Chapter 1

THE Sixth Earl of Saltash glanced round the immense dining-table, and was conscious of a glow of satisfaction. It was an emotion not shared by his butler, or by his steward, each of whom had served the Fifth Earl, and remembered, with a wealth of nostalgic detail, the various occasions upon which the State Dining-room had been used to entertain Royalty, foreign Ambassadors, and ton parties of great size and brilliance. The Fifth Earl had been a Public Man. It was otherwise with his son, who had neither the desire nor the ability to fill a great office. Indeed, so little expectation had he of entertaining even the most undistinguished member of a royal house that the State Apartments at Easterby might have fallen into total disuse had he not, at the age of thirty, become betrothed to the Lady Charlotte Calne.

This, since he was the sole surviving son of the Fifth Earl, he could not but consider to be a matter of considerable family importance; and to mark it he had summoned to Easterby, to meet his prospective bride, every available member of the house of Staple. A rapid review of his maternal relations had been enough to convince him that their presence at this triumphant gathering would be as unnecessary as it was undesirable. To the Staples he was a person of consequence, the head of his family, and not even his masterful sister Albinia would withhold from him (in public) the respect to which his position entitled him. It was otherwise with the Timbercombes, owing him no allegiance; and it did not take him more than a few reflective minutes to decide that his marriage did not concern them.

So twenty persons only sat down to dinner under the painted ceiling in the State Dining-room; and the Earl, seated at the head of a table loaded with plate, and bearing as a centrepiece an enormous epergne, presented by some foreign potentate to the Fifth Earl, looked around him with satisfaction.

It mattered nothing to him that the room was overlarge for the company, and that the gentlemen outnumbered the ladies by two: the Staples had responded in the most gratifying way to his invitation, and were behaving—even his formidable Aunt Caroline—just as they ought. He could see that Lady Melksham, his future mother-in-law, was impressed. With most of the Staples she was already acquainted, but she had not until today met his Uncle Trevor, the Archdeacon, who was seated beside her, or his huge cousin John. His unmarried aunt, Maria, who kept house for him, had suffered a little qualm about John’s lowlier position at the dining-table, but she had yielded to the Earl’s wish. She knew, of course, that an Archdeacon must take precedence over a retired Captain of Dragoon Guards, but the Archdeacon was her younger brother, and it was difficult for her to realize that he had any particular standing in the world. John, on the other hand, was the only son of her second brother, and heir-presumptive to the Earldom, which made him, in her eyes, a person of consequence. She ventured to say as much to the Earl, and he was not displeased: he felt it to be a very just observation.

“However, I daresay dear John won’t care where he sits!” had added Lady Maria comfortably.

The Earl felt that this was regrettably true. He was very fond of John, but he thought him far too careless of his dignity. Probably his years of campaigning in the Peninsula had made him forgetful of what was due to himself and the name he bore. His manners were easy to a fault, and he very often behaved in a freakish way which seriously shocked his noble relative. His exploits in the Peninsula had made him a by-word amongst his fellow-officers; and one at least of his actions since he had sold out, in 1814, had seemed to the Earl unbecomingly whimsical. No sooner did he learn that Napoleon was again at large than he returned to the Army as a volunteer; and when the Earl had shown him that duty did not demand such a sacrifice of his dignity, he had burst out laughing, and had exclaimed: “Oh, Bevis, Bevis—! You don’t suppose I’d miss this campaign, do you? I wouldn’t, for a fortune! Duty be hanged!”

So off had gone John to the wars again. But he had not remained for long in the humble position of a volunteer. Colonel Clifton, commanding the 1st Regiment of Dragoons, no sooner heard that Crazy Jack was back than he enrolled him as an extra aide-de-camp. He emerged from the Waterloo Campaign much refreshed, and with no more serious injuries than a sabre-cut, and a graze from a spent ball. The Earl was very glad to see him safe home again, and began to think that it was time he settled down, and married an eligible female. He had inherited a small estate from his father; he was twenty-nine years of age; and he had no brothers.

His lordship, glancing round his table, remembered this, as his eyes alighted on his aunt-in-law, the Honourable Mrs. Staple. He wondered that she should not have provided her son with a suitable wife, and thought that perhaps he would broach the matter to her later in the evening. He was not quite two years older than John, but as the head of the family he believed himself to be responsible for his cousins. This helped him to overcome the feeling of inferiority which too often possessed him when he was confronted by these overpoweringly large persons. A big race, the Staples: he was himself a tall man, but narrow-shouldered, and inclined to stoop. John, of course, was a giant; and his sister, Lady Lichfield, who was talking with determined amiability to the Earl’s very dull brother-in-law, Mr. Tackenham, stood five foot nine inches in her bare feet. Lucius Staple, only child of the Fourth Earl’s third son, was a big man, too; and so was Arthur, the Archdeacon’s eldest-born, just now striving to entertain his cousin Lettice, who was making sheep’s eyes at John across the table. Even young Geoffrey Yatton, Lettice’s brother, though still slightly gangling, bade fair to tower above the Earl; and their mother, Lady Caroline, could only be described as massive.

Lady Charlotte Calne, the Earl’s betrothed, had been so much struck by the splendid proportions of the Staples that she had been moved to utter a spontaneous remark. “How very big your cousins are!” she said. “They are all very good-looking: exceptionally so, I fancy.”

He was gratified, and said eagerly: “Do you think so Indeed? But Lucius has red hair, you know, and although Geoffrey is well enough, I don’t consider Arthur above the ordinary. But John is a fine fellow, isn’t he? I hope you will like him: everyone likes John! I have a great regard for him myself.”

“If that is so he must have a claim on my regard. I assure you I shall like him excessively,” replied the lady, as one who knew where her duty lay.

Not for the first time he congratulated himself on his choice of bride. Himself a man of no more than mild sensibility he found nothing amiss with his Charlotte’s colourless manner; and he would have experienced considerable surprise had he known that she did not meet with universal approbation in his family. But although Lady Maria thought she would make Bevis an excellent wife, the Archdeacon that she was a pretty-behaved girl, and Lady Caroline that her only fault was a lack of dowry, it was noticeable that Mrs. Staple refrained from expressing an opinion, and Mr. Yatton (though not within his wife’s hearing) went so far as to say that she favoured her mother too much for his taste.

The younger generation was more forthright, only the Earl’s sister, who had been instrumental in promoting the match, according Lady Charlotte a full measure of approval. Miss Yatton, with all the assurance of a young lady with one successful London Season at her back, pronounced her to be a dowdy; her brother Geoffrey confided to his cousin Arthur that he would as lief, himself, take a cold poultice to wife; and Captain Staple, unaware of Lady Charlotte’s amiable determination to like him, answered the quizzical lift of Lucius’s sandy brows with an expressive grimace.

They were standing together at one end of the Crimson State Saloon after dinner. Lucius chuckled, and said: “Oh, she’ll suit Bevis well enough!”

“I hope she may. She wouldn’t suit me!” said the Captain. He glanced round the ornate room. “This is a horrid party!” he decided. “What the devil made Saltash dish up all his relations? Enough to make the girl cry off! Lord, here’s my uncle bearing down on us! I wish I hadn’t been fool enough to come!”

“Well, my dear boy!” said the Archdeacon, in mellifluous accents, and laying an affectionate hand on one of the Captain’s great shoulders. “And how is it with you? I need not ask, however: you are in a capital way! A happy event this, is it not?”

“Yes, if Bevis thinks so,” replied the Captain.

The Archdeacon thought it best to ignore the implication of this. He said: “A young female of the first consequence! But come, now! When, you great creature, are we to be celebrating your approaching nuptials?”

“Not yet, sir: I’m not in the petticoat-line. And if ever I do become engaged,” he added, his blue gaze wandering thoughtfully round the room, “I wouldn’t celebrate the event in this fashion, by Jupiter!”

“Well!” remarked Lucius, as their uncle, with a sweet, mechanical smile, moved away, “you do know how to repulse the enemy, don’t you, Jack?”

“I didn’t mean to. Do you think he was offended?” Captain Staple broke off, his eyes widening in suspicion and dismay. “Good God, Lucius, just look at that!” he ejaculated.

Lucius, following the direction of his horrified gaze, saw that a footman had entered the Saloon, tenderly bearing a gilded harp. Lady Charlotte was being solicited to display her chief accomplishment, while her mama informed Mrs. Staple, with complacency, that her voice had been trained by the first masters. While Lord Saltash, eagerly, and the elder ladies of the party, politely, begged Charlotte to overcome her diffidence, Lord Melksham, the lady’s brother edged his way across the Saloon, and suggested to Lucius that they should (as he phrased it) nabble Ralph Tackenham, and withdraw, with Captain Staple, from the Saloon for a quiet rubber of whist.

“Ay, willingly!” responded Lucius. “But you’ll find his wife won’t permit him to go with us, if I know my cousin Albinia!”

“Nabble him when she ain’t looking,” said Lord Melksham hopefully. “Very partial to a quiet rubber, Ralph!”

“No, it can’t be done.” Captain Staple spoke with decision. “We must—shall!—stay, and listen to your sister’s performance.”

“But she’ll sing for ever!” objected his lordship. “Dismal stuff, too: assure you!”

But Captain Staple, with a shake of his head, moved away towards the group gathered about the fair harpist, and, obedient to an inviting smile, sat down on a small sofa beside his cousin Lettice.

“This will be dreadful” Miss Yatton whispered.

“Yes, very likely,” he agreed. He turned his head to look down at her, a smile in his eyes. “You’ve grown very fine since I saw you last, Letty. I suppose you’ve come out, have you?”

“Good gracious, yes! At the beginning of the Season! If you had been in London, you would know that I enjoyed a considerable success!” said Miss Yatton, never one to hide her light under a bushel. “Only fancy! Papa received three offers for my hand! Quite ineligible, of course, but just think of it! Three, and in my first Season!” He was amused, but he checked her, Lady Charlotte having by this time disposed herself at the harp. He covered one of his lively young cousin’s hands with his own large one, and gave it an admonishing squeeze. Miss Yatton, who was bidding fair to become an accomplished flirt, obeyed the unspoken command, but cast up at him so roguish a look that his sister, observing it, and the smile with which it was received, took instant fright, and determined at the earliest opportunity to draw her mother’s attention to a danger she had perhaps not perceived.

But Mrs. Staple, visited by her daughter some two hours later, listened to her warning with unshaken placidity, merely saying: “Dear me, did you get me to send my maid away only to tell me this, Fanny?”

“Mama, she ogled him throughout dinner! And the way in which he took her hand, and smiled at her—! I assure you—”

“I observed the whole, my love, and was most forcibly put in mind of the way he has with his puppies.”

“Puppies?” exclaimed Lady Lichfield. “Letty is not a puppy, Mama! Indeed, I think her an arrant flirt, and I cannot but be uneasy. You will own that she would not do for my brother!”

“Do not put yourself in a taking, my love!” replied Mrs. Staple, tying the strings of her nightcap under her chin. “I only hope she may amuse him enough to keep him here over the weekend, though I don’t scruple to say that I very much doubt it. My dear Fanny, was there ever such an insipid affair?”

“Oh, there was never anything like it!” readily agreed her daughter. “But, Mama, how shocking a thing it would be if John were to fall in love with Letty Yatton!”

“I have no apprehension of it,” replied Mrs. Staple calmly.

“He seemed to be quite taken with her,” said Fanny. “I cannot but wonder, ma’am, if Letty’s vivacity may not make dear Elizabeth’s gentler manners seem to him—well, tame!”

“You are making a piece of work about nothing,” said Mrs. Staple. “If he should feel a partiality for Elizabeth I shall be excessively happy. But I hope I am not such a goose as to set my heart upon the match. Depend upon it, your brother is very well capable of choosing a wife for himself.”

“Mama! How can you be so provoking?” exclaimed Fanny. “When we have both of us been at such pains to bring John and Elizabeth together, and you have actually invited Elizabeth to Mildenhurst next week!”

“Very true,” returned Mrs. Staple imperturbably. “I should not think it wonderful if John were to find Eliza’s quiet good sense welcome after three days spent—if the chit can contrive it!—in Letty’s company.”

Fanny looked a little dubious, but she was prevented from making any rejoinder by a knock on the door. Mrs. Staple called to this late visitor to come in, adding, In an under-voice: “Take care! This is John: I know his knock.”

So, indeed, it proved. Captain Staple entered, saying: “May I come in, Mama? Hallo, Fan! Talking secrets?”

“Good gracious, no! Unless you think it a secret that this is the most insipid party that ever was given!”

“Well, that’s just it,” said John confidentially. “If you don’t object, Mama, I think I shall be off in the morning.”

“Not remain until Monday!” cried Fanny. “You can’t cry off like that!”

“I’m not crying off. I was invited to meet the bride, and I have met her.”

“But you can’t tell Bevis you don’t mean to stay!”

“As a matter of fact, I have told him,” said John, a little guiltily. “Told him I had arranged to visit friends—not having understood that I was expected to remain here above a night. Now, there’s no need to pull that face, Fan! If you’re thinking Bevis was offended, you’re quite out.”

“Very well, my dear,” interposed his mother, before Fanny could speak. “Do you mean to go home? For I must tell you that although I should like nothing better than to bring my visit to an end to-morrow I cannot do it without putting your Aunt Maria into a miff.”

“No, no, I don’t mean to drag you off with me, Mama!” he assured her. “To tell you the truth, I thought I might take a trip into Leicestershire, to see Wilfred Babbacombe. Bound to be there, now cubbing has started.” He read condemnation in his sister’s eye, and added hastily: “It seems a pity I shouldn’t do so, now that I’m in the district.”

“In the district! Easterby must be sixty miles from Leicester, and very likely more!”

“Well, now that I’m in the north,” amended the Captain.

“But you will not let Mama return to Mildenhurst without an escort!”

“No, of course I won’t. My man shall go with her. You won’t object to having Cocking to ride beside the chaise in my stead, will you, Mama? You’ll be quite safe with him.”

“By all means, my dear. But had you not better take him with you?”

“Lord, no! I’ll take what I want in a saddle-bag, and shan’t have the least need of him,”

“When,” demanded Fanny, a look of foreboding in her eyes, “do you mean to return to Mildenhurst?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” said her maddening brother. “In a week or so, I daresay. Why?”

Fanny, prohibited by a quelling glance from her mama from answering this question, merely looked her disapprobation. Mrs. Staple said: “It is not of the smallest consequence. I have friends coming to stay at Mildenhurst next week, so you are not to be thinking that I may be lonely, John.”

“Oh, that’s famous, then!” he said, relieved. “You know. Mama, I don’t know how it is—whether it’s my uncle, with his bamboozling ways, or Aunt Caroline, or Lucius’s laugh, or Ralph Tackenham prosing on for ever, or young Geoffrey aping the dandy-set, or just the devilish propriety of Easterby—but I can’t stand it here!”

“I know just what you mean,” his mother assured him.

He bent, giving her a hug and a kiss. “You are the best mother in the world!” he said. “What’s more, that’s a very fetching nightcap, ma’am! I must go: Melksham wants to start a faro-bank now, and Bevis don’t like it above half. Poor old fellow! he’ll never be able to handle Melksham—not when Melksham’s muddled, which he is, six days out of the seven. Christened with pump-water, that lad! He’ll be as drunk as an artillery-man before morning.”

With this ominous prophecy, the Captain then took himself off, leaving his parent unperturbed, and his sister seething. Hardly had the door closed behind him, than she exclaimed: “I think John is the most vexatious creature alive! How could you let him go, Mama? You know what he is! I daresay you won’t set eyes on him again for a month! And now he won’t even meet Elizabeth!”

“It is unfortunate, but I don’t despair,” replied Mrs. Staple, smiling faintly. “As for letting him go, a man of nine-and-twenty, my love, is not to be held in leading-strings. Moreover, had I obliged him to come home to meet Elizabeth I am persuaded he would have taken her in aversion from the outset.”

“Well,” said Fanny crossly, “I think he is odiously provoking, ma’am!”

“Very true, my dear: all men are odiously provoking,” agreed Mrs. Staple. “Now I am going to bed, and you had best do the same.”

“Yes, or Lichfield will wonder what has become of me,” Fanny said, getting up from her chair.

“Not at all,” responded her mother coolly. “Lichfield, dear child, is no less provoking than any other man, and is at this moment—I have no doubt—playing faro downstairs.”

Fanny acknowledged the probable truth of this pronouncement by bidding her parent a dignified goodnight.

Chapter 2

CAPTAIN STAPLE was not destined to leave Easterby at an early hour on the following morning. Thanks to the nocturnal habits of Lord Melksham, it was daylight before he went to bed. That amiable but erratic peer, dissuaded from opening a faro bank, had challenged the company to a quiet game of loo; and since the elders of the party, who included besides the Archdeacon, his brother-in-law, Mr. Yatton, and Mr. Merridge the Earl’s chaplain, had retired soon after the ladies, and the Earl was plainly unable to keep the situation within bounds, Captain Staple had not the heart to desert him. The Earl was grateful, but he would not permit him to break up the party, which he was perfectly willing to do. He said: “No, no! If Melksham is determined——He is my guest, you know, and, besides—Well, you will understand how it is!”

“No, I don’t,” said John bluntly. “And if I were you, old fellow, I would order things as I liked in my own house!”

