“But your face?” Betty said. “Isn’t it painful? It’s turning black.”
“I’ll bet that villain’s is as black!” he retorted. “I know I got home on him once. Only let me be called.”
But his father saw that, as he passed through the hall, he took one of the bank pistols out of the case in which they were kept, and slipped it into his pocket. The banker wondered anew, and felt perhaps more anxiety than he showed. At any rate, it was he who called the lad at five and saw that he drank the coffee that Betty had prepared, and that he ate something. At the last, indeed, Clement feared that his father might offer to accompany him, but he did not. Possibly he had decided that if his son was bent on proving his mettle in this odd business, it was wisest not to balk him.
The sun was rising as Clement’s coach rattled down the Foregate between the old Norman towers that crown the Castle Hill, and the long austere front of the school, with its wide low casements twinkling in the first beams. Early milk-carts drew aside to give the coach passage, white-eyed sweeps gazed enviously after it, mob-caps at windows dreamt of holidays and sighed to be on it and away. Soon it burst merrily from the crowded houses and met the morning freshness and the open country and the rolling fields. The mists were rising from the valley behind, as the horses breasted the ascent above the old battle-field, swept down the farther slope, and at eight miles an hour climbed up Armour Hill between meadows sparkling with dew and coverts flickering with conies. Down the hill at a canter, which presently carried it rejoicing into Wem. There the first relay was waiting, and away again they went, bowling over the barren gorse-clad heath that brought them presently through narrow twisting streets to the White Lion at Whitchurch. Again, “Horses on!” and merrily they travelled down the gentle slope to the Cheshire plain, where miles of green country spread themselves in the sunshine, a land of fatness and plenty, of cheese and milk and slow-running brooks. The clock on Nantwich church was showing a half after eight, as with a long flourish from the bugle they passed below it, and halted for breakfast at the Crown, in the stubborn old Round-head town.
Half an hour to refresh, topping up with a glass of famous Nantwich ale, and away again. But now the sun was high, the world abroad, the roads were alive with traffic. Onwards from Nantwich, where they began to run alongside the Ellesmere Canal, with its painted barges and gay market boats, the road took on a new importance, and many a smiling wayside house, Lion or Swan, cheered the travellers on their way. Spanking four-in-hands, handled by lusty coachmen, the autocrats of the road, chaises-and-four with postboys in green or yellow, white-coated farmers and parsons on hackneys, commercials in gigs, and publicans in tax-carts, pedlars, packmen, the one-legged sailor, and Punch and Judy—all these met or passed them; and huge wains laden with Manchester goods and driven by teamsters in smocks with long whips on their shoulders. And the inns! The inns, with their swaying signs and open windows, their benches crowded with loungers and their yards echoing with the cry of “Next team!”—the inns, with their groaning tables and huge joints and gleaming silver, these came so often, swaggered so loudly, imposed themselves so royally, that half the life of the road seemed to be in and about them.
And Clement saw it all and rejoiced in it all, though his eyes never ceased to search for a dour-looking man with a bruised face. He rejoiced in the cantering horses and the abounding life about him, in the freedom of it and the joyousness of it, his pulses leaping in tune with it; and not the less in tune, so splendid a thing is it to be young and in love, because he had fought a fight and slept only three hours. He watched it all pass before him, and if he had ever believed in his father’s scheme of an iron way and iron horses he lost faith in it now. For it was impossible to believe that any iron road running across fields and waste places could vie with this splendid highway, this orderly procession of coaches, travelling and stopping and meeting with the regularity of a weaver’s shuttle, these long lines of laden wagons, these swift chaises horsed at every stage! He saw stables that sheltered a hundred roadsters and were not full; ostlers to whom a handful of oats in every peck gave a gentleman’s income; teams that were clothed and curried as tenderly as children; mighty caravanserais full to the attics. A whole machinery of transport passed under his wondering eyes, and the railway, the Valleys Railway—he smiled at it as at the dream of a visionary.
They swept through Northwich before noon, and an hour later Clement dropped off the coach in front of the Bowling Green Inn at Altringham, and knew that his task lay before him. The little town had no church, but it boasted for its size more bustle than he had expected, and as he eyed its busy streets and its flow of traffic his spirits sank; it did not call itself one of the gates of Manchester for nothing. However, he had not come to stand idle, and the first step, to seek out a constable, was easy. But to secure that worthy’s aid—he was but a deputy, a pot-bellied, spectacled shoemaker—was another matter. The man rolled up his leather apron and pushed his horn-rimmed glasses on to his forehead, but he shook his head. “A very desperate villain,” he said, “a very desperate villain! But lor’, master, a dark sullen chap with a black eye and legs a little bandy? Why, I be dark and I be bandy, and for black eyes—I’m afeared there’s more than one o’ that cut on the road.”
“But not to-day,” Clement urged. “He’ll come through to-day or to-night.”
“Ay, and more likely night than day. But how be I to see if he’s a blackened peeper in the dark! I can’t haul a gentleman off a coach to ask the color of his eyes.”
“Well, anyway, do your best.”