beat out the original tune.
Until she had heard at Exeter from the Governor himself that the prisoner was safe from the reach of justice, Lady Fairfax had been too anxious to pay much heed to the rumours that had run to meet her on her way. Once that assurance gained, however, she gave herself up to a more leisurely journey, and failed not to profit by its diversions.
Mine host, having at length satisfied himself that he had done his duty as a story teller: shown the prisoner bearing marks of severe punishment, with bandaged head and broken arm, scarcely able to sit in the saddle; the lady accompanying him so unearthly pale and wrung with anguish that one might have thought she had got out of her coffin that morning, instead of out of her bed; after these two unfortunates a whole regiment, bloodthirsty and hot for vengeance, riding upon the wings of the wind; a broken-hearted father dead on the way beyond Salisbury; and innumerable relatives wearing the track into ditches in their haste to hear the reading of the will: after all this, I say, mine host retired to the kitchen with the bottle of his own wine to which Lady Fairfax had invited him, and left his travellers to sup in peace. As he closed the door, the eyes of the two guests met in undisguised merriment.
'I vow I am beginning to be sorry,' said Lady Fairfax, 'that to-morrow we arrive at Garth. 'Twill be an end of these Iliads. Had my brother only lived fifty miles farther west, why, my niece might have finished the journey with the dead body of the prisoner strapped across her saddle-bow. There is still one mystery,' she added, 'and with time we might have solved it. No one has told us anything about Colonel Sampson.'