No one, after as much as one glance at the Captain’s good-humored but determined countenance, could doubt this. The Earl said fretfully: “Yes, but you don’t understand! It’s all very well for you—However, that don’t signify! The thing is, you know what Lucius is, and that stupid brother-in-law of mine! And here’s my Uncle Yatton taken himself off, and left young Geoffrey to do as he pleases! I wish you will stay, and help me to see that they keep the line!”

So Captain Staple, no gamester, stayed; and if he failed to keep the stakes as low as his noble cousin would have wished he did contrive to prevent the quiet game of loo from becoming an extremely noisy game of loo. By the time Lord Melksham had wearied of this sport, and inaugurated a game of brag, young Mr. Yatton had succumbed to his potations, which, as the Captain cheerfully informed the Earl, was a very happy circumstance, since it cut his losses short.

Having carried Geoffrey up to bed, he presently held his own brother-in-law’s head under the pump in the scullery, guided his cousin Arthur’s wavering steps up the stairs, and gently but firmly convinced Lord Melksham that it would be better to retire to bed than to try the power of a hunting-horn discovered in the Great Hall.

After so strenuous a night it was not surprising that the Captain should have slept far into the morning. He did not leave Easterby until past noon, and had he attended to the representations made to him by his host and his sister he would not have left it at all that day. It was pointed out to him that the sky threatened bad weather, that he could not hope to achieve more than a few miles of his journey, and that he would do well to abandon the whole project of riding to Leicestershire. But the probability of rain did not much trouble any man who was accustomed to bivouacking under the worst of conditions in the Peninsula and the Pyrenees; and the possibility of having to rack up for the night at some wayside inn seemed to him infinitely preferable to another of Lord Melksham’s convivial evenings. So at noon, Cocking, the private servant who had been with him through all his campaigns, brought his big, Roman-nosed bay horse up to the house, and strapped to the saddle a heavy frieze cloak, and the bag which contained all that the Captain considered to be necessary for his journey. The rest of the Captain’s luggage consisted of a couple of portmanteaux, and these he instructed Cocking to despatch by carrier to Edenhope, Mr. Babbacombe’s hunting-box in Leicestershire. The sight of two such modest pieces caused Lord Melksham’s man, a very superior person, to wonder that any gentleman should care to travel about the country so meagrely provided for. His own master, he said, never stirred from home without several trunks, a dressing-case, and himself: a highly talented valet. However, the bubble of his conceit was swiftly pricked, Cocking replying without hesitation that there was nothing for him to hold his nose up at in that. “If the Captain was a tallow-faced twiddle-poop, mounted on a pair o’ cat-sticks, I dessay he’d need a snirp like you to pad his calves out, and finify him,” he said. “Only he ain’t! Would there be anything more you was wishful to say about the Captain?”

Lord Melksham’s man prudently decided that there was nothing more he wished to say, explaining this forbearance later to his colleagues as being due to his reluctance to bandy words with a vulgar make-bait. Cocking, left in possession of the field, carefully loaded the Captain’s pistols, placed them in the saddle-holsters, and led the bay up to the house. The Captain, attired in buckskin breeches and topboots, and a coat of slightly military cut, gave him a few last instructions, and mounted the big horse. Keeping a hand on the bridle, Cocking looked up at him, and asked if he was to join him at Edenhope, when he had escorted the mistress safely home.

“No, you might not find me there. Besides, I shan’t need you.”

“Well, sir, that’s as maybe, but what I should like to know is who’s going to clean them leathers?” demanded his henchman.

“I don’t know. Mr. Babbacombe’s man, I daresay.”

“Ho!” said Cocking. “That’ll put Mr. Babbacombe’s man in prime twig, that will! Howsoever, it’s just as you wish, sir, out of course!”

He then watched his master ride off down the avenue, slowly shaking his head. A sparrow, hopping about within a few yards of him, was the recipient of his next cryptic confidence. “Resty, very resty!” he said, staring very hard at the bird. “If you was to ask me, I should say we shall have him up to some kind of bobbery in just a brace o’ snaps!”

The Captain, although he had not the smallest intention of getting up to bobbery, was heartily glad to escape from Easterby. There was nothing but Lord Melksham’s mild excesses to break the tedium; and he did not find these amusing. His cousin’s life was hedged about by all the proprieties which had driven the Captain, eight years earlier, to persuade his father to buy him a pair of colours. He had had a strong notion that the Army in time of war would suit him, and events had proved him to be right. Life in the Peninsula had been uncertain, uncomfortable, and often haphazard, but it had offered almost every kind of adventure, and John had refused none of these. He had enjoyed himself enormously, and never so intensely as when engaged upon some dangerous enterprise.

But when the war ended, in 1814, although he rejoiced as much as any man in the downfall of Bonaparte, he knew that the life he liked had ended too. Not for John Staple, the boredom of military life in peace-time! He yielded at last to his mother’s solicitations, and sold out. She thought that he would find plenty to occupy him in the management of his estate, his father having died a year previously. The elder John Staple had been an indolent man, and for some months his son was busy enough. Then had come the news of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba, and a brief period of exciting activity for John. But Bonaparte had been a prisoner on St. Helena for two years now, and everyone seemed to feel that it was time John settled down to a life of civilian respectability. He felt it himself, and tried to be content, but every now and then a fit of restlessness would seize him. When that happened his subsequent actions would be unpredictable, though, as his brother-in-law gloomily said, it was safe to assume that they would be freakish, and possibly outrageous. Lord Lichfield had every reason to believe that he had once wandered for a couple of weeks with a party of gypsies; and not readily would he forget John’s sudden arrival at his house in Lincolnshire, at midnight, by way of an open window, and clad in strange and disreputable garments.

“Good God, what have you been doing?” he had exclaimed.

“Free trading!” had replied John, grinning at him. “I’m glad I’ve found you at home: I want a bath, and some clean clothes.”

Lord Lichfield had been too much shocked to do more than goggle at him for a full minute. It wasn’t, of course, as bad as John made it sound: the whole affair had been the result of an accident.

“But what I say is this, Fanny!” had complained his lordship later. “If I go sailing, and run into a squall, and have to swim for it, do I get picked up by a smuggling-vessel? Of course I don’t! No one but John would be! What’s more, no one but John would finish the voyage with a set of cut-throat rascals, or help them to land their kegs! And if it had happened to me, I shouldn’t be alive to tell the tale: they’d have knocked me on the head, and dropped me overboard.”

“I cannot conceive how it comes about that he was spared.’” Fanny had said. “Oh, I wish he would not do such things!”

“Yes,” agreed her lord. “Though, mind you, he’s very well able to take care of himself.”

“But in the power of a whole crew of smugglers!”

“I expect they liked him.”

“Liked him?”

“Well, you can’t help liking him!” pointed out his lordship. “He’s a very charming fellow—and I wish to God he’d settle down, and stop kicking up these larks!”

“Mama is right!” declared Fanny. “We must find him an eligible wife!”

Candidate after candidate for this post did Fanny and her mama find, and cunningly throw in John’s way. Apparently he liked them—all of them. This one was a most conversible girl, that one seemed to him a very lively girl, another a remarkably pretty girl. But he asked none of them to marry him. When his sister ventured to ask him once if he had ever been in love, he had replied quite seriously, Yes: he rather thought he had been desperately in love with the lodgekeeper’s wife, who used to regale him with brandy-snaps, and allowed him to keep in a hutch outside her kitchen-door the ferrets Mama had so much disliked.

Was that all? had demanded an exasperated sister. No, there had been a girl in Lisbon, when he first joined. Juanita, or was it Conchita? He couldn’t remember, but at all events she was the loveliest creature you ever saw. Dark, of course, and with the biggest eyes, and such a well-turned ankle! Had he been in love with her? “Lord, yes!” replied John. “We all were!”

He admitted that it was time he was thinking of getting married: not, of course, to Fanny, but to Mama. “Well, I know, Mama,” he said apologetically. “But the thing is I’ve got no fancy for one of these dashed suitable marriages, where you don’t really care a fig for the girl, or she for you. I don’t mean to offer marriage to any girl who don’t give me a leveller. So I daresay I shall remain a bachelor, for they don’t—any of ’em! And if one did,” he added thoughtfully, “it’s Lombard Street to a China orange you wouldn’t take to her!”

“Dearest boy, I should take to any girl whom you loved!” declared Mrs. Staple.

He grinned his appreciation of this mendacity, and gave her shoulders a hug, saying: “That was a whisker!”

She boxed his ears. “Odious boy! The fact of the matter is that it is a thousand pities we are not living in archaic times. What you would have liked, my son, is to have rescued some female from a dragon, or an ogre!”

“Famous good sport to have had a turn-up with a dragon,” he agreed. “As long as you didn’t find yourself with the girl left on your hands afterwards, which I’ve a strong notion those fellows did.”

“Such girls,” his mother reminded him, “were always very beautiful.”

“To be sure they were! Dead bores to, depend upon it! In fact, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the dragons were very glad to be rid of ’em,” said John.

Not very promising, this. But Fanny had discovered Elizabeth Kelfield, and Mrs. Staple had acknowledged, after careful and critical study of Miss Kelfield, that here was a lady who might well take John’s fancy. She was dark; she was decidedly handsome; her fortune was respectable; and although she was not quite twenty years of age she seemed older, the circumstance of her having taken from an invalid mother’s shoulders the burden of household cares having given her an assurance beyond her years. Mrs. Staple thought she had quality, and began to cultivate the ailing Mrs. Kelfield.

And now, when mother and daughter had been coaxed to Mildenhurst, off went John into Leicestershire, so that all the scheming so painstakingly undertaken on his behalf seemed likely to be wasted.

In happy ignorance of this, Captain Staple, climbing the slopes of the Pennines, found himself in a wild, moorland country, and liked it. Having a good sense of direction, he had left the pike road at the earliest opportunity, and with it, in a very short space of time, all signs of civilization. This exactly suited his mood, and he rode over the moors, at an easy pace and in a south-easterly direction. He had meant originally to have spent the night in Derby, but his late start made this impossible. Chesterfield became his objective. That was before the bay cast a shoe. When this happened, the Captain had ample time in which to regret having left the pike road, for he appeared to be in the centre of a vast desert. The only habitations to be seen for miles were an occasional cottage, and a few rough sheds dotted about the moors for the protection of shepherds.

It was dusk when the Captain, leading Beau, dropped off the moor into a small village, which boasted not only a forge, but an alehouse as well. The smith had gone home, and by the time he had been fetched from his cottage, and the fire had been blown up again, not only had the last of the daylight vanished, but the rain, which had held off all day, had begun to fall. There was no possibility of racking up for the night at the alehouse, but bait was forthcoming for man and beast. Captain Staple ate a hearty meal of ham and eggs, lit one of his Spanish cigarillos, and went out to see what hope there might be of the weather’s clearing. There was plainly none. The rain was falling with persistent steadiness, and not a star was to be seen.

The Captain resigned himself to a wet ride, and sought counsel of the landlord. This was his undoing. The worthy man not only knew of a comfortable inn a few miles distant, but, anxious to be helpful, directed the Captain to it by what he assured him was the shortest route. He said that the Captain could not miss it, and no doubt the Captain would not have missed it if the landlord had not omitted to tell him that when he bade him take the first lane on the right he did not mean the track which, as every native of those parts knew, led winding upwards to the moor, and ended at a small farmstead. It was an hour later when the Captain, trusting his instinct, and riding steadily southward, found a lane which, rough though it was, seemed likely to lead to some village, or pike road. He followed this, noting with satisfaction that it ran slightly downhill, and within a short space of time knew that his guess had been correct. The lane ran into a broader road, which crossed it at right angles. Captain Staple had no very certain idea where he was, but he was reasonably sure that Sheffield lay to the east, probably at no great distance, so he turned left-handed into the larger road. The rain dripped from the brim of his hat, and mud generously splashed his topboots, but the heavy frieze cloak had so far kept him fairly dry. He leaned forward to pat Beau’s streaming neck, saying encouragingly: “Not much farther now, old chap!”

A bend in the road brought into view an encouraging sight. A small light glowed ahead, which, from its position, the Captain judged to be the lantern hung upon a tollgate. “Come, now, Beau!” he said, in heartening accents. “We’re on the right track, at all events! If this is a pike road, it must lead to some town!”

He rode on, and soon saw that he had indeed reached a pike. The light, though very dim, enabled him to see that it was shut, and guarded, on the northern side of the road, by a gatehouse. No light was visible in the house, and the door was shut. “Cross-country road, not much used,” the Captain informed Beau. He raised his voice, shouting imperatively: “Gate!”

Nothing happened. “Do I dismount, and open it for myself?” enquired the Captain. “No, I’ll be damned if I do! Gate, I say! Gate! Turn out, there, and be quick about it!”

The door in the centre of the gatehouse opened a little way, and a feeble glimmer of lantern light was cast across the road. “Well, come along!” said the Captain impatiently. “Open up, man!”

After a moment’s hesitation, this summons was obeyed. The gatekeeper came out into the road, and revealed himself, in the light of the lantern he carried, to be of diminutive stature. The Captain, looking down at him in some surprise, as he stood fumbling with the gate-tickets, discovered him to be a skinny urchin, certainly not more than thirteen years old, and probably less. The lantern’s glow revealed a scared young face, freckled, and slightly tear-stained.

He said: “Hallo, what’s this? Are you the gatekeeper?”

“N-no, sir. Me dad is,” responded the youth, with a gulp.

“Well, where is your dad?”

Another gulp. “I dunno.” A ticket was held up. “Frippence, please, your honour, an’ it opens the next two gates.”

But the Captain’s besetting sin, a strong predilection for exploring the unusual, had taken possession of him. He disregarded the ticket, and said: “Did your dad leave you to mind the gate for him?”

“Yes sir,” acknowledged the youth, with a somewhat watery sniff. “Please, sir, it’s frippence, and——”

“Opens the next two gates,” supplied the Captain. “What’s your name?”

“Ben,” replied the youth.

“Where does this road lead to? Sheffield?”

After consideration, Ben said that it did.

“How far?” asked the Captain.

“I dunno. Ten miles, I dessay. Please, sir——”

“As much as that! The devil!”

“It might be twelve, p’raps. I dunno. But the ticket’s frippence, please, sir.”

The Captain looked down into the not very prepossessing countenance raised anxiously to his. The boy looked frightened and overwatched. He said: “When did your dad go off?” He waited, and added, after a moment: “Don’t be afraid! I shan’t hurt you. Have you been minding the gate for long?”

“Yes—no! Dad went off yesterday. He said he’d be back, but he ain’t, and please, sir, don’t go telling no one, else Dad’ll give me a proper melting!” begged the youth, on a note of urgent entreaty.

The Captain’s curiosity was now thoroughly roused. Gatekeepers might have their faults, but they did not commonly leave their posts unattended except by small boys for twenty-four hours at a stretch. Moreover, Ben was badly scared; and to judge by the furtive glances he cast round he was scared by something besides the darkness and his loneliness.

The Captain swung himself to the ground, and pulled the bridle over Beaus head. “Seems to me I’d better stay and keep you company for the night,” he said cheerfully. “Now, where am I going to stable my horse?”

Ben was so much astonished that he could only stand staring up at the Captain with his mouth open and his eyes popping. The Captain knew that the generality of country gatehouses had small gardens attached to them with, often enough, rough sheds erected for the storage of hoes, swap-hooks, and wood. “Have you got a shed?” he demanded.

“Ay,” uttered Ben, still gazing, fascinated, at this enormous and fantastic traveller.

“What’s in it?”

“Cackling-cheats.”

The Captain recognized the language. His troop had contained several of the rogues of whom his Grace of Wellington, in querulous humour, had more than once asserted that his gallant army was for the most part composed. “Hens?” he said. “Oh, well, no matter! Take me to it! Is it big enough for my horse?”

“Ay,” said Ben doubtfully.

“Lead the way, then!”

Apparently Ben felt that it would be unwise to demur, which he seemed much inclined to do, for after giving another gulp he picked up his lantern, and guided the Captain to a wicket-gate behind the tollhouse.

The shed proved to be surprisingly large, and when the lantern was hung up on a protruding nail its light revealed not only a collection of fowls, perched on a roost, but also some straw, and a truss of hay in one corner. There were unmistakable signs that Beau was not the first horse to be stabled there, a circumstance which John found interesting, but which he thought it wisest not to comment upon. Ben was regarding him with a mixture of awe and suspicion, so he smiled down at the boy, and said: “You needn’t be afraid: I shan’t hurt you. Now, my cloak’s too wet to put over Beau here: have you got a blanket to spare?”

“Ay. But if Mr. Chirk was to come—But I dessay he won’t!” said Ben. “Coo, he is a big prancer!”

He then took the saddle-bag which John had unstrapped, and went off with it. When he returned it was with a pail of water, and a horse-blanket. He found that the Captain, having shed his coat, was rubbing Beau down, and he at once collected a wisp of straw, and set to work on the big horse’s legs. He seemed to have decided that his uninvited guest, though alarmingly large, really did mean him no harm, for he looked much more cheerful, and volunteered the information that he had set the kettle on to boil. “There’s some rum left,” he said.

“There won’t be presently,” replied John, watching the boy’s fearless handling of his horse. The mild jest was well-received, a friendly grin being cast up at him. He said casually: “Do you work in a stable?”

