As Jeffray turned in under the yews at the park gate he was stopped by the lodge-keeper’s wife running out in a red petticoat and a very slatternly pair of stays. The woman, who was something of a drunkard, appeared flushed and excited. She had the eager, officious look of a common creature big with information.
“Well, Mrs. Wilder, what is it?”
“My man’s gone up to the house, your honor; there’s been a scrimmage at the priory.”
Jeffray’s face hardened on the instant.
“A scrimmage! What do you mean?”
The woman appeared to swell with the satisfaction of her sensational confession. Her red and coarse-featured face shone out at Jeffray with every suggestion of ill omen.
“Mr. Gladden sent down word, sir, as how a number of rough fellows from the forest have broke in, cut the painter gentleman over the head, and trussed up the young woman as was staying with ye.”
Jeffray waited to hear no more. He insulted the woman’s eloquence by clapping in his spurs and leaving her standing open-mouthed and loose-bosomed in the road. It was even as the lodge-keeper’s wife had told him. Jeffray entered the house to find Dick Wilson propped up on the library sofa with a bandaged and bloody head. Bess was gone.
XLI
Dan and old Isaac had been lying hid all day like a couple of leopards in one of the sloping shrubberies that closed in the garden on the west. Their patience had been rewarded, for they had seen Bess appear for that fatal moment upon the terrace when she had taken leave of Jeffray when he rode to Rookhurst. They had watched her return into the house, pass the windows of the dining-room and seat herself at the window of the blue parlor. Her own dreamy and passionate sense of security had delivered her into her husband’s hands. Dan and Isaac had crept round to the eastern end of the terrace, entered with masterly boldness at the porch door, and caught Bess alone in the blue parlor. The girl had fought like a wild thing, only to be stunned by Dan in savage impatience with a blow from the hilt of his hanger. In the hall he had come face to face with Dick Wilson rushing, pistols in fists, from the library. The painter, nothing of a marksman, had fired at Isaac and missed, and taken a cut across the pate from Dan’s hanger for his pains. Peter Gladden, discreetly deaf to all this pother, had only run to Mr. Wilson’s help when he was assured that such dangerous ruffians as the Grimshaws had departed. Officious to the point of fanaticism when the peril was past, he had scuttled away to rouse the grooms in the stable, and had stormed and hectored when the fellows displayed no overmastering desire to give chase to the Grimshaws over Rodenham heath.