CHAPTER XII.
"I am a wise fellow; and, which is more, an officer; ... and one that knows the law, go to."—Much Ado about Nothing.
It was one hour after midnight, when the fellow travellers left the lone inn near the Newark cross-road. They had arrived there at eight o'clock in the evening. During their stay, Hal had obtained no sleep but that which he had taken at the table, and which had lasted but a few minutes. Anne had slept perhaps an hour before going down to the parlor. The reader will remember the fatigued condition in which both had come to the inn. Their next rest could not be had until a long and hard ride should achieve for them a probable gain of some hours over the horsemen whom Anthony Underhill had heard. For this gain, Hal counted on the fact that Barnet's horses, more recently ridden, could not be as fresh as his own, and on Barnet's constant necessity of pausing at each branching of the road, to make inquiries. Such were the conditions under which the second full day of the flight began.
It was now a time for drawing on that reserved energy which manifests itself only in seasons of strait. Hal was aware, from past experience, of this stored-up stock of endurance, that serves its possessor on occasions of extremity. To Anne, its existence within her must have come as a new disclosure. Hal, as a man of gentle rearing, had for her a man's compassion for a woman to whom this discovery is made by hardship undergone for the first time. And yet, so does human nature abound in apparent contradictions, he had a kind of satisfaction, almost gleeful, at the toils she had brought upon herself by attempting to overreach him. For, had she used in sleep the time she had spent in that attempt, had she not taken sufficient of the wine to enervate herself somewhat, she would now have been in fresh vigor for the wearing ride before her.
The riders had a slight check at Nottingham, owing to a difference of opinion between Master Marryott and the watch, as to the propriety of their passing through the town at such an hour of the night. Hal was in instant readiness for any outcry on the part of Mistress Hazlehurst. But he looked so resolute, Kit Bottle so formidable, Anthony Underhill so rigid with latent fighting force, that Anne doubtless saw little to be gained from a conflict between her enemy and the unaided dotards of the night watch. A gold piece, to reinforce a story explaining their early riding, proved the magic opener it commonly proves, and obtained a lantern from one of the watchmen, as well; and the fugitives rode free, northward into Sherwood forest.
It was lone riding, and toilsome, through the green-wood where Robin Hood and his outlaws had made merry, and past Newstead Abbey; and would have been next to impossible but for the lantern, with which the Puritan lighted up a few inches of the tree-roofed road ahead. Dawn found them near Mansfield, through which town they soon after passed without stay, and proceeded into Derbyshire.
At seven o'clock, having covered twenty-nine miles in the six hours since their last setting out, and all but Kit Bottle being ready to fall from their saddles, they stopped before a humble hostelry at Scardiff.
They could get but one fresh horse here. Bottle took this one, upon which to ride back to a suitable spot for watching the road behind. The others of the party had to be content with giving their nearly used-up animals what rest might be had in saddle and bridle, and under a penthouse roof at one end of the inn. Hal, before entering the inn, bought the vigilance of a hostler toward keeping his horses in readiness for further going, and against any attempt on Anne's part, through Francis, to disable them while he slept; though, indeed, he saw little likelihood of her employing such means, both she and her page being in the utmost need of immediate sleep; and she unable to purchase treachery of the inn folk, for, as he observed when she paid the hostess in advance, her purse was now sadly fallen away. Hal foresaw, from this last circumstance, two things: a certainty of her resorting soon to desperate measures against him, and an opportunity for his chivalry to display itself in an offer to pay her charges while she continued with deadly purpose to accompany him.