“Some days I does. Others it’s all sorts,” replied Ben. “Mr. Sopworthy hires me mostly.”

“Who is he?”

“Buffer, at Crowford. Blue Boar,” said Ben, beginning to wipe the stirrups with a piece of sacking.

“Innkeeper?” hazarded John.

“Ay.”

“Does your dad keep a horse?”

The wary look came back into Ben’s face. “No.” He eyed John sideways. “That horse-cloth ain’t me dad’s. It—it belongs to a friend. He comes here sometimes. Maybe he wouldn’t like you using of it, so—so you don’t want to go saying anything about it, please, sir! Nor about him, acos he don’t like meeting no strangers!”

“Shy, is he? I won’t say anything,” promised John, wondering if this were perhaps the man of whom Ben was afraid. He was by this time convinced that some mystery hung about the toll-house, with which, no doubt, the disappearance of its custodian was connected; but he was wise enough to keep this reflection to himself, since it was plain that Ben, in the manner of a colt, was uncertain of him, ready to shy off in a panic.

When Beau had been covered with the blanket, and left to lip over an armful of hay, Ben led the Captain up the garden to the back of the toll-house, where a central door opened into a small kitchen. The house, as John quickly saw, was of the usual pattern. It consisted of two tolerable rooms with another between them, which had been divided into two by a wooden partition. The rear half was the kitchen, and the front the toll-office. The kitchen was small, over-warm, and extremely untidy. Since it was lit by a couple of dip-candles in tin holders, an unpleasant aroma of hot tallow hung about it. But the Captain knew from past experiences in the more primitive parts of Portugal that the human nose could rapidly accustom itself to even worse smells, and he entered the room without misgiving. Ben shut and bolted the door, set down the lantern, and produced from the cupboard a black bottle, and a thick tumbler. “I’ll mix you a bumper,” he offered.

The Captain, who had seated himself in the Windsor chair by the fire, grinned, but said: “Much obliged to you, but I think I’ll mix it myself. If you want to make yourself useful, see if you can pull off these boots of mine!”

This operation, which took time, and all Ben’s strength, did much to break the ice. It seemed to Ben exquisitely humorous that he should tumble nearly heels over head, clasping a muddied topboot to his chest. He began to giggle, forgetting his awe, and looked all at once much younger than John had at first supposed him to be. He disclosed, upon enquiry, that he was going on for eleven.

Having found a pair of pumps in his saddle-bag, John mixed himself a glass of hot rum and water, and sat down again with his legs stretched out before him, and his boots standing beside the hearth to dry. “That’s better,” he said, leaning his fair head against the high-back of the chair, and smiling sleepily across at his host. “Tell me, are we likely to be called out very often to open that gate?”

Ben shook his head. “No one don’t come this way after dark much,” he said. “ ’Sides, it’s raining fit to bust itself.”

“Good!” said John. “Where am I going to sleep?”

“You could have me dad’s bed,” suggested Ben doubtfully.

“Thank you, I will. Where do you think your dad may have gone to?”

“I dunno,” said Ben simply.

“Does he often go away like this?”

“No. He never done it afore—not like this. And he ain’t gone on the mop, because he ain’t no fuddlecap, not me dad. And if he don’t come back, they’ll put me on the Parish.”

“I expect he’ll come back,” said John soothingly. “Have you got any other relations? Brothers? Uncles?”

“I got a brother. Leastways, unless he’s been drownded, I have. He was pressed. I shouldn’t wonder if I was never to see him no more.”

“Lord, yes, of course you will!”

“Well, I don’t want to,” said Ben frankly. “He’s a proper jobbernoll, that’s what he is. Else they wouldn’t never have snabbled him. Me dad says so.”

If Ben possessed other relatives, he did not know of them. His mother seemed to have died some years before; and it soon became apparent that he clung to his father less from affection than from a lively dread of being thrown on the Parish. He was convinced that if this should befall him he would be sent to work at one of the foundries in Sheffield. He lived near enough to Sheffield to know what miseries were endured by the swarms of stunted children who were employed from the age of seven in the big manufacturing towns; and it was not surprising that this fate should seem so terrible to him. There was only one worse fate known to him, and this, before long, he was to confide to John.

While he talked, and John sat sipping his rum, the wind had risen a little, bringing with it other sounds than the steady dripping of the rain. The wicket-gate for the use of travellers on foot creaked and banged gently once or twice, and when this happened Ben’s face seemed to sharpen, and he broke off what he was saying to listen intently. John noticed that his eyes wandered continually towards the backdoor, and that the noises coming from the rear of the house seemed to worry him more than the creak of the gate. A gust of wind blew something over with a clatter. It sounded to John as though a broom, or a rake, had fallen, but it brought Ben to his feet in a flash, and drove him instinctively to John’s side.

“What is it?” John said quietly.

“Him!” breathed Ben, his gaze riveted to the door.

John got up, and trod over to the door, ignoring a whimper of protest. He shot back the bolts, and opened it, stepping out into the garden. “There’s no one here,” he said, over his shoulder. “You left a broom propped against the wall, and the wind blew it over, that’s all. Come and see for yourself!” He waited for a moment, and then repeated, on a note of authority: “Come!”

Ben approached reluctantly.

“Weather’s fairing up,” remarked John, leaning his shoulders against the door-frame, and looking up at the sky. “Getting lighter. We shall have a fine day tomorrow. Well? Can you see anyone?”

“N-no,” Ben acknowledged, with a little shiver. He looked up at John, and added hopefully: “He couldn’t get me, could he? Not with a big cove like you here.”

“Of course not. No one could get you,” John replied, shutting the door again, and going back to the fire. “You may bolt it if you choose, but there’s no need.”

“Yes, ’cos he might come to see me dad, and I mustn’t see him, nor him me,” explained Ben.

“Lord, is he as shy as all that? What’s the matter with him? Is he so ugly?”

“I dunno. I never seen him. Only his shadder—onct!”

“But you’ve rubbed his horse down for him, haven’t you?”

“No!” Ben said, staring.

“Wasn’t that his blanket that you brought me for Beau?”

“No.’ That’s Mr. Chirk’s!” said Ben. “He’s a—” He stopped, gave a gasp, and added quickly: “He’s as good as ever twanged, he is! You don’t want to go telling nobody about him! Please, sir—”

“Oh, I won’t breathe a word about him! Are all your friends so shy?”

“He ain’t shy. He just don’t like strangers.”

“I see. And does this other man—the one you’re afraid of—dislike strangers too?”

“I dunno. He can’t abide boys. Me dad says if he was to catch me looking at him he’d have me took off to work in the pits.” His voice sank on the word, and he gave so convulsive a shudder that it was easy to see that coal-pits were to him a worse horror than foundries.

John laughed. “That’s a fine Banbury story! Your dad’s been hoaxing you, my son!”

Ben looked incredulous. “He could have me took off. He’d put a sack over me head, and—”

“Oh, would he? And what do you suppose I should do if anyone walked in and tried to put a sack over your head?”

“What?” asked Ben, round-eyed.

“Put a sack over his head, of course, and hand him to the nearest constable.”

“You would!” Ben drew an audible breath.

“Certainly I would. Does he come here often?”

“N-no. Leastways, I dunno. After it’s dark, he comes. I dunno how many times. Onct, there was two on ’em. I woke up, and heard them, talking to me dad.”

“What were they talking about?”

Ben shook his head. “I didn’t hear nothing but just voices. I got right under me blanket, ’cos I knew it was Kirn.”

By this time it seemed fairly certain to John that the gatekeeper’s disappearance was connected in some way with Ben’s mysterious bugbear; and it seemed still more certain that he was engaged upon nefarious business. What this might be John had not the remotest conjecture, and it was plainly useless to question Ben further. He got up, saying: “Well, it’s high time you were under your blanket again. If anyone shouts gate, I’ll attend to it, so you show me where your dad’s bed is, and then be off to your own.”

“You can’t open the gate!” said Ben, shocked. “You’re a flash cove!”

“Never mind what I am! You do what I tell you!”

Thus adjured, Ben escorted him into the toll-office, from which access to the two other rooms was obtained. One of these, where Ben slept on a truckle-bed, contained stores, but the other was furnished with some degree of comfort, the bed even being provided with cotton sheets, and a faded patchwork quilt. The Captain, having no fancy for the gatekeeper’s sheets, coolly stripped them off the bed, rolled them into a bundle, and tossed them into a corner of the room. He then stretched himself out on top of the blankets, pulled the quilt over himself, and blew out the candle. For a few minutes, before falling asleep, he wondered what he was going to do if the gatekeeper did not return that night. The proper course, which would be to report the man’s absence, would seem unpleasantly like a betrayal of Ben; yet no other presented itself to him. But the Captain was never one to meet troubles halfway, and he very soon stopped frowning over this problem. After all, it was probable that before morning the gatekeeper would be back at his post. Stale-drunk, too, thought John, setting little store by Ben’s assurance that his dad was not one to go on the mop.

Chapter 3

THE Captain slept soundly, and awoke to daylight, and the sound of voices. On getting up, and looking out of the little latticed window, he saw that Ben was holding open the gate for a herd of cows to pass through, and exchanging courtesies with the boy who was driving them. A fine autumn day had succeeded the night’s downpour, and the mist still lay over the fields beyond the road. A glance at the watch which he had laid on the chair beside the bed informed John that it was half-past six. He strolled into the toll-office just as Ben shut the gate, and came in.

With the daylight the worst of Ben’s fears were laid to rest. He looked a different boy from the hag-ridden urchin of the previous evening; walked in whistling; and greeted the Captain with a grin.

“Your dad not back?” John asked.

The grin faded. “No. Likely he’s piked.”

“Run away? Why should he?”

“Well, if he ain’t piked, p’raps he’s gorn to roost,” temporized Ben. “’Cos when he loped off, he told me to mind the gate for an hour, and he’d be back. What’ll I do, gov’nor?”

This question was uttered, not in a tone of misgiving, but in one of cheerful confidence. Ben looked enquiringly up into John’s face, and John realized, ruefully, that his small protégé was reposing complete trust in his willingness and ability to settle the future satisfactorily for him.

“Well, that’s a problem which seems to hang in the hedge a trifle,” he said. “We shall have to talk it over. But first I want a wash, and breakfast.”

“I got some bacon cut, and there’s eggs, and a bit of beef,” offered Ben, ignoring the first of the Captain’s needs as a frivolity.

“Excellent! Where’s the pump?”

“Out the back. But ”

“Well, you come and work it for me,” said John. “I want a towel, and some soap as well.”

Considerably surprised (for the Captain looked quite clean, he thought), Ben collected a piece of coarse soap, cut from a bar, and a huckaback towel, and followed his guest into the garden. But when he discovered that the Captain, not content with sousing his head and neck, proposed to wash the whole of his powerful torso, he was moved to utter a shocked protest. “You’ll catch your death!” he gasped.

The Captain, briskly rubbing the soap over his chest, and down his arms, laughed. “Not I!”

“But you don’t need to go a-washing of yourself all over!”

“What, after sleeping all night in my clothes? Don’t I just!” John glanced critically down at Ben, and added: “It wouldn’t do you any harm to go under the pump either.”

Ben stepped out of reach instinctively, but was summoned back to work the pump-handle. He would then have beat a hasty retreat, but was frustrated. A large hand caught and held him; he looked up in alarm, and saw the blue eyes laughing.

“I had a wash Sunday last!” he said imploringly. “I ain’t cutting no wheedle! Honest, I did!”

“Did you, by Jupiter? Then it’s a week since you were clean, is it? Strip, my lad!”

“No!” said Ben tearfully, wriggling to be free of the grip on his shoulder. “I won’t!”

The Captain dealt him one hard, admonitory spank. “You’d better!” he said.

His voice was perfectly good-humoured, but Ben was no fool, and, with a despairing sniff, he capitulated. It was doubtful if ever before he had been obliged to scrub his skinny person so thoroughly; and certainly no well-wisher had ever held him remorselessly under the pump, and worked it with such a will. He emerged spluttering and shivering, and eyed his persecutor with mingled respect and resentment. John tossed the towel to him, saying: “That’s better! If you own another shirt, put it on!”

“What, clean mish too?” gasped Ben.

“Yes—and comb your hair!” said John. “Bustle about, now! I’m hungry.”

Half an hour later, surveying Ben across the kitchen table, he professed himself satisfied. He said that Ben looked much more the thing, an observation which caused that young gentleman’s bosom to swell with indignation. His eyes were red-rimmed and watering from contact with the soap, and his skin felt as though it had been scoured. He still thought the Captain a fascinating and an awe-inspiring personage, but having watched him vigorously brushing his teeth he now suspected that he must be queer in his attic. When a hearty breakfast had been disposed of, and the Captain insisted not only that all the crockery should be washed, but that the floor should be swept clean of mud, crumbs, scraps of bacon-rind, and some decayed cabbage stalks, he was sure of it. He explained that Mrs. Skeffling, from down the road, came to clean the place every Wednesday, but the Captain paid no heed, merely telling him to fetch a broom, and to be quick about it. He himself, having discovered some blacking and a brush in the cupboard, took his boots into the garden, and set about the unaccustomed task of removing the dried mud from them. He also tried, not very successfully, to get rid of the travel stains from his buckskin breeches. He recalled, as he worked on them, Cocking’s words, and realized that there was more to the care of leathers than he had supposed. In fact, the upkeep of a gentleman’s wardrobe seemed to entail a great deal of unforeseen labour, not the least arduous of which was the removal of Beau’s hairs from the skirts of his coat, where they obstinately stuck, resisting all efforts to brush them off.

When this was accomplished, there was Beau to be watered, fed, and groomed, his bit to be cleaned, the saddle girths to be brushed free of mud, by which time the morning was considerably advanced. While he performed all these labours John tried to think of some solution to Ben’s problem. He thought of several, but not one that was likely to meet with any sort of approval. It began to seem as though he would be obliged, instead of continuing his journey to Leicestershire, to spend the day in making discreet enquiries into the gatekeeper’s possible whereabouts.

He went back into the gatehouse, a crease between his brows. This did not escape Ben’s notice. He made haste to point out that he had thoroughly swept the kitchen; and as this was productive of nothing more than a nod ventured to ask if the Captain was angry.

John, who was rather absently ladling water into the iron kettle which hung from a hook above the old-fashioned fireplace, paused, dipper in hand, and looked down at him. “Angry? No. Why should I be?”

“I thought you looked as if you was in a tweak—a bit cagged, like,” explained Ben.

“I was wondering what’s to be done with you, if your dad doesn’t come back today. Can you think of any place where he might have had business? Did he ever visit anyone in Sheffield, for instance?”

“He don’t visit nobody, me dad don’t. And if he was going to town, he’d put his best toge on, and a shap on his head, and he didn’t,” replied Ben shrewdly. “He loped off just like he was going down to the Blue Boar. P’raps he’s been pressed, like Simmy!”

Since this solution did not seem in any way to disturb Ben, the Captain refrained from trying to convince him that the Press Gang neither operated in remote inland districts, nor pressed such persons as gatekeepers. He went on ladling water into the kettle; and Ben, suddenly remembering that he had not fed the pig, which led a somewhat restricted life in a sty at the bottom of the ground, took himself off to repair this omission.

As soon as the kettle began to sing the Captain poured some of the water into a tin mug, and bore it off to the gatekeeper’s bedroom. He had just set out his shaving tackle, and was about to lather his face, when he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching down the road. A shout of Gate! was raised, and John was obliged to put down his brush. Collecting the tickets on his way, he strolled out of the toll-house, and saw that a gig had drawn up to the east of it. A cursory glance showed him that the reins were being handled by a woman, and that a middle-aged groom sat beside her; and a rapid scrutiny of the list of tolls set up on a board beside the house informed him that the charge at this pike for a one-horse vehicle was threepence. He walked up to the gig, and the groom, who had been looking at him in some surprise, said: “Well, shake your shambles, can’t you? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

John raised his eyes from the book of tickets. “Gatekeeping. The charge is——”

The words died on his lips. He stood perfectly still, gazing not at the groom, but at the girl beside him.

A very tall girl, and nobly-proportioned, she was dressed in a green pelisse that was serviceable rather than fashionable. A pair of tan gloves, not in their first youth, covered her capable, well-shaped hands; and a plain bonnet with no other trimming than a bow of ribbon was set on a head of thick chestnut hair, which showed tawny gleams in the sunlight. Humorous gray eyes looked down into John’s, the arched brows above them lifting slightly; an amused smile hovered about a mouth too generous for beauty. But this faded as John stood looking up at her. She stared down at him, seeing an unshaven young giant, in stained leathers and a shirt unbuttoned at the throat, with curly fair hair ruffled by the breeze, and the bluest of eyes fixed unwaveringly on her face.

“Church!” said the groom impatiently. “Open up, my lad!”

If John heard him he paid no heed. He stood as though stunned, for he had received his leveller at last.

A flush crept into the lady’s cheeks; she said, with an uncertain laugh: “I suppose you must be Brean’s elder son. You are certainly a big fellow! Please open the gate! Churchgoers, you know, are exempt from tax.”

Her voice recalled John to his senses. Colour flooded his face; he uttered an inarticulate apology, and made haste to open the gate. It was a single the and he stood holding it at the side of the road while the gig passed beyond it. The lady nodded to him, quite kindly, but in the manner of one immeasurably his superior; and drove away at a brisk trot.

