“Why say you that, Sir Thomas? How know you they won’t?”
“Because they won’t suspect our having come this way; never think of it. Before putting the torch to the old delinquent’s house, I took the precaution to have all his domestics locked up in an out-building; that they shouldn’t see which way we went off. As they and the Ruardean people knew we came up from Monmouth, they’ll naturally conclude that we returned thither. So, your Highness, any pursuit of us will take the direction down Cat’s Hill, instead of by Drybrook and down the Plump.”
“Egad! I hope so, Colonel. For, to speak truth I don’t feel in the spirit for a fight just now.”
It was not often Rupert gave way to cowardice, and more seldom confessed it; even in confidence to his familiars, of whom Lunsford was one of the most intimate. But at that hour he felt it to very fear. Perhaps from the wine he had drunk at Hollymead, now cold in him; and it might be his conscience weighted with the crime he was in the act of committing. Whatever the cause, his nervousness became heightened rather than diminished, as they marched on; and anxiously longed he to be on the other side of the Severn.
Not more so than his reprobate companion, whose bravado was all assumed; his words of confidence forced from him to gloss over the mistake he had made, in recommending the route taken. Sorry was he now, as his superior, they had not gone by Monmouth. Within its Castle walls they would at that moment have been safe; instead of hurrying along a road, with the obstruction of a river in front, and the possibility of pursuit behind. Ay, the probability of it, as Lunsford himself knew well, feigning to ignore it.
“In any case, your Highness,” he continued, in the same strain of encouragement, “we’ll be out of their way in good time. From here it’s but a step down to Westbury.”
By this they had reached the head of the ravine-like valley in which stands Flaxley Abbey, and were hastening forward fast as the impedimenta of captives would permit. The road runs down the valley, which, after several sinuosities, debouches on the Severn’s plain. But, long before attaining this, at rounding one of the turns, their eyes were greeted by a sight which sent tremor to their hearts.
“Mein Gott!” cried the Prince, suddenly reining up, and speaking in a tone of mingled surprise and alarm, “you see, Sir Thomas?”
Sir Thomas did see—sharing the other’s alarm, but without showing it—a sheet of water that shone silvery white under the moonlight overspreading all the plain below. The river aflood, and inundation everywhere!
“We’ll not be able to cross at all?” pursued the Prince, in desponding interrogative. “Shall we?”