CHAPTER IX.
"That wench is stark mad, or wonderful froward."—The Taming of the Shrew.
The object of this double chase, Master Marryott, rode on with his two men, through the night, beyond Stevenage, at what pace it seemed best to maintain. The slowness, incredible to a bicyclist or horseman who to-day follows the same route, was all the greater for the darkness; but slowness had good cause without darkness. English horse-breeding had not yet shown or sought great results in speed. An Elizabethan steed would make a strange showing on a twentieth century race-track; for the special product of those days was neither horses nor machines, but men. And such as the horses were, what were the roads they had to traverse! When a horse put his foot down, the chances were that it would land in a deep rut, or slide crunching down the hardened ridge at the side thereof, or find lodgment in a soggy puddle, or sink deep into soft earth, or fall, like certain of the Scriptural seed, upon stony places. It is no wonder, then, that on a certain occasion, when Queen Elizabeth was particularly impatient for a swift answer to a letter she caused sent to the keepers of Mary Stuart, the messenger's time from London to Fotheringay and back was at the rate of less than sixty miles a day. As for travel upon wheels, an example thereof will occur later in this narrative. But there was in those days one compensatory circumstance to fugitives flying with a rapidity then thought the greatest attainable: if they could not fly any faster, neither could their pursuers.
The night journey of our three riders continued in silence. As no sound of other horses now came from behind or from anywhere else, and as the objects passed in the darkness were but as indistinct figures in thick ink against a ground of watered ink. Hal's senses naturally turned inward, and mainly upon what was then foremost in the landscape of his mind. This was the face of Mistress Anne Hazlehurst; and the more he gazed upon the image thereof, the more he sighed at having to increase the distance between himself and the reality. His reluctance to going from the neighborhood of her was none the less for the matter-of-fact promptness with which he did go therefrom. The face was no less a magnet to him for that he so readily and steadily resisted its drawing powers. Those drawing powers would, of course, by the very nature of magnets, decrease as he went farther from their source; but as yet they were marvellously strong. Such is the charm exerted upon impressionable youth by a pair of puzzling eyes, a mysterious expression, a piquant contour, allied to beauty. All the effect of his first sight of that face was revived, and eked to greater magnitude by his strange confrontation with her, proud and wrathful in the poor lantern rays that fell intermittently and shiftingly upon her in the dark road.
He wondered what would be her subsequent proceedings that night; tried to form a mental panorama of her conduct regarding her wounded servants; of her actions now that she saw her design upset, the tenor of her life necessarily affected by this new catastrophe to her household. He pitied her, as he thought of the confused and difficult situation into which she had been so suddenly plunged. And then he came to consider what must be her feelings toward himself. Looking upon him as her brother's slayer, she must view him with both hate and horror. His violent treatment of her servants would augment the former feeling to a very madness of impotent wrath.
Yet it was not Hal Marryott that she hated,—it was the make-believe Sir Valentine Fleetwood; not the player, but the part he played. Still, a dislike of a character assumed by an actor often refuses to separate the actor from the character; moreover, she must necessarily hate him, should she ever come to know him, for having assumed that part,—for being, indeed, the aider of her enemy against herself. Hal registered one determination: should the uncertain future—now of a most exceeding uncertainty in his case—bring him in his own person into the horizon of this woman, he would take care she should not know he had played this part. What had passed between them should be blotted out; should be as if indeed Sir Valentine, not Hal Marryott, had escaped her in the road. And Hal bethought himself of one gain that the encounter had yielded him: it had acquainted him with the name and place of the previously unknown beauty. Some day, when he should have gone through with all this business, he might indeed seek her.
When he should have gone through with this business? The uncertain future came back to his thoughts. What would be the outcome of this strange flight? So strange, that if he should tell his friends in London of it, they would laugh at the tale as at a wild fiction. Fool a trained man-hunter, a royal messenger grown old in catching people for the council, and fool him by such a device as Hal had employed! Act a part in real life, even for a moment, to the complete deception of the spectator intended to be duped! To be sure, Dick Tarleton had done so, when he pretended in an inn at Sandwich to be a seminary priest, in order to be arrested and have the officers pay his score and take him to London, where, being known, he was sure to be discharged. But Dick Tarleton was a great comedian, and had essayed to represent no certain identifiable seminary priest; whereas Master Marryott, who had dared impersonate a particular known man, was but a novice at acting.
But Hal soon perceived this fact: that playing a part on the stage and playing a part in real life are two vastly different matters. A great actor of the first may be a great failure in the second, and the worst stage player may, under sufficient stress, fill an assumed character deceptively in real life. The spectator in a theatre expects to see a character pretended, and knows that what he sees is make-believe, not real. A spectator in real life, chosen to be duped, expects no such thing, and is therefore ready to take a pretence for what it purports to be. Whatever may occur eventually to undeceive him, he is in proper mind for deception at first contact with the pretence. And the very unlikelihood of such an attempt as Hal's, the very seeming impossibility of its success, was reason for Roger Barnet's not having suspected it.
These thoughts now occurred to Hal for the first time. Should he succeed in his novel adventure, he might congratulate himself upon the achievement, not of a great feat of stage-playing, indeed, though to his stage training he owed his quick perception and imitation of Sir Valentine's chief physical peculiarities, but of a singular and daring act, in which he both actually and figuratively played a part.