John remained where he was, still holding the gate, and looking after the gig until it passed round the bend in the road, and was gone from his sight.

He became aware of Ben, who had emerged from the tollhouse, and was regarding him in mild surprise. He shut the gate, and said: “Did you see that gig, Ben?”

“Ay. I give that big prancer of yours a carrot. Coo, he ”

“Who was the lady driving it? Do you know?”

“’Course I does! When I gives a carrot to Mr. Chirk’s Mollie, she—”

“Well, who is she?”

“I’m a-telling of you! She’s Mr. Chirk’s mare, and she shakes hands for carrots! You arsts her what she’ll do for it, and she lifts up her right fore—”

“The devil fly away with Mr. Chirk’s mare! Who was the lady in that gig?”

“Oh, her!” said Ben, losing interest. “That was only Miss Nell. She’ll be going to Church.”

“Where does she live? Will she be coming back?”

“Ay, out of course she will! There ain’t no other way she can get home from Crowford, not with the gig there ain’t.”

“Where is her home?”

Ben jerked his chin, vaguely indicating an easterly direction. “Over there. Mr. Chirk’s learnt Mollie to do all sorts of tricks. She—”

“He had best sell her to Astley, then. Does Miss Nell live nearby?”

“I telled you!” said Ben impatiently. “At the Manor!”

“What Manor? Where is it?”

It was plain that Ben thought poorly of persons who were so ignorant that they were unaware of the locality of the largest house in the vicinity. “Everyone knows where Squire’s house is!” he said scornfully.

“The Squire, eh? Is he Miss Nell’s father?”

“Squire? No! He’s her granfer. He’s an old gager. No one ain’t set eyes on him since I dunno when. They do say he’s as queer as Dick’s hatband, ever since he was took bad all on a sudden. He can’t walk no more. Folks say it’s Miss Nell as is Squire these days.”

“How far is it from here to the Squire’s place?”

“Kellands? A mile, I dessay.”

“Who is he? What is his name?”

Tired of this catechism, Ben sighed, and answered: “Sir Peter Stornaway, out of course!”

“Do you see her—do you see Miss Nell often?”

“Ay, most days,” replied Ben indifferently.

The Captain drew a breath, and stood for a few moments gazing down the road to where he had last seen the gig. Emerging suddenly from this trance, he ejaculated: “Good God, I must shave!” and strode into the tollhouse.

Miss Stornaway, returning homewards, was not obliged to summon the new gatekeeper to open for her. Captain Staple was on the watch, and came out of the toll-house as soon as he heard the sound of carriage-wheels. He was still in his shirt-sleeves, but he now sported a neatly tied neckcloth, and had pulled on his top-boots. He had recovered from his stupefaction, too, so that Miss Stornaway, pulling up, found herself looking down, not at a gigantic hobbledehoy, as tongue-tied as he was handsome, but at a perfectly assured man who smiled up at her without a vestige of shyness, and said: “Forgive me for having unlawfully demanded toll of you! I’m a new hand—shockingly green!”

Miss Stornaway’s eyes widened. She exclaimed involuntarily: “Good heavens! you can’t be Brean’s son!”

“No, no, I fancy he’s at sea. The poor fellow was pressed, you know.”

“But what are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Keeping the gate,” he replied promptly.

She was bewildered, but amused too. “Nonsense! How could you be a gatekeeper?”

“If you mean that I’m a bad one you must remember that I’m a novice. I shall learn.”

“Nothing of the sort! I mean—Oh, I believe you’re hoaxing me!”

“Indeed I’m not!”

“Where is Brean?” she demanded.

“Well, there you have me,” he confessed. “Like Ben—are you acquainted with Ben?—I dunno! That’s why I’m here.”

She wrinkled her brow. “Do you mean that Brean has gone away? But why should you take his place? Are you doing it for a wager?”

“No, but now that you come to suggest it I see that that might not be at all a bad notion,” he said..

“I wish you will be serious!” she begged, trying to frown and succeeding only in laughing.

“I am very serious. On the whole, I believe I shall do better to announce myself to be a cousin of Brean’s.”

“No one would credit such a tale, I assure you!”

“Don’t you think so? I can talk cant with the best, you know.”

She made a despairing gesture. “I don’t understand a word of this!”

The groom, who had been staring very hard at John, said: “Seems to me there’s something smoky going on here. If you ain’t playing a May-game, sir; nor cutting a sham—”

“I’m not, but I agree with you that there’s something smoky going on,” John interrupted. “The gatekeeper went off two nights ago, and hasn’t been seen since.”

“Well, that’s very bad,” acknowledged Miss Stornaway. “But I do not see why you should take his place!”

“But you must see that Ben is a great deal too young to remain here alone!” John pointed out.

“You are the oddest creature! How do you come here? Why—Oh, I wish you will explain it to me!”

“I will,” he promised. “It is quite a long story, however. Won’t you step down from your gig? I shan’t invite you to come into the toll-house, for although I have induced Ben to sweep out the kitchen it is not at all tidy, but we could sit on the bench.”

Her eyes danced; it seemed as if she were half inclined to fall in with this suggestion, but at that moment the groom said something to her in a low voice, directing her attention to the road ahead.

Coming towards the gate, on a showy-looking hack, was a thickset man, rather too fashionably attired for his surroundings. He wore white hunting-tops, a florid waistcoat with several fobs and seals depending from it, a blue coat with long tails and very large buttons, and a beaver hat with a exaggeratedly curled brim.

The laughter went out of Miss Stornaway’s eyes; she said rather hurriedly: “Some other time, perhaps. Please to open the gate now!”

John went to it immediately. It had a fifteen foot clearance, and the man on the gray hack reined in short of its sweep towards him. He looked rather narrowly at John for a moment, but rode forward as soon as the gate stood wide enough, and reined in alongside the gig. The beaver was doffed with a flourish, revealing exquisitely pomaded and curled black locks.

“Ah, Miss Nell, you stole a march on us, did you not?” challenged the gentleman jovially. “But I have found you out, you see, and come to meet you!”

“I have been to Church, sir, if that is what you mean,” Miss Stornaway replied coldly.

“Sweet piety! You will allow me to escort you home!”

“I cannot prevent you from doing so, sir, but I am sorry you should have put yourself to the trouble of coming to meet me. It was unnecessary,” said Miss Stornaway, whipping up her horse.

John shut the gate, and went back into the toll-house. A strong aroma of onions assailed him, from which he inferred that Ben considered it was time to start cooking dinner. He went into the kitchen, and said abruptly: “Ben, did you tell me that there is a woman who comes here to clean the place?”

“Ay, Mrs. Skeffling. She comes Wednesdays. She washes the duds too,” replied Ben. “We has a roast, Wednesdays, and a pudden, and all. Coo, she’s a prime cook, she is!”

“We must have her every day,” John said decidedly.

“Every day?” gasped Ben, nearly upsetting the pan he was holding over the fire. “Whatever for, gov’nor?”

“To keep the house clean, and cook the dinner, of course. Where does she live?”

“Down the road. But she has to have a sow’s baby every time!”

“In that case, I shall have to go to market and buy a litter of pigs,” said John. He perceived that Ben was looking quite amazed, and laughed. “Never mind! How much is a sow’s baby?”

“A half-horde—sixpence! Properly turned-up we’d be!”

“Don’t bother your head about that!” recommended John.

Ben eyed him with considerable respect. “You got a lot of mint-sauce, gov’nor?”

“I’m tolerably well-blunted,” responded John gravely. “Now, listen, Ben! I’m going to remain here—”

“You are?” cried Ben joyfully.

“Until your dad comes back, or, at any rate—”

“Coo, I hope he don’t never come back!”

“Quiet, you unnatural brat! If he doesn’t come back—lord, I’m dashed if I know what I’m to do with you, but I won’t throw you on the Parish, at all events! The thing is, if I’m to stay here I must make some purchases. How far off is the nearest town, and what is it?”

After reflection, Ben said that he thought Tideswell was only a matter of five miles or so. He added that his dad had bought the pig there, and a new coat for the winter. This sounded promising.

“I’ll ride there tomorrow,” John said. “You won’t be scared of minding the gate while I’m away, will you?”

“I ain’t scared—leastways, not in the day time I ain’t,” said Ben. “But I got to muck out Mr. Sopworthy’s henhouse, mind! He’ll tip me a meg, and likely want me to lend a hand at summat else. I dunno when I’ll be back.”

“Well, you must tell him that you’re needed here. What kind of a man is this Mr. Sopworthy?”

“He’s a leery cove, he is, me dad says. He ain’t one as’ll squeak beef on you, but it’s pound dealing with him, else he goes up in the boughs—proper, he does!”

“If that means that he’s an honest man, I fancy I had best make his acquaintance. I gather you don’t think he’d be likely to inform against your dad, so we shall tell him that your dad’s been called away for a few days, and left me to take his place. I’m a cousin of yours,” said the Captain.

“He won’t never swallow a rapper like that!” objected Ben. “He ain’t no chub! He’d know you was a flash cull, sure as check!”

“Not he!” grinned John.

“Soon as you opens your mummer, he will!” insisted Ben. “’Cos you talks flash, and you got a lot of cramp-words, like all the gentry-coves.”

“I’ll take care not to use ’em,” promised John.

“Yes, and what about that mish you got on, and them stampers?” demanded Ben, quite unconvinced.

“If you mean my shirt, I am going to buy some others, in Tideswell, and a stout pair of brogues as well. Don’t shake your head at me! I’ve been discharged from the Army, understand? Trooper, 3rd Dragoon Guards—and batman (that means a servant) to an officer. That’s how I come to talk a trifle flash. You remember that, and we shall come off all right!”

Ben looked dubious, but all he said was: “What’ll I call you, gov’nor?”

“Jack. What I must have is decent stabling for Beau. He can’t remain cooped up in a hen-house, and it seems to me that the Blue Boar’s the best place for him.”

“Why couldn’t you stable him in Farmer Huggate’s barn?” asked Ben captiously.

“I could, if I knew where it was,” John retorted.

“It’s nob but a step, back of here,” Ben said. “Farmer Huggate and me dad’s as thick as hops. If you was to grease him in the fist, likely he’d let you have fodder for Beau, too, ’cos he’s got two big prads of his own.”

This suggestion pleased the Captain so well that he sent Ben to see Farmer Huggate as soon as he had eaten his dinner. He himself remained on duty, but was only twice called upon to open the gate. Whatever might happen during the week, the road seemed to be very little used on Sundays. Having discovered some clean sheets in a chest, John was able to make up his bed. He did some energetic work with the broom, drastically tidied the kitchen, and then sat down to compile a list of the various commodities which were needed to make life in a toll-house tolerable. He was engaged on this task when an imperative voice summoned him to the gate. He got up rather quickly, for he recognized the voice, and strode out.

Miss Stornaway, mounted on a good-looking hack, and unattended, said, with a slight smile: “Well, sir, I’ve come to hear that long story, if you please! You must know that they call me the Squire in these parts: that must serve as an excuse for my curiosity!”

“You need none,” he said, opening the gate a little way.

She touched her horse with her heel, saying as she went past John: “Do you mean to demand toll of me? I warn you, I shall inform against you if you do! I don’t go above a hundred yards from the gate: not as much!”

“Is that the rule?” he asked, going to her horse’s head.

“Of course!” She transferred the bridle to her right hand, brought one leg neatly over the pommel, and slipped to the ground. Shaking out the folds of her shabby riding-dress, she glanced up at John. “Heavens, how big you are!”

He smiled. “Why, yes! You told me so, this morning!”

She laughed, blushed faintly, and retorted: “I did not know how big until now, when I find myself on a level with you. You must know that in general I look over men’s heads.”

He could see that this must be so. She did not seem to him to be an inch too tall, but he realized that she was taller even than his sister, and built on more magnificent lines. Hitching her horse to the gate post, he said sympathetically: “It’s a trial, isn’t it? I feel it myself, and my sister tells me it has been the bane of her existence. Do you always ride unattended, Miss Stornaway?”

She had seated herself on the bench outside the tollhouse, under the fascia board, which bore, in staring black capitals, the name of Edward Brean. “Yes, invariably! Does it offend your sense of propriety? I am not precisely a schoolgirl, you know!”

“Oh, no!” he replied seriously, coming to sit down beside her. “I like you for it—if you don’t think it impertinent in me to tell you so. I’ve thought, ever since I came home, that there’s a deal too much propriety in England.”

She raised her brows. “Came home?”

“Yes. I’m a soldier—that is to say, I was one.”

“Were you in the Peninsula?” He nodded. “My brother was, too,” she said abruptly. “He was killed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Where?”

“At Albuera. He was in the 7th.”

“You should be proud,” he said. “I was at Albuera, too. I saw the Fusiliers go into action.”

She lifted her chin. “I am proud. But he was my grandfather’s heir, and——Oh, well! What was your regiment?”

“3rd Dragoon Guards. I sold out after Toulouse.”

“And your name?”

“John Staple. I have told Ben to set it about that I’m a trooper—an officer’s batman. He says I talk flash, you see.”

She laughed. “Perfectly! But how do I address you?”

“In general, my friends call me Jack.”

“I cannot be expected to do so, however!”

“Well, if you call me Captain Staple you will undo me,” he pointed out. “I’m only a gatekeeper. Don’t be afraid I shall encroach! I won’t—Miss Nell!”

“You are certainly mad!” she said. “Pray, how do you come to be a gatekeeper?”

“Oh, quite by chance! I had been staying with one of my cousins, up in the north—the head of my family, in fact, and a very dull dog, poor fellow! There was no bearing it, so I made my excuses, and set out to ride into Leicestershire, to visit a friend of mine. Then my horse cast a shoe, up on the moors, I lost my bearings, became weather-bound, and reached this gate in darkness and drenching rain. Ben came out to open it for me. That seemed to me an odd circumstance. Moreover, it was easy to see he was scared. He told me his father had gone off on Friday evening, and hadn’t returned; so I thought the best thing I could do would be to put up here for the night.”

“Ah, that was kind!” she said warmly.

“Oh, no! not a bit!” he said. “I was deuced sick of the weather, and glad to have a roof over my head. I’m curious, too: I want to know what has become of Edward Brean.”

“It is odd,” she agreed, knitting her brows. “He is a rough sort of a man, but he has been here for a long time, and I never knew him to desert his post before. But you surely don’t mean to continue keeping the gate!”

“Oh, not indefinitely!” he assured her. “It’s not at all unamusing, but I expect it would soon grow to be a dead bore. However, I shall stay here for the present—unless, of course, the trustees find me out, and turn me off.”

“But your family—your friends! They won’t know what has become of you!”

“That won’t worry ’em. I’ve done it before.”

“Kept a gate?” she exclaimed.

“No, not that. Just disappeared for a week or two. I don’t know how it is, but I get devilish bored with watching turnips grow, and doing the civil to the neighbours,” he said apologetically.

She sighed. “How fortunate you are to be able to escape! I wish I were a man!”

He looked at her very kindly. “Do you want to escape?”

“Yes—no! I could not leave my grandfather. He is almost helpless, and very old.”

“Have you lived here all your life?”

“Very nearly. My father died when I was a child, and we came to live with Grandpapa then. When I was sixteen, my mother died. Then Jermyn went to the wars, and was killed.” She paused, and added, in a lighter tone: “But that is all a long time ago now. Don’t imagine that poor Grandpapa has kept me here against my will! Far from it! Nothing would do for him but to launch me into society—though I warned him what would come of it!”

“What did come of it?” John enquired.

She made her mouth prim, but her eyes were laughing. “I did not take!” she said solemnly. “Now, don’t, I beg of you, play the innocent and ask me how that can have come about! You must see precisely how it came about! I am by far too large. Grandpapa compelled my Aunt Sophia to house me for a whole season, and even to present me at a Drawing-room. When she saw me in a hoop, we were obliged to revive her with hartshorn and burnt feathers. I cannot love her, but indeed I pitied her! She can never have enjoyed a season less. It was so mortifying for her! I had no notion how to behave, and when she took me to Almack’s not all her endeavours could obtain partners for me. I don’t know which of us was the more thankful when my visit ended.”

“I expect I must have been in Spain,” he said thoughtfully. “I never went to Almack’s till after I had sold out, and my sister dragged me there. To own the truth, I found it devilish dull, and there wasn’t a woman there, beside my sister, whose head reached my shoulder. It made me feel dashed conspicuous. If you had been there, and we had stood up together, it would have been a different matter.”

“Alas, I’m more at home in the saddle than the ballroom!”

“Are you? So am I! But my sister can keep it up all night.”

“Is your sister married?”

“Yes, she married George Lichfield, a very good fellow,” he replied.

“I think I met him once—but I might be mistaken. It is seven years since my London season. Do you feel that Lady Lichfield would approve of your present occupation?”

“Oh, no, not a bit!” he said. “She and George don’t approve of any of the things I do. I shan’t tell her anything about it.”

“I think I am a little sorry for her. And still I don’t understand why you mean to remain here!”

“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you do. I didn’t mean to, last night, but something happened today which made me change my mind.”

“Good gracious! What in the world was it?”

“I can’t tell you that now. I will, one day.”

“No, that’s too provoking!” she protested. “Is it about Brean? Have you discovered something?”

