She consented; and Toomey, who was glad enough to turn homeward for his own comfort as well as that of the horses, wheeled round, and drove off at a good pace. A little way out of the village they nearly ran over a man, who, walking in the same direction, had not heard the carriage making up on him, either on account of the preoccupation of his thoughts or the thick carpeting of snow on the road.
‘All right,’ growled the man, having saved himself, and Toomey drove on.
Madge recognised the voice of Caleb Kersey. She would have liked to speak to him, but it was too late. She supposed, however, that he was on his way to visit Sam Culver, from whom he would learn the cause of Pansy’s disappearance. Caleb was on this quest, as she surmised, and he was going to Ringsford, but not to seek information from the gardener.
CHAPTER XLIX.—AT MIDNIGHT.
Coutts Hadleigh relished good wine; but he was cautious in his cups, as in everything else. On this evening, however, he ‘drank fair,’ as it is called, with his comrades; and those who were acquainted with his habits noted the fact with increasing curiosity as the evening advanced. This was the fifth annual dinner he had given to ‘his men’ since the captain’s commission had been thrust upon him, and he had on no previous occasion displayed so much hilarity or provided so many cynical anecdotes for the entertainment of the company. His lieutenant and sub.—both proprietors of the land they farmed—concluded that the captain must have made some exceptionally lucky stroke in business recently. Coutts believed he had.
The members of the Kingshope Volunteer corps were mostly young farmers and the sons of farmers, who should have possessed the physical proportions which would have specially qualified them for the soldier’s career. But it was surprising to observe how few of them presented these qualifications. When Dick Crawshay first saw them mustered, he exclaimed in loud indignation, his huge form towering over the whole troop: ‘What! is that all our county can show in the way of Volunteers? Why, half a dozen of our old yeomen would scare them into the middle of next week without a tussle! They are more like a set of town scarecrows than country-bred lads.... Ah, this comes ov givin’ the land to people that have money and no muscle, and meddle with things they know nothing about.’
He was right in a certain degree, for these youths were the sons of wealthy merchants who take up farming as a hobby, and leaving the work to hired labourers, are indifferent to losses, and therefore able to pay rents which the working farmer has struggled for a time to compete with, and given up in despair, or emigrated. This was a sore subject with yeoman Dick, and although regularly invited by Coutts to this annual feast, he regularly refused to go—and even kept within his own bounds whenever he knew there was a parade. The prejudice prevented him from learning that a goodly number of these young fellows made up for physical deficiencies by skill as marksmen and efficiency in drill; so that the Kingshope Volunteer corps formed a by no means unsatisfactory body of men for home defence. But had any one dared to hint that even in some respects they might be favourably compared with the old yeomanry, he would have made Dick his foe.
On the present occasion, Captain Hadleigh’s company showed that they had improved slightly on one of the yeomanry practices by keeping up their revels to a late hour without all getting drunk. The lieutenant having to pass Ringsford on his way home, and having his gig with him, drove the captain to the gates of the Manor. The snow had only ceased falling a little while before the company at the King’s Head broke up, and now it lay deep on the roads, houses, and fields. The old church looked like a huge snow-house; and the meadows in the dim moonlight presented a white surface, apparently on a level with the hedgerows.
The lieutenant’s powerful cob had its work to do, for at every step its hoofs sank deep in the snow-covered road. But the travellers were merry, and did not mind the slowness of their progress. Their chief trouble was to keep the road and avoid the open ditches. They succeeded in this, and also succeeded in distinguishing the point where the Manor gates broke the white wall.
Coutts made his way through the side-gate, which shook large pancakes of snow down upon him as he opened it.