“Ah,” she said slowly, “I wish I had been there.”
Not then, but later, when the letter had passed into her hands, he fancied that he saw the drift of her questions. And he had qualms, for he was not wholly bad. He was not cruel, and the thought of Henrietta’s fate if she fell into the snare terrified him. True, Thistlewood, dark and saturnine, a man capable of heroism as well as of crime, was something of a gentleman. He might decline to go far. He might elect to take the girl’s part. But Giles and Lunt were men of a low type, coarse and brutish, apt for any villainy; men who, drawn from the slums of Spitalfields, had tried many things before they took up with conspiracy, or dubbed themselves patriots. To such, the life of a spy was no more than the life of a dog: and the girl’s sex, in place of protecting her, might the more expose her to their ruthlessness. If she fell into their hands, and Bess, with her infernal jealousy and her furious hatred of the class above her, egged them on, swearing that if Henrietta had not already informed, she might inform—he shuddered to think of the issue. He shuddered to think of what they might be capable. He remembered the things that had been done by such men in France: things remembered then, forgotten now. And he shuddered anew, knowing himself to be a poor weak thing, of no account against odds.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LETTER
We left Mr. Bishop standing in the middle of the woodland track and following Henrietta with his eyes. He had suspected the girl before; his suspicions were now grown to certainties. Her agitation, her alarm on meeting him, her refusal to parley, her anxiety to be gone, all—and his keen eyes had missed no item of her disorder—all pointed to one thing, to her knowledge of her lover’s hiding-place. Doubtless she had been to visit him. Probably she had just left him.
“But she’s game, she’s very game,” the runner muttered sagely. “It’s breed does it.” And plucking a scrap of green stuff from a briar he chewed it thoughtfully, with his eyes on the spot where he had lost the last wave of her skirt.
Presently he faced about. “Now where is he?” he asked himself. He scanned the path by which she had descended, the briars, the thorns, the under-growth. “There’s hiding here,” he thought; “but the nights are cold, and it’d kill him in the open. And she’d been on the hill. In a shepherd’s hut? Possibly; and it’s a pity I was not after her sooner. But we searched the huts. Then there’s Troutbeck? And the farms? But how’d he know any one here? Still, I’ll walk up and look about me. Strikes me we’ve been looking wide and he’s under our noses—many a hare escapes the hounds that way.”
He retraced his steps to the road, and strolled up the hill. His air was careless, but his eye took note of everything; and when he came to the gate of Starvecrow Farm he stood and looked over it. The bare and gloomy aspect of the house and the wide view it commanded impressed him. “I don’t wonder they keep a dog,” he thought. “A lonely place as ever I saw. Sort of house the pedlar’s murdered in! Regular Red Barn! But that black-eyed wench the doctor is gallivanting after comes from here. And if all’s true he’s in and out night and day. So the other is not like to be here.”
Still, when he had walked a few yards farther he halted. He took another look over the fence. He noted the few sombre pines that masked the gaunt gable-end, and from them his eye travelled to the ragged garden. A while he gazed placidly, the bit of green stuff in his mouth. Then he stiffened, pointing like a game dog. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his hand went to the pocket in his skirts, where he carried the “barker” without which he never stirred.
On the other side of the breast-high wall, not six paces from him, a man was crouching low, trying to hide behind a bush.
Mr. Bishop had a stout heart. He had taken many a man in the midst of his cronies in the dark courts about St. Giles’s; and with six hundred guineas in view it was not a small danger that would turn him. Yet he was alone, and his heart beat a little quicker as he proceeded, with his eyes glued to the bush, to climb the wall. The man he was going to take had the rope about his neck—he would reck little of taking another life. And he might have backers. Possibly, too, there was something in the silence of this hill-side—so different from the crowded alleys in which he commonly worked—that intimidated the officer.