“I am taking my own life in my hands, Dick,” he said. “There is nothing else for me to do. They are desperate men, you say; I grant it you. They will murder this woman, Dick, and I, too—am desperate. The law will not help me. I tell you I am going to Pevensel to try and save her, though she be another man’s wife.”
Wilson, with a helpless gesture, sank back into his chair.
“I see that I waste my words,” he said.
“Good-bye, Dick; give me your hand.”
“God keep you, sir, from getting your brains scattered for the sake of a green petticoat.”
The sky was breaking in the west when Jeffray mounted his black mare, rode down through the park, and passed the gibbet on Rodenham heath. A splendor of rain-drenched gold streamed from under the lifting edge of the clouds. The whole landscape grew bathed in a flood of slanting light. The moorland and the green woods flashed and glittered; masses of wild tawny vapor crowned the heights of Pevensel. Rain was still falling lightly from the black clouds above, but the mutterings of the thunder and the streaks of fire were passing southward towards the sea.
Jeffray left the road below Beacon Rock and crossed the heath towards the forest. His eyes, dark and alert in his sallow face, searched the waste for signs of life. A solitary plover flapped and wailed against the sun, but for all else the wilderness and the welkin seemed deserted. Soon Jeffray was riding down the long slope that fell away towards the purlieus of the forest. He found the path that Bess had shown him of old, and passed in under the trees.
Pevensel was a magic wilderness that evening, with the sunlight flooding through from the wet west, and every bough glistening with dew. Under the pines the damp mast shone a deep rich bronze. The scent of the rain-drenched bracken and the pines steamed up into the slanting sunlight. Jeffray had no eye for the mere beauty of it at that moment. All tangible things were without significance save when they prompted the vigilance of the senses. The trees were a dumb and unmeaning multitude, the sunlight a curse when it blurred and obscured the distance. Jeffray had no vision before him save the vision of Bess lying senseless and broken in Dan’s great arms.
A confused sound of voices came suddenly to Jeffray through the forest, as he neared the broad ride known as White Hind walk. He reined in to listen, heard the gruff and angry growling of men’s voices rising from the deeps below him. Pushing on cautiously he came to where the ride clove a great pathway through the forest, and, putting spurs to his mare, dashed across it at a canter. As he flashed across the open he caught a glimpse of a line of pack-horses being driven at a trot along the ride some two hundred paces towards the south. Men were cursing and belaboring the beasts with sticks, the fierce and strenuous figures looming dim and blurred under the light through the trees. The significance of the thing flashed through Jeffray’s mind, as he held the mare well in hand and swung along the winding path, dodging the swooping boughs as they trailed above his head. He had seen a smuggling cavalcade threading through the forest, in some peril of capture, to judge by the way the men were beating the pack-horses. Jeffray remembered, at the same moment, the cornet and the light-horse at Rodenham village. There might be fighting afoot, and what if the Grimshaws were entangled in the scrimmage?
It was not long before the trees began to thin before him, the open west shining a wall of amber pilastered by the dark boles of the pines. Jeffray, growing cautious, dismounted and led his mare aside from the path, and tethered her in a slight hollow of the ground where she was hidden from the path by undergrowth and bracken. He took the pistols out of the holsters, reprimed them, and pushed on towards the hamlet. Looking down from the converging aisles of the forest, he saw the green break in the woods lying calm and quiet under the western sun. The place appeared deserted and silent, save for a few cows with swelling udders that were waiting at a byre-gate to be milked.