“No, nothing. It wasn’t that,” John replied.

“Then what, pray——”

“I must own I should be glad if I could discover what has happened to the fellow,” he remarked, as though she had not spoken. “If he had met with an accident, one would think there would have been news of it by now. He must be pretty well known in the district, isn’t he?”

She nodded. “Yes, certainly. He is red-haired, too, which makes him easily recognizable. You don’t think, I collect, that he can have gone off, perhaps to Sheffield, and drunk himself into a stupor?”

“I did think so,” he admitted, “but Ben assures me his dad don’t go on the mop. He is quite positive about it, and I imagine he must know. According to his story, Brean went out on Friday evening, saying that he would be back in an hour or two. He was not wearing his hat, or his best coat, which, in Ben’s view, precludes his having had the intention of going to town.”

“He would scarcely set out for Sheffield after dark, in any event. It is more than ten miles away! How very odd it is! Are you sure that Ben is telling you the truth when he says he doesn’t know where his father went?”

“Oh, yes, quite sure! Ben is excessively frightened—partly by the thought that he may be thrown on the Parish, much more by a mysterious stranger who seems to have formed the habit of visiting the toll-house after dark, and with the utmost secrecy.”

She looked startled. “Who—?”

“That I don’t know. But I have a strong suspicion that he is in some way concerned in Brean’s disappearance,” John said. “And I have another, even stronger, that there’s something devilish havey-cavey going on here!”

Chapter 4

“WHAT makes you say that?” she asked quickly, her eyes fixed with great intentness on his face.

He looked a little amused. “Well, ma’am, when a man does his visiting at night, and takes the most elaborate precautions against being seen, he’s not commonly engaged on honest business!”

“No. No, he cannot be, of course. But what could he be doing here? It is absurd!—it must be absurd!”

He turned his head. “That sounds as though you have been thinking what I have said,” he remarked shrewdly.

She glanced at him, and away again. “Nonsense! You must let me tell you that you are a great deal too fanciful, Captain Staple!”

He smiled very warmly at her. “Oh, I would let you tell me anything!” he said. “You are quite right, of course, not to confide in strangers.”

She gave a little gasp, and retorted: “Very true—if I had anything to confide! I assure you, I have not!”

“No, don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t mean to tease you with questions you don’t care to answer. But if you think, at any time, that I could be of service to you, why, tell me!”

“You—you are the strangest creature!” she said, on an uncertain laugh. “Pray, what service could I possibly stand in need of?”

“I don’t know that: how could I? Something is troubling you. I think I knew that,” he added reflectively, “when that would-be Tulip of Fashion put you so much out of countenance this morning.”

Her chin lifted; she said, with a curling lip: “Do you think I am afraid of that counter-coxcomb?”

“Lord, no! Why should you be?”

She looked a trifle confounded, and said in a defiant tone: “Well, I am not!”

“Who is he?” he enquired.

“His name is Nathaniel Coate, and he is a friend of my cousin’s.”

“Your cousin?”

“Henry Stornaway. He is my grandfather’s heir. He is at this present staying at Kellands, and Mr. Coate with him.”

“Dear me!” said John mildly. “That, of course, is enough to trouble anyone. What brings so dashing a blade into these parts?”

“I wish I knew!” she said involuntarily.

“Oh! I thought I did know, “said John.

She threw him a scornful look. “If you imagine that it was to fix his interest with me, you’re quite out! Before he came to Kellands, I daresay he did not know of my existence: he had certainly never seen me!”

“Perhaps he came into the country on a repairing lease,” suggested John equably. “If he teases you, don’t stand on ceremony! Give him his marching orders! I’m sure his waistcoat is all the crack, but he shouldn’t sport it in the middle of Derbyshire.”

“Unfortunately, it is not within my power to give him his marching orders.”

“Isn’t it? It is well within mine, so if you should desire to be rid of him, just send me word!” said John.

She burst out laughing. “I begin to think you have broken loose from Bedlam, Captain Staple! Come, enough! I am sure I do not know how it comes about that I should be sitting here talking to you in this improper fashion. You must be thinking me an odd sort of a female!”

She rose as she spoke, and he with her. He did not reply, for Ben chose that moment to appear upon the scene, with the announcement that Farmer Huggate said he was welcome to stable Beau in the big barn.

“Well, that’s famous,” said John. “You shall show me where it is presently, but first go and see if you can prevail upon Mrs. Skeffling to come up to the toll-house tomorrow. Promise her as many pig’s babies as you think necessary, but don’t take no for an answer!”

“What’ll I say?” demanded Ben. “She’ll think it’s a queer set-out, gov’nor, ’cos what would anyone want with her coming to clean the place every day?”

“You may tell her that your cousin, besides being the worst cook in the Army, has picked up some finical ways in foreign parts. Off with you!”

“Wait!” interposed Miss Stornaway, who had been listening in considerable amusement. “Perhaps I can help you. I collect you wish Mrs. Skeffling to come to the tollhouse each day. Very well! I daresay I can arrange it for you. Go and ask her, Ben, and if she says no, never mind!”

“Admirable woman!” John said, as Ben went off down the road. “I’m much in your debt! What will you tell her?”

“Why, that you seem to be a very good sort of a man, but sadly helpless! Have no fear! She will come. Did I not tell you that they call me the Squire? I shall ride down the road directly, to visit her, which is a thing I frequently do. She will tell me, and at length, of your summons, and certainly ask my advice. You may leave the rest to me!”

“Thank you! Will you assist me in one other matter? I must contrive somehow to ride to Tideswell tomorrow, to make some necessary purchases, and the deuce is in it that I’ve no notion of what, precisely, I should ask for. I must have some tolerable soap, for instance, but it won’t do just to demand soap, will it? Ten to one, I should find myself with something smelling of violets, or worse. Then there’s coffee. I can’t and I won’t drink beer with my breakfast, and barring some porter, the dregs of a bottle of rum, and a bottle of bad tape, that’s all I can find in the place. Tell me what coffee I should buy! I’ll make a note of it on my list.”

Her eyes were alight. “I think I had better take a look at your list,” she decided.

“Will you? I shall be much obliged to you! I’ll fetch it,” he said.

She followed him into the toll-house, and he turned to find her standing in the kitchen doorway, and looking critically about her. “Enough to make poor Mrs. Brean turn in her grave!” she remarked. “She was the neatest creature! However, I daresay Mrs. Skeffling will set it to rights, if she is to come here every day. Is this your list?”

She held out her hand, and he gave it to her. It made her laugh. “Good heavens, you seem to need a great deal! Candles? Are there none in the store-cupboard?”

“Yes, tallow dips. Have you ever, ma’am, sat in a small room that was lit by tallow dips?”

“No, never!”

“Then take my advice, and do not!”

“I won’t. But wax candles in a kitchen! Mrs. Skeffling will talk of it all over the village. Soap—blacking—brushes—tea—” She raised her eyes from the list. “Pray, how do you propose to convey all these things from Tideswell, Captain Staple?”

“I imagine there must be a carrier?”

“But that will not do at all! Conceive of everyone’s astonishment if such a quantity of goods were to be delivered to the Crowford gatekeeper! Depend upon it, the news would very soon be all over the county that an excessively strange man had taken Brean’s place here. It must come to the ears of the trustee controllers, and you will have them descending on you before you have had time to turn round.”

“I am afraid I am quite corkbrained,” said John meekly. “What must I do instead?”

She glanced at the list again, and then up at him. “I think I had best procure these things for you,” she suggested. “That, you see, will occasion no surprise, for I very often go shopping in Tideswell.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling. “But I must buy some shirts, and some shoes and stockings, and you can hardly do that for me, ma’am!”

“No,” she agreed. She considered him anew, and added candidly: “And it will be wonderful if you can find any to fit you!”

“Oh, I don’t despair of that! There are bound to be plenty of big fellows in the district, and somebody must make clothes for ’em!” said the Captain cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I saw a fine, lusty specimen not an hour ago. Cowman, I think. If I’d thought of it, I’d have asked him the name of his tailor.”

She gave a gurgle of laughter. “Oh, if you can be content with a flannel shirt—or, perhaps, a smock—!”

He grinned at her. “Why not? Did you take me for a Bond Street beau? No, no! I was never one of your high sticklers!”

“I take you for a madman,” she said severely.

“Well, they used to call me Crazy Jack in Spain,” he admitted. “But I’m not dangerous, you know—not a bit!”

“Very well, then, I will take my courage in my hands, and drive you to Tideswell tomorrow, in the gig—that is, if you can leave the gate in Ben’s charge!”

“The devil’s in it that I can’t,” he said ruefully. “The wretched boy has informed me that he must muck out Mr. Sopworthy’s hen-houses tomorrow!”

“Oh!” She frowned over this for a moment, and then said: “It doesn’t signify: Joseph—that’s my groom!—shall keep the gate while you are away. The only thing is—” She paused, fidgeting with her riding-whip, the crease reappearing between her brows. Her frank gaze lifted again to his face. “The thing is that it is sometimes difficult for me—now—to escape an escort I don’t need, and am not at all accustomed to! But I fancy—I am not perfectly sure—that my cousin and Mr. Coate have formed the intention of driving to Sheffield tomorrow. You will understand, if I should not come, that I could not!” He nodded, and she held out her hand. “Good-bye! I will ride to Mrs. Skeffling’s cottage now. Oh! Must I pay toll? I have come out without my purse!”

He took her hand, and held it for an instant. “On no account!”

She blushed, but said in a rallying tone: “Well for you it is not thought worth while to post informers on this road!”

She picked up her skirts, and went out into the road. Captain Staple, following her, unhitched her horse from the gate post, and led him up to her. She took the bridle, placed her foot in his cupped hands, and was tossed up into the saddle. As the hack sidled, she bent to arrange the folds of her skirt, saying: “I mean to visit one of my grandfather’s tenants, so don’t look for me again today! My way will take me over the hill.”

A nod, and a smile, and she was trotting off down the road, leaving John to look after her until the bend hid her from his sight.

She was not his only visitor that day. Shortly before eight o’clock, the wicket-gate clashed, and a heavy knock fell on the toll-house door. Ben, who was engaged in whittling a piece of wood into the semblance of a quadruped, in which only its creator could trace the faintest resemblance to the Captain’s Beau, jumped, but showed no sign of the terror which had possessed him during the previous evening. Either he did not connect his father’s mysterious visitor with an open approach to the office-door, or he placed complete reliance on Captain Staple’s ability to protect him.

John went into the office. He had left the lantern on the table, and by its light he was able to recognize the man who stood in the open doorway. He said: “Hallo! What can I do for you?”

“Jest thought I’d drop in, and blow a cloud with you,” responded Miss Stornaway’s groom. “Stretching me legs, like. The name’s Lydd—Joe Lydd.”

“Come in!” invited John. “You’re very welcome!”

“Thank’ee, sir!”

“The name,” said John, pushing wide the door into the kitchen, “is Jack.”

Mr. Lydd, who was both short and spare, looked up at him under his grizzled brows. “Is it, though? Jest as you please, Jack—no offence being meant!”

“Or taken!” John said promptly. “Sit down! Saw you this morning, didn’t I?”

“Now, fancy you remembering that!” marvelled Mr. Lydd. “Because I didn’t think you noticed me, not partic’lar.”

John had gone to the cupboard, but he turned at this, and stared across the kitchen at his guest. Mr. Lydd met this somewhat grim look with the utmost blandness for a moment or two, and then transferred his attention to Ben. “Well, me lad, so your dad’s hopped the wag, has he? What sort of a fetch is he up to? Gone on the spree, I dessay?”

“Gone up to Lunnon, to see me brother,” said Ben glibly. “ ’Cos he heard as Simmy ain’t in the Navy no more.”

“Fancy that, now!” said Mr. Lydd admiringly. “Made his fortune at sea, I wouldn’t wonder, and sent for his dad to come and share it with him. There’s nothing like pitching it rum, Ben!”

John, who was drawing two tankards of beer at the barrel beside the cupboard, spoke over his shoulder, dismissing his imaginative protégé to bed. Ben showed some slight signs of recalcitrance, but, upon encountering a decidedly stern look, sniffed, and went with lagging step towards the door.

“That’s right,” said Mr. Lydd encouragingly. “You don’t want to take no risks, not with your gov’nor looking like bull-beef, I wouldn’t!”

John grinned, and handed him one of the tankards. “Is that what I look like? Here’s a heavy wet for you! Did you come to discover where Brean is? I can’t tell you.”

Mr. Lydd, carefully laying down the clay pipe he had been filling, took the tankard, blew off the froth, and ceremoniously pledged his host. After a long draught, he sighed, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and picked up his pipe again. Not until this had been lit, with a screw of paper kindled at one of the smouldering logs, did he answer John’s question. While he alternately drew at the pipe, and pressed down the tobacco with the ball of his thumb, his eyes remained unwaveringly fixed on John’s face, in a meditative and curiously shrewd scrutiny. By the time his pipe was drawing satisfactorily, he had apparently reached certain conclusions, for he withdrew his stare, and said in a conversational tone: “Properly speaking, Ned Brean’s whereabouts don’t interest me. If you like to set it about he’s gone off to visit young Simmy, it’s all one to me.”

“I don’t,” John interrupted.

“Well, it ain’t any of my business, but what I say is, if you’re going to tell a bouncer let it be a good ’un! However, I didn’t come here to talk about Ned Brean.”

“What did you come to talk about?” asked John amiably.

“I don’t know as how I came to talk about anything in partic’lar. Jest dropped in, neighbourly. It’s quiet up at the Manor, these days. Very different from what it used to be when I was a lad. That was afore Sir Peter ran aground, as you may say. A very well-breeched swell he was, flashing the dibs all over. Ah, and prime cattle we had in the stables then! Slap up to the echo, Squire was, and the finest, lightest hands—! Mr. Frank was the same, and Master Jermyn after him—regular top-sawyers! Dead now, o’ course. There’s only Miss Nell left.” He paused, and took a pull at his beer, watching John over the top of the tankard. John met his look, the hint of a smile in his eyes, but he said nothing.

Mr. Lydd transferred his gaze to the fire. “It’s not so far off forty years since I went to Kellands,” he said reminiscently. “Went as stable-boy, I did, and rose to be head-groom, with four under me, not counting the boys. Taught Master Jermyn to ride, and Miss Nell too. Neck-or-nothing, that was Master Jermyn, and prime ’uns Squire used to buy for him! He wouldn’t look at a commoner, not Squire! ‘Proper high bred ’uns, Joe!’ he used to say to me. ‘Proper high bred ’uns for the boy, if I drown in the River Tick!’ Which he pretty near did do,” said Mr. Lydd, gently knocking some of the ash from his pipe. “What with his gaming, and his racing, it was Dun Territory for Squire, but he always said as how he’d come about. I dessay he would have, if he hadn’t took ill. He had a stroke, you see.

Mr. Winkfield—that’s his man, and has been these thirty years—he will have it that was Master Jermyn being killed in the wars that gave Squire his notice to quit. I don’t know how that may be, because he wasn’t struck down immediate: not for some years he wasn’t. But he wasn’t never the same man after the news came. He don’t leave his room now. Going on for three years it is since I see him on his feet. A fine, big man he used to be: not as big as you, but near it. Jolly, too. Swear the devil out of hell, he could, but everybody liked him, because he was easy in his ways, and he laughed more often than he scowled. You wouldn’t think it if you was to see him now. Nothing left of him but a bag of bones. He sends for me every now and then, just to crack a whid over old times. Mr. Winkfield tells me he remembers what happened fifty years ago better than the things that happened yesterday. Always says the same thing to me, he does. ‘Not booked yet, Joe!’ he says, for he likes his joke. And, ‘Take good care of Miss Nell!’ he says. Which I always have done, of course—so far as possible.”

John rose, and carried both empty tankards over to the barrel. Having refilled them, he handed one to Mr. Lydd again, slightly lifted his own in a silent toast, and said: “You’re a very good fellow, Joe, and I hope you will continue to take care of Miss Nell. I shan’t hinder you.”

“Well, now, I had a notion that maybe you wouldn’t,” disclosed Mr. Lydd. “I’ve been mistook in a man, in my time, but not often. You may be what they call a flash cull, or you might have come into these backward parts because you was afraid of a clap on the shoulder, but somehow I don’t think it. If I may make so bold as to say so, I like the cut of your jib. I don’t know what kind of a May game you’re playing, because—not wishing to give offence!—you can’t slumguzzle me into thinking you ain’t Quality. Maybe you’re kicking up a lark, like. And yet you don’t look to me like one of them young bucks, in the heyday of blood, as you might say.”

“In the heyday of blood,” said John, “I was a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards. I came into these parts by accident, and I am remaining by design. No shoulder-clapper is on my trail, nor am I a flash cull. More than that I don’t propose to tell you—except that no harm will come to your mistress at my hands.”

Mr. Lydd, after subjecting him to another of his fixed stares, was apparently satisfied, for he nodded, and repeated that there was no offence meant. “Only, seeing as I’ve had me orders to mind the pike tomorrow, while you go jauntering off to Tideswell with Miss Nell—let alone Rose getting wind of it, and talking me up to find out what your business is till I’m fair sick of the sound of her voice—”

“Who is Rose?” interrupted John.

