CHAPTER XI
Great was Lady Eleanor's distress when she heard from the Corporal what had happened. "Ah, if only Colonel Fitzdenys had been here!" she repeated more than once; but she could think of nothing that could be done except to send a letter at once to the colonel to tell him the whole story and to ask him to be present at Kingstoke, which lay close to Fitzdenys, when the prisoner should be brought up next morning. This was the Corporal's suggestion; but Lady Eleanor noticed that he was unusually silent and subdued, and she was rather surprised when he asked leave rather mysteriously to be absent from the house for the rest of the day. But she trusted him so implicitly that she granted his request without hesitation, and the Corporal, having sent off the letter, went out for the evening by himself.
The truth was that he was bitterly hurt and indignant at the hard words that Mrs. Mugford had used towards him, of having betrayed the children to the witch on the moor. The bare idea that he should have been false to his mistress and to the children, whom he worshipped, made him furious; and he went out with the determination of giving Mrs. Mugford a bit of his mind before night, but, like a wise man, not until he had thought the matter well over during a solitary walk. So he made his way through the woods and in due time came to the place where Dick had pointed out to him the ragged man, whom he had found skulking in the fern a short time before. Then it flashed across him suddenly that this man might be the deserter, and he blamed himself for his stupidity in not thinking of it at first. Once again he racked his brains to remember where he had seen the man before, for certainly he had seen him or some one very like him; and with his mind full of Mrs. Mugford he suddenly recalled her son Henry, who had enlisted for a marine, and had once come back on sick-leave. The more he thought of it, the more certain he was that the man whom he had found was Henry Mugford, for though he had not seen him for some years he had never heard that he had been discharged. That would account for Mrs. Mugford's anxiety to keep the Corporal out of the village, and to get the idiot arrested, for it would probably be some days before a serjeant of Marines could arrive from Plymouth, or the idiot himself could be sent there, to decide if he were the deserter Henry Bale or not. And, as to the name, the Corporal knew well enough by experience that men constantly enlisted under assumed names, while Bale was a likely name for this particular man to choose, as it had been Mrs. Mugford's own before she married.
Thus reflecting, the Corporal turned along the path that led through the woods lying above the village, stopped when he saw the roofs of the cottages below him, and went down through the covert towards the hedge that parted the cottage-gardens from it. It was dusk, so that he had little difficulty in remaining unseen, and as he drew nearer to the two cottages where Mrs. Fry and Mrs. Mugford lived, he heard the voices of the pair in violent altercation in the garden below.
"You said so plain as could be that you'd a-share the two guineas with me," Mrs. Fry was saying indignantly. "That's what you said."
"And don't I say that I'll give 'ee five shillings?" retorted Mrs. Mugford, "and that's more than nine out of ten would give. 'Twas I catched mun and not you. If I hadn't stopped mun in the road they'd never have catched mun at all, and 'twas a chance then that he might have killed me, mazed as he is. And you've a-taken pounds and pounds from the gentry for the harm that was done your Tommy, and never given me so much as a penny, though I've a-showed mun many times when you wasn't in house."
"Well," said Mrs. Fry defiantly, "then we'll see what people say when I tells what I've a-seen of a man coming round to your house night-times these weeks and weeks, and you going out to mun with bread and mate. I've a-seen mun, for all that you was so false."
Then they dropped their voices, and Mrs. Mugford appeared to be making new offers. But the Corporal had heard enough. Keeping himself carefully concealed he walked along the hedge until he found a rack over it, which seemed to be well worn, leading down to the cottages below, and by this rack he curled himself up in the bushes, and waited. In a short time the village was dark and silent, for in those days oil-lamps were never seen in a cottage; and the Corporal found waiting rather cold work, but he had bivouacked on colder nights in the wars, and lay patiently in his place. A little after ten the moon rose, but it was full eleven o'clock before the Corporal heard the bushes rustle, and at last made out a man creeping cautiously alongside the hedge. Nearer and nearer he came, straight to the rack in the hedge, where after pausing for a moment to listen, he was beginning to scramble up; when the Corporal suddenly laid hold of his ankles, brought him sprawling down, rolled him into the hedge-trough, and was instantly on top of him, with his knee on his chest and his hand on his throat. The unfortunate creature was too much paralysed by fright to resist; and the Corporal soon dragged his face round into the moonlight and saw that he had caught the man that he wanted.
"So you've come here again, Henry Bale," said the Corporal; "I told you that it would be the worse for you, if you did."