The girl looked surprised, but, putting down her linen, went below about the bill. Her mother came up betimes with some show of concern, hoping that the gentleman had not found anything lacking. John Gore relieved her from any such doubt, paid her her money, with a gold piece thrown in, and asking her to fill his flask for him and make him a small parcel of food, he gathered up cloak, sword, pistols, and valise, marched down the stairs and out by a side door into the stable-yard.
His horse had finished a good meal of bran and oats when a stable-boy pitched the saddle on again, while John Gore stood and looked on. Through the doorway of the stable he had a view of the street, and kept his eyes upon it, knowing that the smithy lay down in the borough of Sanglake. Mistress Green Stays came in with John Gore’s flask and some food tied up in a clean napkin, and John Gore gave her a kiss and a piece of silver while the boy was fastening the girths under the nag’s belly. The girl had gone, blushing a little, with the coin in her palm, when Captain Grylls’s black horse came up the street with a hostler at his head.
John Gore appeared to remember of a sudden that he had left a bunch of seals in his bedroom, and he walked off, telling the boy to keep the horse warm in the stable, for the beast’s coat was still wet with the sweat of the morning. From the window of the upper parlor John Gore saw Captain Grylls come out into the road and look at the new shoe on his nag’s foot. He had a roll of brown tobacco leaves between his lips, and looked flushed and comforted by his dinner. John Gore saw that the captain was ready to mount before he went down again into the stable-yard. A clatter of hoofs warned him that his man was on the road, so he mounted and rode quietly out of the yard with his eyes on the watch for Captain Grylls.
The man in the brown coat rode out by the western end of the town, puffing smoke from his cigarro, and looking about him alertly like a man who is no longer tired. John Gore let him draw ahead, so that there was a good space between them, and the curves of the road to hide them from each other. He kept his distance upon Captain Grylls by catching a glimpse of him every now and then over a hedge-top. For from the moment that John Gore had recognized the gentleman, the suspicion had seized on him that Captain Grylls was bound for Thorn. What charges the fellow had there, or whether he were riding on my Lord Gore’s service, John o’ the Sea could only guess.
There was a good hour’s daylight left when they approached the track that led down through the woods toward Thorn. John Gore drew up a little, riding on the grass, and going very warily, so as not to blunder into a betrayal. He had a mind to get to the bottom of this business, and to prove whether he was the fool of fancy or whether his grim surmises were drawing toward the truth. The road ran straight for two hundred yards or more, and the sea-captain, pulling close under some brushwood, reined in to see what Captain Grylls would do. John Gore saw him rein in, pause, and then turn his horse suddenly toward the left, where a dead oak stood, and disappear into the woods. Captain Grylls had taken the track for Thorn, and John Gore brought his fist down on his knee with the air of a man whose suspicions were closing up, link by link.
John Gore shadowed Captain Grylls through the woods, riding very warily till he saw him go trotting over the grass-lands where the waning light from the west beat vividly upon Thorn. Turning into that same thicket of beeches, he tethered his horse where the trunks hid him from the house, and advancing from tree to tree he was in time to see Captain Grylls lead his horse up to the gate. One glance at that window of the tower showed it him as a mere slit of blackness amid the ivy, and he kept his eyes fixed upon the figure at the gate. He could see into the court-yard from where he stood, and as he watched he saw a man come round the angle of the house with what looked like a white cloth tied over his face. Even at that distance John Gore recognized him by his slow, ponderous walk, and by his size, for the man who had taken them in that night stood nearly six feet four.
The gate opened, and Captain Grylls led his horse in, turning to glance up the valley, as though to see if any one were moving there. They crossed the court and disappeared round the angle of the house, and though he watched there till dusk fell, John Gore saw no more of the captain or the man with the white cloth over his face.
He leaned against the tree for a while, eating the food he had brought with him from the inn, and washing it down with liquor from his flask. He was summing up the situation, and wondering what to make of it, for it seemed more than probable that he would spend a night in the open woods. Captain Grylls had most assuredly ridden into Thorn, and he suspected Captain Grylls to be his father’s creature. He remembered also that gathering in Hortense’s house, and the hints his father had thrown out to him. Anne Purcell might be in the secret of some intrigue; Thorn was her house and the very place for a refuge in case of need. Then there were the white hands he had seen at the window, those hands that had set all manner of passionate surmises afire within his brain. Yet what a suspicious, speculative fool he might prove himself to be! It was humanly possible and reasonable that the couple down yonder should have a daughter.
Darkness had fallen, and, taking his cloak, he cast it over his horse’s loins. Then after petting and fondling the beast as though to persuade him to patience, he started out from the beech thicket over the grass-land toward the house.
He had come within a hundred yards of the moat when he saw a beam of light steal out suddenly from the black mass of the ruin. It came and went, mounting higher each moment, for some one was carrying a lantern up the tower stair, the light shooting out, as it passed, through the narrow squints in the wall. John Gore gained one of the thorn-trees close to the moat and took cover there, about twenty yards from the gate.