“Miss Durward,” said Mr. Lydd, with bitter emphasis. “Not that I’m likely to call her such, for all the airs she may give herself. Why, I remember when she first came to Kellands to be nursemaid to Miss Nell! A little chit of a wench she was, too! Mind, I’ve got nothing against her, barring she’s grown stoutish, and gets on her high ropes a bit too frequent, and I don’t say as I blame her for being leery o’ strangers—Miss Nell not having anyone but Squire to look after her, and he being burned to the socket, the way he is.”

It was by this time apparent to John that orphaned though she might be Miss Stornaway did not lack protectors, and it came as no surprise to him when, shortly after eight o’clock next morning, he sustained a visit from Miss Durward. He was enjoying a lively argument with a waggoner when she came walking briskly down the road, this ingenious gentleman, recognizing in him a newcomer, making a spirited attempt to convince him that the proper charge for the second of his two vehicles, which was linked behind the first, was threepence. But Captain Staple, who had usefully employed himself in studying the literature provided by the Trustees of the Derbyshire Toll-gates for the perusal of his predecessor, was able to point out to him that as the vehicle in question was mounted on four wheels it was chargeable at the rate of two horses, not of one. “What’s more, it’s loaded,” he added, interrupting an unflattering description of his personal appearance and mental turpitude, “so it pays double toll. I’ll take a horde and tenpence from you, my bully!”

“You’ll take one in the bread-basket!” said the waggoner fiercely.

“Oh, will I?” retorted the Captain. “It’ll be bellows to mend with you if you’re thinking of a mill, but I’ve no objection! Put ’em up!”

“I seen a man like you in a fair onct,” said the waggoner, ignoring this invitation. “Leastways, they said he was a man. ’Ardly ’uman he was, poor creature!”

“And now I come to think of it,” said the Captain, “didn’t I see you riding on the shaft? That’s unlawful, and it’s my duty to report it.”

Swelling with indignation, the waggoner spoke his mind with a fluency and a range of vocabulary which commanded the Captain’s admiration. He then produced the sum of one shilling and tenpence, defiantly mounted the shaft again, and went on his way, feeling that his defeat had been honourable.

The Captain, shutting the gate, found that he was being critically regarded by a buxom woman who was standing outside the toll-house, with a basket on her arm. Her rather plump form was neatly attired in a dress of sober gray, made high to the throat, and unadorned by any ribbons or flounces. Over it she wore a cloak; and under a plain chip hat her pretty brown hair was confined in a starched muslin cap, tied beneath her chin in a stiff bow. She was by no means young, but she was decidedly comely, with well-opened gray eyes, an impertinent nose, and a firm mouth that betokened a good deal of character. Having listened without embarrassment to John’s interchange with the waggoner, she said sharply, as he caught sight of her: “Well, young man! Very pretty language to be using in front of females, I must say!”

“I didn’t know you were there,” apologized John.

“That’s no excuse. The idea of bandying words with a low, vulgar creature like that! What have you done to your shirt?”

John glanced guiltily down at a jagged tear in one sleeve. “I caught it on a nail,” he said.

She clicked her tongue, saying severely: “You’ve no business to be wearing a good shirt like that. You’d better let me have it, when you take it off, and I’ll mend it for you.”

“Thank’ee!” said John.

“That’s quite enough of that!” she told him, an irrepressible dimple showing itself for an instant. “Don’t you try and hoax me you’re not a gentleman-born, because you can’t do it!”

“I won’t,” he promised. “And don’t you try to hoax me you’re not Miss Stornaway’s nurse, because I wouldn’t believe you! You put me much in mind of my own nurse.”

“I’ll be bound you were a rare handful for the poor soul,” she retorted. “If you are going to town this morning, see you buy a couple of stout shirts! A sin and a shame it is to be wearing a fine one like this, and you very likely chopping wood, and I don’t know what beside! What your mother would say, if she was to see you, sir—!”

Concluding from this speech that he had been approved, John said, with a smile: “I will. I’ll take good care of your mistress, too. You may be easy on that head!”

“Well, it’s time someone did, other than me and Joseph—though what good he could do it queers me to guess!” she said. “I don’t know who you are, nor what you’re doing here, but I can see you’re respectable, and if you did happen to fall out with a nasty, bracket-faced gentleman, with black hair and the wickedest eyes I ever did see, I don’t doubt he’d have the worst of it. With your good leave, sir, I’ll step inside to have a word with Mrs. Skelling, if that’s her I hear in the kitchen. I’ve got some of our butter for her, which Miss Nell promised she should have. And I was to tell you, Mr. Jack—if that’s what you’re wishful to be called—that Miss Nell will be along with the gig just as soon as those two gentlemen have taken themselves off to Sheffield!”

With these words she marched through the office to the kitchen, where she found Mrs. Skeffling, a widow of many years’ standing, zestfully engaged in turning out the contents of the cupboard, and scrubbing its shelves: a thing which, as she informed Miss Durward, she had long wanted to do. After both ladies had expressed, with great frankness, their respective opinions of the absent Mr. Brean’s dirty and disorderly habits, Mrs. Skeffling paused from her labours in order to enjoy a quiet gossip about the new gatekeeper.

“Miss Durward, ma’am,” she said earnestly, “I was that flabbergasted when I see him, which I done first thing this morning, Monday being my day for lending Mrs. Sopworthy a hand with the washing, and Mr. Jack stepping up to the Blue Boar to buy a barrel of beer! Even Mr. Sopworthy was fairly knocked acock when Mr. Jack says as he was Mr. Brean’s soldier-cousin, come to mind the gate for him for a while. ‘Lor’!’ he says, ‘I thought it was the Church tower got itself into my tap!’ Which made Mr. Jack laugh hearty, though Mrs. Sopworthy was quite put out, thinking at first it was a gentleman walked in, which Landlord shouldn’t have spoke so free to. Then they got to talking, Mr. Jack and Landlord, and I’m sure none of us didn’t know what to think, because he didn’t talk like he was Quality, not a bit! And yet it didn’t seem like he was a common soldier, not with them hands of his, and the sort of way he has with him, let alone the clothes he wears! Miss Durward, ma’am, I’ve got a shirt of his in the wash-house this moment, with a neckcloth, and some handkerchers, and I declare to you I’ve never seen the like! Good enough for Sir Peter himself, they are, and whatever would a poor man be doing with such things?”

“Oh, he’s not a poor man! Whatever put that into your head?” said Rose airily. “Didn’t Mr. Brean ever tell you how one of his aunts married a man that was in a very good way of business? I forget what his name was, but he was a warm man, by all accounts, and this young fellow’s his son.”

Mrs. Skeffling shook her head wonderingly. “He never said nothing to me about no aunts.”

“Ah, I daresay he wouldn’t, because when she set up for a lady she didn’t have any more to do with her own family!” said the inventive Rose. She added, with perfect truth: “I forget how it came about that he mentioned her to me. But this Mr. Jack—being as he’s got his discharge, and not one to look down on his relations—took a fancy to visit Mr. Brean. He’s just been telling me so.”

“But whatever made Mr. Brean go off like he has?” asked Mrs. Skeffling, much mystified.

“That was where it was very fortunate his cousin happened to come to visit him,” said Rose, improvising freely. “It seems he was wanting to go off on some bit of business—don’t ask me what, because I don’t know what it was!—only, being a widower, and not having anyone fit to mind the gate for him, he couldn’t do it. So that’s how it came about—Mr. Jack, being, as you can see, a good-natured young fellow, and willing to do anyone a kindness.”

This glib explanation appeared to satisfy Mrs. Skeffling. She said: “Oh, is that how it was? Mr. Sopworthy took a notion Mr. Jack was gammoning us. ‘Mark my words,’ he says, ‘it’s a bubble! It’s my belief,’ he says, ‘he’s one of them young bucks as has got himself into trouble.’ What he suspicioned was that maybe there was a fastener out for him, for debt, very likely; or p’raps he up and killed someone, in one of them murdering duels.”

“Nothing of the sort!” said Rose sharply. “He’s a very respectable young man, and if Mr. Sopworthy was to set such stories about it’ll be him that will find himself in trouble!”

“Oh, he wouldn’t do that!” Mrs. Skeffling assured her. “What he said was, however it might be it wasn’t no business of his, and them as meddled in other folks’ concerns wouldn’t never prosper. Setting aside he took a fancy to Mr. Jack. ‘Whatever he done, he ain’t no hedge-bird,’ he says, very positive. ‘That I’ll swear to!’ Which I told him was sure as check, because Miss Nell knows him for a respectable party, and said so to me with her own lips. So then,” pursued Mrs. Skeffling, sinking her voice conspiratorially, “Mr. Sopworthy stared at me very hard, and he says to me, slow-like, that if so be Mr. Jack was a friend of Miss Nell’s it wouldn’t become no one to start gabbing about him, because anyone as wished her well couldn’t but be glad if it should happen that a fine, lusty chap like Mr. Jack was courting her, and no doubt he had his reasons—the way things are up at the Manor—for coming here secret. Of course, I don’t know nothing about that, which I told Mr. Sopworthy.”

She ended on a distinct note of interrogation, her mild gaze fixed hopefully on her visitor’s face. Miss Durward, who had been thinking rapidly, got up with a great show of haste, and begged her not to say that she had ever said such a thing. “I’m sure I don’t know what Mr. Sopworthy can have been thinking about, and I hope to goodness he won’t spread such a tarradiddle! Now, mind, Mrs. Skeffling! I never breathed a word of it, and I trust and pray no one else will!”

“No, no!” Mrs. Skeffling assured her, her eyes glistening with excitement. “Not a word, Miss Durward, ma’am!”

Satisfied that before many hours had passed no member of a small community affectionately disposed towards the Squire’s granddaughter would think the presence in her gig of the new gatekeeper remarkable, and reckless of possible consequences, Miss Durward took leave of Crowford’s most notable gossip, and departed. She found John passing the time of day with the local carrier, and concluded, from such scraps of the dialogue as she was privileged to overhear, that he was making excellent progress in his study of the vulgar tongue. She told him, as soon as the carrier had driven through the gate, that he should think shame to himself, but rightly judging this censure to be perfunctory he only grinned at her, so endearing a twinkle in his eye that any misgivings lingering in her anxious breast were routed. She then put him swiftly in possession of such details of his genealogy as her fertile imagination had fabricated, and adjured him to drum these well into Ben’s head.

“I will,” he promised, enveloping her in a large hug, and planting a kiss on one plump cheek. “You’re a woman in a thousand, Rose!”

“Get along with you, do, Mr. Jack!” she commanded, blushing and dimpling. “Carrying on like the Quality, and you trying to hoax everyone you’re Brean’s cousin! You keep your kisses for them as may want them!”

“I don’t know that anyone does,” he said ruefully.

“Well, I’m sure I can’t tell that!” she retorted tartly. “Now, don’t forget what I’ve been telling you!”

“I won’t. What is my father’s name, by the by?”

“Gracious, I can’t think of everything!”

“Didn’t you give him one? Then I think I’ll keep my own. I daresay there are many more Staples in England than ever I heard of. Tell me this! In what way can I be of service to your mistress?”

The dimple vanished, and her mouth hardened. She did not answer for a minute, but stood with her gaze fixed on the gate post, her face curiously set. Suddenly she brought her eyes up to his face, in a searching look. “Are you wishful to be of service to her?” she demanded.

“I never wished anything so much in my life.”

He spoke perfectly calmly, but she was quick to hear the note of sincerity in his deep, rather lazy voice. Her lip quivered, and she blinked rapidly. “I don’t know what’s to become of her, when the master dies!” she said. “She and Mr. Henry are the last of the Stornaways, and it’s him that will have Kellands, not her that’s looked after it these six years past! Long before the master was struck down it was Miss Nell that was as good as a bailiff to him, and better! It was she that turned off all the lazy, good-for-nothing servants that used to eat master out of house and home, let alone cheating him the way it was a shame to see! Scraping, and saving, breeding pigs for the market, leasing this bit of land and that, and bargaining for the best price her own self, like as if she was a man! And when master took ill, she sold the pearls her poor mother left her, and every scrap of jewelry she had from Sir Peter in the days when he was still in his prime, and there wasn’t one of us knew how deep he was in debt. Everything she could she sold, to keep off the vultures that came round as soon as it got to be known Sir Peter was done for! All Sir Peter’s lovely horses—and I can tell you he had hunters he gave hundreds of guineas for, and a team he used to drive which all the sporting gentlemen envied him—and her own hunters as well, with her phaeton, and Sir Peter’s curricle, and the smart barouche he bought for her to drive in when she went visiting—everything! There’s nothing in the stables now but the hack she rides, and the cob, and a couple of stout carriage-horses which she kept for farm-work mostly. There wasn’t a soul to help her, barring old Mr. Birkin, that lived out Tideswell way, and was a friend of the master’s, and he’s been dead these eighteen months! Mr. Henry never came next or nigh the place. He knew that there was nothing but the title and a pile of debts to be got out of it! But he’s here now, Mr. Jack, and it seems he means to stay! If he’d more heart than a hen, I’d call him a carrion-crow—except that I never saw a crow hover round where there was nothing more to be picked over than a heap of dry bones! I don’t know what brings him here, nor I wouldn’t care, if he hadn’t got that Mr. Coate along with him! But that’s a bad one, if ever I saw one, sir, and he’s living up at the Manor like he owned it, and casting his wicked eyes over Miss Nell till my nails itch to tear them out of his ugly face! Miss Nell, she’s not afraid of anything nor of no one, but I am, Mr. Jack! I am!”

He had listened in silence to what he guessed to be the overflowing of pent-up anxieties, but when she paused, unconsciously gripping his shirt-sleeve, he said quietly, lifting her hand from his arm, and holding it in a warm clasp: “Why?”

“Because when the master goes she’ll be alone! And not a penny in the world but the little her mother left her, and that not enough to buy her clothes with!”

“But she has other relatives, surely! She spoke to me of an aunt—”

“If it’s my Lady Rivington you’re meaning, sir, it’s little she’d trouble herself over Miss Nell, and nor would any of poor Mrs. Stornaway’s family! Why, when she was a bit of a girl, and the master persuaded her ladyship to bring her out, it was him paid for all, and I know the way her ladyship, and the Misses Rivington, looked down on her, because she was so tall, and more like a boy than a girl!”

“I see.” John patted her hand, and released it. “You go home now, Rose, and don’t you fret about Miss Nell!”

She thrust a hand into her pocket for a handkerchief, and rather violently blew her nose. “I shouldn’t have said anything!” she uttered, somewhat thickly.

“It’s of no consequence. I should have discovered it.”

She gave a final sniff, and restored the handkerchief to her pocket. “I’m sure I don’t know what possessed me, except for you being so big, sir!”

He could not help laughing. “Good God, what has that to say to anything?”

“You wouldn’t understand—not being a female,” she replied, sighing. “I’ll be going now, sir—and thank you!”

Chapter 5

AN hour later, Miss Stornaway’s shabby gig drew up at the toll-gate, and her henchman, jumping down, tendered three coins to John, with a broad wink, and demanded a ticket opening the only other gate that lay between Crowford and Tideswell. But John had already provided himself with this, and he waved away the coins, which made Nell exclaim against him for cheating the trustees.

“Nothing of the sort!” he replied, climbing into the gig. “I’m not one of those who are able—as the saying goes—to buy an Abbey, but I was born to a modest independence, and I would scorn to cheat the trustees!”

“But you should not be obliged to buy the ticket for my carriage!” she objected.

“Oh, there was no obligation! I hoped to impress you by making such a handsome gesture,” he said gravely.

“Sporting the blunt!” she retaliated, casting a challenging look at him to see how he took this dashing phrase.

“Exactly so!” he said.

A gurgle of laughter escaped her. “How absurd you are! Are you never serious, Captain Staple?”

“Why, yes, sometimes, Miss Stornaway!” She smiled, and drove on for a few moments without speaking. She was not, he thought, shy, but there was a little constraint in her manner, which had been absent from it on the previous day. After a pause, she said, as though she felt it incumbent upon her to make some remark: “I hope you do not dislike to be driven by a female, sir?”

“Not when the female handles the ribbons as well as you do, ma’am,” he replied.

“Thank you! It needs no particular skill to drive Squirrel, but I was always accounted a good whip. I can drive a tandem,” she added, with a touch of pride. “My grandfather taught me.”

“Didn’t your grandfather win a curricle race against Sir John Lade once?”

“Yes, indeed he did! But that was long ago.” A tiny sigh accompanied the words, and as though to cover it, she said, in a rallying tone: “I had meant to pass you off as the stable boy, you know, but you are so smart today I see it will not do!”

He was wearing his riding-coat and topboots, and his neckcloth was arranged with military neatness. There was nothing of the dandy in his appearance, but his coat was well cut, and, in striking contrast to Henry Stornaway’s buckish friend, he looked very much the gentleman.

He stretched out one leg, and grimaced at it. “I did my best,” he admitted, “but, lord, how right my man was about these leathers of mine! He gave me to understand no one could clean them but himself. I don’t know how that may be, but I certainly can’t! My boots are a disgrace to me, too, but that might be the fault of Brean’s blacking.”

She laughed. “Nonsense! I only wish Rose might see you! You have met Rose, so you will not be surprised to learn that she cannot approve of a gentleman’s being seen on the highway in his shirt.”

