But she at last attained a degree of stolid iciness at which she remained. It imposed upon Hal, riding at her side, a silence that became the harder to break as it became the less bearable. And the further she tried to put herself out of his pity, the greater his pity grew, for the effort she was required to make. The more his admiration increased, too; and if pity is ever akin to love, it is certainly so when united to admiration. Her determination had not the mannish mien, nor her dislike the acrid, ill-bred aspect that would have repelled; they were of the womanly and high-born character that made them rather pique and allure. Partly to provoke her feelings to some change of phase, partly to elicit relief from the impassiveness in which she had sought refuge, partly for the cruel pleasure sometimes inexplicably found in torturing the tender and beautiful,—a pleasure followed by penitence as keen,—he made two or three delicate jests about the locked door; these were received with momentary glints of rage from her dark eyes, succeeded by coldness more freezing than before.
The silence created—and diffused—by her enveloped the whole party, making the ride even more bleak than it was already from the wintry day and the loneliness of the road. It was bad weather for travelling, less by reason of the present cold than of the signs of impending storm. "There is snow in the air," growled Anthony Underhill to himself, as if he smelled it. Of the country through which they passed, the most was open, only the pasture-land and the grounds pertaining immediately to gentlemen's houses being fenced. Enclosures were a new thing in those days, defended by the raisers of sheep and cattle, bewailed by the farmers who tilled the soil. Where the road did not run between woods or over wild moors, it gave views of far-off sheep-cotes, of mills, and here and there of distant castle-towers, or the gables of some squire's rambling manor-house; or it passed through straggling villages, each with a central green having a may-pole and an open pool.
But most human life was indoors upon this evening of belated winter; still and brown was the landscape. Once, soon after they had passed from Rutlandshire into Leicestershire, a burst of yokelish laughter struck their ears from among some trees, like a sudden ray of light and warmth in a cold, dead world. It came from some yeomen's sons who were destroying the eggs of birds of prey. The population of Melton Mowbray was housed and at supper, as they rode through that town in the early dusk without stop.
On into Nottinghamshire they went; and at last, checked alike by darkness and by weariness, they came to a halt before a little, low, wobbly-looking wood-and-plaster inn at the junction of the Nottingham road with the cross-road to Newark.
CHAPTER XI.
"He's in the third degree of drink; he's drowned."—Twelfth Night.
The inn people coming forth with a light, Hal made similar arrangements to those effected at his two previous stopping-places, with this difference, that he himself was to watch for two hours, and then be succeeded by Anthony. Anne could not exactly repeat her precautions taken at Oakham, for Hal procured the only available fresh horses before she applied for any; nor could she arrange that her own horses should be held in readiness before the inn. She caused them, however, to be fed and kept in an unlocked shed, from which her Page_might speedily take them out; and she was successful in bespeaking information in case of the enemy's departure.