“Goodbye, father,” he said in a voice that was scarcely above a whisper.
“Goodnight and goodbye,” came the response in accents clear and unmoved.
An instant later and Alec was gone. Sir Gilbert waited till the noise of his son’s footsteps on the gravel had died away. Then he crossed to the window and refastened the shutters, and drew again the heavy curtains. So departed from the home of his ancestors the heir of Withington Chase.
By this time the night was fair, but although the wind had spent much of its force, it still blew in fitful gusts. Having crossed the lawn and the flower-garden, Alec leaped the sunken fence which divided the latter from the park, and then turning sharply to the right, presently struck into a footpath, well known to him of old, which wound through the belt of timber that sheltered the Chase from the north and north-east winds. Having traversed this, he emerged into a wilder part of the grounds rarely trodden by anyone save an occasional poacher, or by that law-breaker’s implacable foe, the gamekeeper, in the course of his nocturnal rounds.
Alec Clare was returning by the way he had come. He had quitted the London train at Westwood station, four miles away, where there was no one who knew him, rather than go on to Mapleford, the station nearest the Chase, where, even at that late hour, he could not have made sure of not being recognised: and he had his own reasons for wishing to keep his midnight visit a secret from everybody. His intention was to climb the wall at the far corner of the park where it abutted on a narrow lane which, at a distance of a quarter of a mile, opened on to the high road that led direct to Westwood station.
He was plunging forward through the rain-soaked bracken, feeling intolerably sore at heart, wroth with himself, his father and the world at large, but most of all with himself, and the prey to a dull heavy pain, which had its origin in the knowledge that he was leaving behind him the home of his birth, his mother’s grave, and all the haunts that were inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, perhaps never to see them again—when suddenly from behind the bole of a huge elm a man stepped full in his path and barred the way.
Alec fell back a step or two with an involuntary exclamation, so startled was he, and next moment the man did the same. He was a big, burly fellow, dressed in velveteens and gaiters, and carrying a stout cudgel in his right hand.
“Why, lawks-a-me, if it ain’t Master Alec!” he exclaimed with a gasp of astonishment; “and just as I’d made sure I was a going to cop one o’ them confounded poachers. Well, wonders will never cease. I’m mortal glad to see you, sir, anyhow.”
The speaker was Martin Rigg, Sir Gilbert’s gamekeeper. Alec and he had been firm allies in days gone by. Many a night had the “young master” and the keeper gone the rounds together when the former was supposed to be sound asleep in bed. Many had been their escapades, even to the extent of doing a little night-poaching on their own account. All that Alec knew of woodcraft, of the “gentle art” and of the haunts and habits of birds and animals, he owed to Martin Rigg.
“Yes, it is I, Martin,” replied the young man, now thoroughly roused from his abstraction. “If you took me for a poacher, I, at the first glance, took you for a ghost, or something equally as uncanny.”