She continued the song more softly, a triumphant light slowly increasing in her eyes. At last her voice was still. The supposed Sir Valentine moved not, lifted not his head, opened not his eyes. Only his regular breathing, the heavy breathing of vinous stupor, was heard in the room.
Mistress Hazlehurst rose without noise.
"He will not be in riding mood for ten hours to come," she said, quietly, to Francis. "An his men waken him, he'll be for calling them hard names, and off to sleep again! God-'a'-mercy, what an ocean of wine hath he swallowed in three short hours! Come. Francis, we may sleep with ease of mind to-night. He is stayed beyond even the will to go on. And I thank heaven, for I am well-nigh as drowsy, and as loath to ride in this weather, as he must be!"
It was sleepily indeed that she stepped, with as little sound as could be, over the crackling rushes to the door. To keep her enemy in the drinking mood, and to dissemble her purpose, she had taken an unusual quantity of wine herself. Ladies did not drink as much in Elizabeth's outwardly decent reign as they came to drink a few years later, under Scottish Jeames, when, if Sir John Harrington lied not in 1606, those of the court did "abandon their sobriety" and were "seen to roll about in intoxication." And Mistress Hazlehurst was the last woman in the world to violate the prevalent seemliness under the virgin queen. But she had sipped enough to augment the languor induced by her recent exertions. She put a hand upon the door-post to support herself as she approached it.
There was a wild, swift beating of horses' hoofs on the road outside; an abrupt stop just before the inn; a shrill whistle, and this shout from Anthony Underhill:
"What, ho! Halloo, halloo!"
Hal raised his head, and looked drowsily around with blinking eyes. There was a noise overhead of a heavy tread,—that of Captain Bottle, responding to the alarm. In a trice old Kit was heard clearing the stairs at a bound, and then seen dashing through the passage and out into the darkness. He had unbarred the outer door with a single movement.
Hal stared inquiringly at Mistress Hazlehurst. Her eyes had a glow of confident expectation. That was her blunder.
Her look told him all,—that she had supped with him, sung for him, incited him to drink, in order that he might be unfit for flight or action. He sprang to his feet, clapped on his hat, threw off his tipsiness with one backward jerk of the shoulders; was himself again, with clear eyes and strong, steady limbs.