TRAITOR OR PATRIOT?
A TALE OF THE RYE-HOUSE PLOT.
CHAPTER I.
"QUEEN RUTH."
May-day! None of your raw, drizzling, windy, nineteenth-century May-days, when folks, chilled to their marrow-bones, draw their old cloaks and coats about them and beg for a cozy blaze in place of the smart new "ornament for the fire-stove." No; a right-down, unmistakable, fine old English first of May, with a fine old English sun, gradually assuming roseate hues, and setting the heavens in a glow as he slopes westward behind the trees of Epping Forest, casting long shadows athwart the smooth-shaven grass-plot which carpets the forecourt of a fine old many-gabled Hertfordshire farm-house; while his dying brilliancy gilds the broken summits of the ruined gate-house overshadowing it, and illumines the fresh tints of the cowslips, and earliest summer flower-garlands, festooned with many a gay ribbon-knot about a May-pole towering to the cloudless sky. Around this a group of young folks are merrily footing it to the tune of "Phillida flouts me," which the fifers and fiddlers, mounted on a table beneath the big spreading yew-tree, are braying out with a will.
Spring-tide.
And the Queen of the May? Well, there she is; that—. But no; what differs more than taste on these points? and you must decide for yourself concerning the value of her claims on beauty. To you it may seem that many of those bright eyes, and laughing lips, and all the rest of it, rival the charms of Queen Ruth, Young Mistress Ruth Rumbold, the only child of Master Richard Rumbold of the Rye House, whose embattled gate-tower roof just shows yonder through the trees, with its gilded vane gleaming in the setting sun-rays. But then you do not know Ruth as all these good people have known her for fifteen years turned last Martlemas-tide, when she was left a motherless three months old babe to the care of Nurse Maudlin—Maudlin Sweetapple. Therefore it is hardly possible for you to conceive how entirely she has won the affection, even of creatures commonly reported to be destitute of it; such as Gammer Grip, the miserly old hunks who lives in the tumble-down hut over against the crossways, and of Growler and Grab, the Nether Hall watch-dogs and terrors of the neighbourhood.
The maltster's daughter.
So possibly it has come to pass, that love has clothed little Mistress Ruth about with a beauty strangers might not be able to see. For you, the gray eyes so frankly meeting yours from beneath their long dark lashes and the well-defined brows might be too grave and thoughtful, though indeed, quite to decide, you should wait till she speaks. The tip of that little nose, to please your classical notions, ought not possibly to assert its right of way as it does, in just the slightest of upward directions. Neither is her mouth of the "button-hole" or "two-cherries-on-one-stalk" order; though it is a handsome, sweet-tempered mouth enough, with its resolute yet mobile curves when the red lips part to speak or to smile. Then again, her hair is neither sunny nor raven-black, as it behoves heroines' hair to be; but then she did not look to be a heroine, this Hertfordshire maltster's daughter. Nor was it of the tawny red the fine ladies of those Merry Monarch days delighted to dye their locks; but just of an ordinary middling shade of brown, with the faint ripple of a natural curl on her white forehead, and something of the sort which defied the silken snood, and saucily insisted on straying at pleasure about the nape of her slender neck. As to her hands, they were as well moulded and serviceable a little pair as you might wish to see; and if they were a trifle browner than modish maidens might have considered altogether the thing, the sun, and the churn, and the delicious home-made bread, and such like things, were possibly responsible; but an ocean of milk of roses itself, could not have been so soft and sweet as their touch, if you needed help from them in any pain or trouble befalling you.