“Torn, too, but she has promised to mend it for me. I am very much obliged to her, and not only for that cause. She came to see whether I was a fit and proper person to be permitted to go with you to Tideswell, and she decided that I was.”

“Yes, she did. I beg your pardon! but she was used to be my nurse, you know, and nothing will persuade her that I am twenty-six years of age, and very well able to take care of myself. She is the dearest creature, but she is for ever preaching propriety to me.”

“I should think she has some pretty strong notions of propriety,” he agreed.

“Alas, poor Rose, she has indeed, and they have all been overset!”

He was watching her profile, thinking how delightfully she smiled, and how surely her expressive countenance reflected her changing moods. “Have they? How did that come about?” he said.

She looked mischievous, chuckling deep In her throat. “She is in love with a highwayman!”

“What? Oh, no, impossible!”

“I assure you! She won’t admit it—never speaks of it!—but it’s quite true. I know nothing, of course! If I dare to question her I get nothing for my pains but a tremendous scold, and when I was saucy enough to ask her if he does not come secretly to Kellands to see her she would have boxed my ears, could she but have reached them! But I am very sure he does. And the ridiculous thing is that she is the most respectable creature alive, and very nearly forty years old! I daresay no one could be more shocked than she is herself, but make up her mind never to see him again she cannot! Mind, not a word of this to her!”

“Good God, I should not dare! But how came it about?”

“Oh, he held us up, rather more than a year ago! It was the most farcical adventure imaginable. She had gone with me to Tinsley, which is beyond Sheffield, you know. It was all to do with a heifer I had a mind to purchase, and since Joseph was laid up with the lumbago, Rose accompanied me in his stead. In this very gig! But owing to a number of circumstances we were detained for longer than I had thought for, so that I was obliged to drive home after dark. Not that I cared for that, or Rose either, for it was moonlight, and I don’t think it ever came into our heads that we might be held up. But we were, and by a masked figure, with a couple of horse-pistols in his hands, all in the style of high melodrama! He commanded me to stand and deliver. You may depend upon it that I obeyed the first of these commands, but what I was to deliver, beyond the few shillings which I had in my reticule, I knew no more than the man in the moon, which I ventured to tell him. That was where we descended from melodrama to farce! He seemed to be a good deal taken aback, and rode up quite close to peer at me. Well! Rose has a temper, and impertinence she will not brook! She said, ‘How dare you?’ not a bit afraid! Then she told him to put his guns away this instant, and, when he didn’t obey, demanded to know whether he had heard her. If it had not been so absurd I should have been in a quake! But there was not the least need: he did put his guns away, and began to beg her pardon, saying he had mistaken me for a man! She was not in the least mollified, however. She scolded him as though he had been a naughty child, and instead of seizing our reticules, or riding off, he stayed there, listening to her, and trying to make his peace with her. He did it, too, in the end! Rose can never remain in a rage for long, and he was so very apologetic that she was obliged to relent. Then he was so obliging as to make us a present of a password, if ever we should be held up again, which I thought excessively handsome of him! The Music’s paid! that’s what you must say if you should be held up. I own, I have never had occasion to put it to the test, but I believe it to be a powerful charm. After that, we drove home, and I never knew, for many weeks, that he followed us all the way, just to discover where Rose lived! It was a case of love at first sight. What do you think of that for a romance?”

“Admirable!” he replied, a good deal amused. “I have only one fault to find with it: I don’t see the happy ending. What is the name of this Knight of the Road ?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know that.”

“I fancy I do.”

She looked quickly at him, surprise in her face. “You do? How is this?”

“I think it may be Chirk. I also believe him to ride a mare called Mollie,” he said coolly.

“But how did you discover this?”

“Ah!”

“No, don’t be so provoking, pray!”

He laughed. “Well, when I arrived at the toll-gate, two nights ago, I stabled my horse in the hen-house. It was evident that a horse had been stabled there before, and at no very distant date. My predecessor owns no horse, but he does own a horse-blanket, and fodder. These, Ben informed me, are, in fact, the property of Mr. Chirk. Of course, Mr. Chirk may be a most estimable character, but as I have been given to understand that he very much dislikes strangers, and would not at all like it to be known that he was in the habit of visiting the toll-house, I take leave to doubt that.”

“Good heavens!” She drove on for a few moments, her eyes on the road ahead. “Do you mean that Brean may have been in league with footpads?”

“The suspicion had occurred to me,” he admitted. “To what extent, however, I have no idea. I should imagine that he does no more than afford shelter to this Chirk, for although I can readily perceive that a dishonest gatekeeper on a busy road might be of invaluable assistance to the fraternity, for the information he could give them, I can’t believe that such a little-frequented road as ours is a haunt of highwaymen.”

“No, certainly not: I never heard of anyone’s being held up on it.” Her eyes sparkled. “How very shocking, to be sure—and how very exciting! Of course, if this Mr. Chirk of yours is indeed poor Rose’s admirer, his presence in the district is readily explained. But if he is not, what can bring him here? Is it possible that Brean’s disappearance is in some way connected with him?”

“That thought had occurred to me too,” he acknowledged. “Also that some link may exist between him and the unknown stranger of whom Ben stands in such dread. If it does, however, Ben has no notion of it. He esteems Chirk most highly: in fact, he says he is good as ever twanged, which I take to be praise of no mean order! What I hope is that I may be privileged to meet Chirk. I think he has been quite a frequent visitor. But if Brean is working with him, he must know very well where he is, and he won’t come to the toll-house while I am there.”

“And the other? the mysterious man?”

“I’ve seen no sign of him.”

There was a pause. She was looking ahead, frowning a little. Suddenly she drew a sharp breath, and said abruptly: “Captain Staple!”

He waited, and then, as she appeared to be at a loss, said encouragingly: “Yes?”

“It is of no consequence! I forget what I was about to say!” she replied, in rather a brusque tone. The constraint, which had vanished while she recounted Rose’s romance, returned; and after an uncomfortable silence, she asked him, as one in duty bound to manufacture polite conversation, whether he admired the Derbyshire scene. His lips twitched; but he answered with perfect gravity that he had been much struck by the wild beauty of the surrounding countryside. He then said that having approached Crowford from the north-west his way had led him across some rough moorland, whence magnificent views had been obtained. This provided Miss Stornaway with a safe topic for discussion. She supposed he must have passed close to the Peak, and was sorry to think he should not have visited the cavern there. “There are a great many caves in the hills,” she informed him. “Many more, I daresay, than are generally known, but that one, in particular, is quite a curiosity. You should visit it before you leave Derbyshire. Only fancy!—in its mouth, which is enormous, there is actually a village built! The rock is limestone, you know, and if you penetrate into the cave you will find it worn into the most fantastic shapes. There is a stream running through it, and the guide takes one in a small boat along it. It is most romantic, I assure you—but shockingly cold!”

He responded with great civility; and Miss Stornaway, searching her mind for further matters of topographical interest, recalled that the spring, in Tideswell, which had an uncertain ebb and flow, was also reckoned amongst the wonders of the Peak.

This subject lasted until the turnpike was reached. Tideswell lay not far from this, and the rest of the way was beguiled in discussing the exact nature of the commodities to be purchased in the town. Miss Stornaway, informing the Captain that it was her custom to stable Squirrel at the Old George while she transacted her business, would have driven there immediately, but as soon as the outlying buildings of the town came into sight John stopped her, saying that it would be best if he were to be set down there. “You may overtake me on the road when we have each of us done all this shopping,” he said. “It won’t do for you to be seen driving a gatekeeper, you know.”

“Good heavens, I don’t care for that!” she said scornfully.

“Then I must care for you,” he replied.

“Nonsense! You don’t look in the least like a gatekeeper! Besides, no one knows you!”

“They soon will. One of the disadvantages of being bigger than the average, ma’am, is that one is easily recognizable. No, don’t drive on!”

Except for a lift of her obstinate chin she gave no sign of having heard him. After a moment, he leaned forward, and, taking the reins above her hand, pulled Squirrel up. She flamed into quick wrath, exclaiming: “How dare you? Understand me, sir, I am not accustomed to submit to dictation!”

“I know you are not,” he said, smiling at her. “Never mind! You may very easily punish me by refusing to take me up again presently. Will an hour suffice us, do you suppose?”

He jumped down from the gig, and for a moment she eyed him uncertainly. There was so much amused understanding in his face that her little spurt of temper died, and she said: “Oh, if you choose to be so nonsensical—! Yes, an hour—and you will be well served if I make you trudge all the way to Crowford!”

She drove on, and he followed her on foot into the town.

By a stroke of good fortune, he found a pair of serviceable brogues in a warehouse that catered for the needs of farm labourers, but not all his endeavours could discover a coat into which he could squeeze his powerful shoulders. He was obliged to abandon the search, and to purchase instead a leather waistcoat. By the time he had acquired coarse woollen stockings, a supply of flannel shirts, and several coloured neckcloths, only a few minutes were left to him in which to write and to despatch a letter to the Hon. Wilfred Babbacombe, at Edenhope, near Melton Mowbray. This missive was necessarily brief, and requested Mr. Babbacombe, in turgid ink and on a single sheet of rough paper, to ransack two valises consigned to his guardianship and to wrench from them such shirts, neckcloths, nightshirts, and underlinen as they might be found to contain, and to despatch these, in a plain parcel, to Mr. (heavily underscored) Staple, at the Crowford Toll-gate, near Tideswell, in the County of Derbyshire.

Having sealed this communication with a wafer, and deposited it at the receiving-office, Captain Staple gathered together his various packages, and set out on the homeward journey.

He had not proceeded very far along the road out of the town before Miss Stornaway overtook him. She pulled up, and he was soon seated beside her again, bowling along in the direction of Crowford.

“I must tell you at once that I have exceeded your instructions, and bought for you, besides wax candles, a lamp which you may set upon the table, and which will be very much more the thing for you,” she told him. “You informed me that you were in the possession of an independence, so I did not scruple to lay out another six shillings of your money. Did you contrive to procure raiment more fitted to your calling than what you are wearing now?”

“Yes, but I had a great fancy for a frieze coat, and I could not find one to fit me!”

“You mean, I collect, into which you might squeeze yourself!” she retorted. “Well! I warned you how it would be! Tideswell is not, after all, a large town.”

“No,” he agreed. “And sadly lacking in historic interest. Apart from its spring there really seems to be nothing to say about it, which leaves me quite at a loss.”

“Oh?” she said, puzzled, and slightly suspicious.

“We could talk about the weather, of course,” he said thoughtfully. “Or I could describe to you some of the places I have visited abroad.”

She bit her lip, but when he began, in the blandest way, to expatiate upon the grandeur of the Pyrenees, she interrupted him, exclaiming impetuously: “I wish you will not be so foolish! I don’t care a button for the Pyrenees!”

“You would care even less for them, had you ever been obliged to winter there,” he observed. “You choose what we are to talk about! Only don’t say, Captain Staple! and then decide that I am not, after all, a trustworthy confidant.”

Quite unused to such direct dealing, she stammered: “I d-didn’t! Why should I——How can I know that you are to be trusted? I never set eyes on you until yesterday!”

“There, I am afraid, I can’t help you,” he said. “It would be of very little use to tell you that I am entirely to be trusted, so perhaps we had better continue to discuss the Pyrenees.”

There was an awful silence. “I beg your pardon!” said Nell stiffly.

“But why?” asked John.

“I did not mean to offend you.”

“Of course not. I’m not offended,” he said pleasantly. “On the contrary, I am very much obliged to you for having done my marketing for me. By the by, how much did you expend on my behalf, ma’am?”

A flush mounted to her cheek; she said: “You need not continue to slap me, Captain Staple!”

That made him laugh, A quick, indignant glance at him informed her, however, that the expression in his eyes was one of warm kindness. No one had ever looked at her just like that before, and it had the effect upon her of making her feel, for perhaps the first time in her life, a strong desire to lay the burden of her cares upon other shoulders. Captain Staple’s were certainly broad enough to bear them.

“That, at least, is something I should never do to you, Miss Stornaway,” he said. “I think life has dealt you too many slaps.”

“No—oh, no!” she said, in a shaken voice. “Indeed, I have been very much indulged!”

“Yes, possibly, when your grandfather was a hale man. Too much depends upon you now, and I cannot discover that there is anyone to support or to advise you.”

She said, with the flash of a wry smile: “Captain Staple, if you continue in this vein you will induce in me a mood of self-pity that will very likely cause me to burst into maudlin tears! And that, I am persuaded, you would dislike excessively!”

“I own I would prefer you not to burst into tears on the high road,” he admitted. “Some other vehicle would be bound to come into sight just at that moment!”

A gurgle of laughter escaped her. “Very true! I won’t do it.”

“I’ve a notion you are not prone to shed tears,” he said smilingly.

“I’m more prone to swear!” she confessed. She added apologetically: “It comes from having lived always with my grandfather, and being about the stables a great deal.”

“Don’t guard your tongue on my account!” he begged, his eyes dancing.

“Ah, you don’t provoke me to swear!”

“Who does? The gentleman in the natty waistcoat?”

She hesitated.

“Now is the moment for Captain Staple!” he murmured. “Give me the reins!” She transferred them without protest to his hand, and the cob, obedient to a light signal, dropped to a walk. “That’s better,” said John. “What’s the fellow doing here, if he didn’t come to dangle after you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what brought either of them here! Since my grandfather was taken ill it is very quiet at Kellands. We don’t entertain, and—and there are no longer hunters in the stables. Not that my cousin would care for that: he is not a hunting man; but Coate talks a great deal about the runs he has enjoyed with all the best packs. I don’t know how that may be.”

“Nor I, indeed, and it would be unjust to hazard a guess, I expect,” the Captain said cheerfully.

“Well, he hasn’t the look of a Melton man, has he?”

“No. How came your cousin to make a friend of him?”

Her lip curled. “I daresay he could find no one better. Henry is the most miserable creature! My grandfather was used to call him a park-saunterer. Jermyn told me once that he was a pretty loose fish besides.” She saw a muscle twitch in the Captain’s cheek. “Don’t laugh at me! I warned you my language is unladylike!”

“Just so! In what way is Henry a loose fish? If he is a miserable creature, I take it he don’t go raking round the town?”

“Oh, no! But the people he knows are not at all the thing, and Jermyn said it was too bad he should be known to be his cousin, because he suspected him to be not over-particular in matters of play and pay.”

“That’s bad,” said John. “Does he pursue any gainful occupation, or is he a gentleman of means?”

“Well, I don’t think he’s very plump in the pocket, but he must have a competence, I suppose, for my uncle married a lady of moderate fortune, and he was their only child. At all events, he was never bred to any profession.”

“Hangs on the town, eh? Gamester?”

“Oh, yes, and that was what Jermyn disliked so much! He thought him the most paltry fellow to spend his days being ear-wigged at Tattersall’s, when he knows so little about horses that whenever he buys one you may depend upon it will be found to be touched in the wind, or for ever throwing out a splint! Then, too, he does not play at the clubs, but at houses in Pall Mall, where one never sees the real Goes! In fact,” said Miss Stornaway, summing the matter up in a word, “the fellow’s a skitter!”

“I see,” said John, only the very slightest tremor in his voice.

“Until Jermyn was killed, I scarcely knew him, because Grandpapa quarrelled with my uncle upon the occasion of his marriage,” Nell pursued. “She was the daughter of a Cit, and, I believe, rather a vulgar person. Not,” she added, in a reflective tone, “that Grandpapa ever liked him above half—according to what Huby has told me. Huby is our butler, and he has been at Kellands for so long that he knows far more about Grandpapa than I do. But when Jermyn died, Henry became the heir, and Grandpapa thought himself obliged to receive him. He used to come here now and then, because in those days he was afraid of Grandpapa, but you could see that he thought it a dead bore. When Grandpapa had that dreadful stroke, Henry ceased to come, which I was very glad of. I never heard anything more of him until ten days ago, when he suddenly arrived at Kellands.” Her eyes smouldered. “He had the effrontery to tell me that he thought it his duty! You may guess how I liked that!”

“I imagine you must have told him how soon he might pack his bags again?”

“I did,” she said bitterly. “Then—then I was made to see that it is not in my power to be rid of him! He is sly enough to know that I would not, for any consideration you might offer me, permit him to agitate my grandfather. I was obliged to acquiesce in his remaining, particularly when he talked of rusticating for a while, because he was scorched. For Grandpapa to be succeeded—as might happen at any moment—by a man imprisoned for debt would be too much! Besides, I am very well able to deal with Henry. But then, you see, Coate arrived at Kellands, and to my astonishment Henry informed me that it was by his invitation! Since that day there has been no doing anything with Henry: he is ruled entirely by that creature, and I think—I am sure—that he is afraid of him. Coate orders all as he pleases—or he would do so, if I were not there to check him!”

“Are you able to do that?”

“Yes, in general, because I have the good fortune to take his fancy,” she said disdainfully. “I have been the object of his gallantry this past week. He has even done me the honour to inform me that he likes a female to be spirited: it affords the better sport, you see.” She was interrupted at this point, Captain Staple expressing a strong desire to make Mr. Coate’s acquaintance. She laughed, but shook her head. “No, no, I beg you will not! I am well able to take care of myself, and if I were not I have Joseph and Winkfield at hand. If I chose to disclose the whole to my grandfather, he would have both Coate and Henry turned out of doors: he is still master at Kellands! I don’t choose to. Dr. Bacup considers that any agitation might prove fatal, and my chief concern is to shield him from any knowledge of what is going on.”

“Very well, but you have no need to keep that knowledge from me. What is going on?” asked John.

“I don’t know.” She clasped and unclasped her hands. “That is what alarms me—not, I give you my word, Coate’s encroaching fancies! He and Henry are here for some purpose, and I cannot discover what it may be. It’s nothing good! Henry is afraid of something, and Coate is afraid of what Henry may divulge when he’s in his cups. He watches him like a cat, and once I heard him threaten to break his neck if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.”

“Did he, by Jove! Can you discover nothing from your cousin?”

“No. When he is sober, it would be useless to question him, and when he’s foxed, Coate takes good care not to let him out of his sight. He becomes a trifle fuddled nearly every night, but he doesn’t say anything to the purpose.”

“Am I to understand by that that you are present at these—er—carouses?” demanded John,

“Of course I am not! It is what Huby tells me. He is very old, and he pretends to be deaf, for he was quite sure Coate could be up to no good, as soon as he laid eyes on him. Only he cannot conceive, any more than I can, what it could be that should bring him to the Peak district, or why he should ally himself with such a poor creature as Henry.”

“I haven’t met Henry, but I apprehend you don’t think it possible that he might have hired Coate for some nefarious purpose? The fellow sounds to me very like a paid bravo.”

She considered this for a moment, but gave a decided negative. “For Coate is the master, not Henry. Besides, what use could he find for a bravo here?”

“Well, if your Cousin Henry is indeed the snirp you think him, I can only suppose that he is useful to Coate for some reason as yet hidden from us. Perhaps he is in possession of some vital secret necessary to the success of Coate’s plans.”

She looked at him sceptically. “You don’t believe that!”

“I don’t know. There must be some reason for such an ill-assorted alliance!”

“I think you must be quizzing me! Such a notion is fantastic!”

“Very likely, but I might say the same of your apprehensions. Oh, no! don’t eat me! I haven’t said it, and I swear I don’t think it!”

She cast him a fulminating look. “Perhaps, sir, you believe me to be suffering from the merest irritation of the nerves?”

“Not a bit of it! I believe you to be a woman of admirable common sense, and I place the utmost reliance on what you tell me. If you were the most vapourish female imaginable, I must still lend an attentive ear to your story: do not let us forget that a gatekeeper, stationed almost at your door, has disappeared under circumstances which one can only call mysterious! That is quite as fantastic as anything you have told me, you know!”

Slightly mollified, she said: “It seems absurd, but do you suppose Brean’s disappearance may be connected in some way with whatever it is those two are plotting?”

“Certainly I do—though in what way I must own I have not the smallest conjecture! However, it will not do to be applying the principles of common sense to a situation which we clearly perceive to be something quite out of the ordinary, so do not tell me, ma’am, that it is fantastic to suppose that your cousin and his friend can have anything to do with a gatekeeper!”

She smiled, but absently, saying, after a moment: “I thought I was indulging my fancy only, but—the thing is, Captain Staple, that I am persuaded my cousin is suspicious of you! I don’t know who told him that there was a new gatekeeper at the Crowford pike, but he knows it, and has been asking me who you are, and what has become of Brean.”

“Well, that does not encourage us to think that Brean is working with him,” John admitted. “On the other hand, he might be cutting a sham—making it appear, you see, as though he knew nothing of Brean. Or even being afraid of what Brean may be doing.”

“No, I don’t think it is that,” she replied, knitting her brows. “Coate seems not to care about it. He came into the room when Henry was questioning me, and all he said was that he had fancied you were not the man who had opened to him before, but for his part he had paid very little heed to you.”

“Well, before he is much older he will be paying a great deal of heed to me,” observed John. “However, you were very right not to tell him so! He is too set in his ways, and a surprise will be good for him. For anything we know, of course, he and Brean may have decided to tip Cousin Henry the double. Or—But the possibilities stretch into infinity!”

“Are you funning again?” she demanded. “I collect that you think it all incredible!”

“Not a bit of it! You will allow, however, that in this prosaic age it is certainly unusual to find oneself suddenly in the middle of what promises to be an excellent adventure! I have spent the better part of my life looking for adventure, so you may judge of my delight. The only thing is, I wonder if I was wise to turn myself into a gatekeeper? I can’t but see that it is bound to restrict my movements.”

“I must say, I can’t conceive what should have induced you to do anything so whimsical!” she said frankly.

“Oh, it wasn’t whimsical!” he replied. “After I had seen you, I had to provide myself with an excuse for remaining at Crowford, and there it was, ready to my hand!”

She gave a gasp. “C-Captain Staple!”

“On the other hand,” he went on, apparently deaf to this interruption, “I could scarcely hope to escape remark, were I to revert to my proper person, and that might put our fine gentlemen on their guard. No: setting the hare’s head against the goose-giblets, things are best as they are—for the present.”

“Yes,” she agreed uncertainly, stealing a sidelong look at him.

He urged the cob to a trot again. “What I must first discover is the precise nature of Coate’s business here. To tell you the truth, I can’t think what the devil it can be! If this were Lincolnshire, or Sussex, I should be much inclined to suspect the pair of them of being engaged in some extensive smuggling, and of using your house as their headquarters; but this is Derbyshire, and sixty or seventy miles from the coast, I daresay, so that won’t answer.”

“And hiding kegs of brandy in the cellars?” she asked, laughing. “Or perhaps storing them in one of our limestone caverns.”

“A very good notion,” he approved. “But my imagination boggles at the vision of a train of pack-ponies being led coolly to and fro, and exciting no more interest than if they were accommodation coaches!” They had come within sight of Crowford village, and he gave back the reins and the whip into her hands, saying: “And we shall excite less interest, perhaps, if you drive, and I sit with my arms folded, groom-fashion.’’

In the event, this precaution was superfluous, since the only two persons to be seen on the village street were a short-sighted old dame, and Mr. Sopworthy, who was standing outside the Blue Boar, but seemed to recall something needing his attention, and had disappeared into the house by the time the gig drew abreast of it. Miss Stornaway was still wondering why he had not waited to exchange a greeting with her when she drew up before the tollgate.

The Captain alighted; the merchandize was unloaded, and his debts faithfully discharged. Joseph Lydd reported that only strangers had passed the gate during his absence, and got up beside his mistress. The Captain went to hold open the gate, and Miss Stornaway drove slowly forward. Clear of the gate, she pulled up again, for he had released it, and stepped into the road, holding up his hand to her. Hesitating, she transferred the whip to her left hand, and put the right into his. His fingers closed over it strongly, and he held it so for a moment while her eyes searched his face, half in enquiry, half in shy doubt. There was a little smile in his. “I meant what I said to you,” he told her. Then he kissed her hand, and let it go, and with considerably heightened colour she drove on.

Chapter 6

MR. LYDD, observing these proceedings out of the tail of his eye, preserved silence and a wooden countenance for perhaps two minutes. Then, as the gig, rounding a bend, passed the entrance to a rough lane, leading up to the moors, he gave a discreet cough, and said: “Fine young fellow, our new gatekeeper, miss. I disremember when I’ve seen a chap with a better pair of shoulders on him. Quite the gentleman, too—even if he is Ned Brean’s cousin.”

“You know very well that he is not, Joseph,” said Miss Stornaway calmly. “He is a Captain of Dragoon Guards—or he was, until he sold out.”

“A Captain, is he?” said Joseph, interested. “Well, it don’t surprise me, not a bit. He told me himself he was a military man, miss, and that didn’t surprise me neither, him having the look of it. In fact, I suspicioned he might be an officer, on account of the way he’s got with him, which makes one think he’s used to giving his orders, and having ’em obeyed—and no argle-bargle, what’s more!”

“When did he tell you he was a military man?” demanded Nell.

Under the accusing glance thrown at him, Mr. Lydd became a little disconcerted. He besought his young mistress to keep her eyes on the road.

“Joseph, when has Captain Staple had the opportunity to tell you anything about himself, and why did he?”

“To think,” marvelled Mr. Lydd, “that I should have gone and forgotten to mention it to you, missie! I’m getting old, that’s what it is, and things slip me memory, unaccountable-like.”

“If you have been at the toll-house, prying into Captain Staple’s business——”

“No, no!” said Joseph feebly. “Jest dropped in to blow a cloud, being as I was on me way to the Blue Boar! Yesterday evening, it was, and very nice and affable the Captain was. We got talking, and one thing leading to another he jest happened to mention that he was a military man.”

“You went there on purpose!” said Nell hotly. “Because he—because you thought—I wish to heaven you and Rose would remember that I am not a child!”

“No, Miss Nell, but you’re a young lady, and seeing as Sir Peter can’t look after you no more, like you ought to be—and Rose being an anxious sort of a female,” he added basely, “it seems like it’s me duty to keep me eye on things, as you might say!”

“I know you only do it out of kindness,” said Nell, “but I assure you it is unnecessary! You have no need to be anxious about me!”

“Jest what I says to Rose, missie! Them was me very words! ‘We got no need to be anxious about Miss Nell,’ I tells her. ‘Not now, we haven’t.’ That, out of course, was after I come home from the tollhouse.”

Miss Stornaway, fully and indignantly conscious of the unwisdom of attempting to bring to a sense of his presumption a servitor who had held her on the back of her first pony, extricated her from difficulties in an apple-tree, and, upon more than one occasion, rescued her from the consequences of her youthful misdeeds, accomplished the rest of the short journey in dignified silence.

Kellands Manor was an old and a rambling house, standing at no great distance from the pike road, which, in fact, ran through the Squire’s land. Its pleasure gardens, though well laid-out, were neglected, the shrubbery being overgrown, the flower-beds allowed to run riot, and the wilderness to encroach year by year on lawns once shaven and weedless. Miss Stornaway, unlike the one remaining gardener, looked upon this decay with indifference. Behind a crumbling stone wall an extensive vegetable plot was in good order; new trees had been planted in the orchard; and the home farm was thriving.

Miss Stornaway, walking up from the stables with her rather mannish stride, the tail of her worn riding-dress looped over her arm, entered the house through a side-door, and made her way down a flagged corridor to the main hall. From this an oaken staircase rose in two graceful branches to the galleried floor above. She was about to mount it when a door on one side of the hall opened, and her cousin came out of the library. “Oh, there you are, cousin!” he said, in the peevish tone which was habitual with him. “I have been in these past twenty minutes, and desirous of having a word with you.”

She paused, a hand on the baluster-rail, and one booted foot already on the first step of the stairway. “Indeed!” she said, looking down at him from her superior height, her brows lifting a little.

His was not an impressive figure, and he was never so conscious of this as when he stood in his magnificent cousin’s presence. He had neither height nor presence, and a strong inclination towards dandyism served only to accentuate the shortcomings of his person. Skin-tight pantaloons of an elegant shade of yellow did not set off to advantage a pair of thin legs, nor could all the exertions of his tailor disguise the fact that his narrow shoulders drooped, and that he was developing a slight paunch. His countenance was tolerably good-looking, but spoilt by a sickly complexion and the unmistakable marks of self-indulgence; and his rather bloodshot eyes seemed at all times incapable of maintaining a steady regard. He sported several fobs and seals, wore exaggeratedly high points to his collars, and fidgeted incessantly with snuff-box, quizzing-glass, and handkerchief.

“I’m sure I don’t know where you can have been,” he complained. “And Huby and that woman of yours quite unable to tell me! I must say, I don’t consider it at all the thing.”

“Perhaps they thought my whereabouts no concern of yours,” suggested Nell. “I have been transacting some business in Tideswell. What is it that you wish to say to me?”

Instead of answering, he embarked on a rambling censure of her independent manners. “I can tell you this, cousin, you present a very odd appearance, jauntering all over the country as you do. I wonder that my grandfather should suffer it, though I suppose the old gentleman is in such queer stirrups he don’t realize what a figure you make of yourself. Nat was saying to me only this morning—”

“Pray spare me a recital of Mr. Coate’s remarks!” she interrupted. “If my odd ways have given him a distaste for me, I can only say that I am heartily glad of it!”

“There you go!” he exclaimed bitterly. “I should have supposed you might have taken pains to be civil to a guest, but no! You behave—”

“Let me remind you, Henry, that Mr. Coate is a guest in this house neither by my wish nor my invitation!”

“Well, he’s here by mine, and if you weren’t such an unaccountable girl you’d be glad of it! Handsome fellow, ain’t he? Slap up to the mark, too, as you’d say yourself!”

“I should never describe Mr. Coate in such terms.”

“Oh, don’t put on those missish airs with me, Nell! Lord knows I’ve heard you using all sorts of sporting lingo!”

“Certainly! I trust, however, that I am in general veracious!” she retorted.

“I’m not surprised that fine aunt of yours couldn’t nabble a husband for you!” he said, nettled. “You’ve a damned nasty tongue in your head! I can tell you this, a Long Meg like you can’t afford to put up the backs of people as you do!”

“That is the second thing you have been so obliging as to tell me, and no more interesting to me than the first. Have you anything more to say?”

“Yes, I have! I wish you will accord Nat a little common civility! It’s no very pleasant thing for me to have my cousin behaving like a shrew! One would have thought you would have been pleased with the very flattering distinction he accords you! I don’t know what you think is to become of you when the old man slips his wind! You needn’t look to me to provide for you, for if he has more to leave than the title and an estate mortgaged to the hilt—”

“Are you having the effrontery to suggest that I—I, Nell Stornaway!—should encourage the advances of Coate?” she demanded. “Perhaps you think he would make a suitable match for me?”

“Oh, well!” he muttered, his eyes shifting from hers. “You might do worse, and you’re not likely to do better. I don’t say—I never spoke of marriage, after all! All I care for is that you should make his visit agreeable. You don’t give a fig for the awkwardness of my position! If you open your mouth at the dinner-table, ten to one it is only to say something cutting to Nat—”

“Yes, indeed! You would fancy that he must be sensible by now, would you not, that his presence at Kellands is only less distasteful to me than the extremely improper style of his advances? But, no!”

“A woman of address would know how to turn it off without flying into a miff!”

“Yes, and some women, no doubt, are more fortunate than I in those male relatives whose duty it might be thought to guard them from such unwanted attentions!”

He coloured, and shot her a resentful glance. “What a piece of work you make about a trifle! I suppose you expect Nat to toad-eat you, though how you should when you wear a gown with a darn in it—the shabbiest thing! puts me to the blush, I can tell you!—and serve such plain dinners—only one course, and that ill-dressed! And then, to crown all, go off afterwards, and never come into the drawing-room, as you should! No tea-tray brought in: nothing as it should be!—’pon my soul, I don’t know why you should look to be treated with any extraordinary civility!”

“Good gracious, does Mr. Coate desire tea in the evening?” she exclaimed. “I thought it was the brandy he wanted! I will not fail to tell Huby that between us we have quite mistaken the matter; and a tray shall be brought to you. My presence, however, you must dispense with: I sit every evening with my grandfather.”

“Yes! If Nat had the good fortune to please you, you wouldn’t choose to spend your time with an old dotard who’s had his notice to quit!”

She took a swift step towards him. He shrank back instinctively, but not quickly enough to escape a swinging box on the ear, which made him stagger. “You will speak of my grandfather with respect in this house, Henry! Understand that!”

A burst of hearty laughter, coming from the direction of the front door, made her turn, at once startled and mortified. Nathaniel Coate stood upon the threshold, laughing, and waving his hat like a huntsman capping hounds to a scent. “Bravo, bravo! That was a wisty one, by God! It’s bellows to mend with you, Henry: she’ll give you pepper, by God, she will!” He tossed his hat and his whip on to a chair, and came forward, saying: “What have you been about, you stupid fellow? Why don’t you take that Friday-face of yours away before Miss Nell slaps it again?”

Henry, taking this broad hint, retired again into the library, shutting the door behind him with a vicious slam, which made his friend give another of his loud laughs, and say: “Silly ninny hammer! Now we shall have him in the sullens! Ah, don’t be in a hurry to slip off, Miss Nell! Damme if this ain’t the first time I’ve laid eyes on you today!”

Since he had contrived to step between her and the staircase she was unable to slip off. He was looking her over in a way that gave her the unpleasant sensation of having been stripped of her clothing; and although she was not at all afraid of him she would have been glad to have been able to escape. She said coolly: “You might have seen me at the breakfast-table, but you are not an early riser. Now, if you please, I must go to my grandfather!”

He did not move from the stairs. “Ah, that’s a slap for me, ain’t it? I shall have to mend my ways, shan’t I? Why don’t you take me in hand, eh? Blister me if I wouldn’t enjoy being schooled by you! I don’t know when I’ve taken such a fancy to a girl as I have to you, and that’s the truth! Ay, you may look down that high-bred nose of yours, lass, and try to barn me you’re a stone statue, but I know better! Full of spirit, you are, and that’s how I like women to be—women and horses, and devilish alike they are! You’re a beautiful stepper, and a ginger besides, and that’s the metal for my money!”

“If we are to employ the language of the stables, Mr. Coate,” she replied, rigid with wrath, “I will inform you that having lived all my life with a nonpareil I have nothing but contempt for mere whipsters! Now, if you will be so obliging as to permit me to pass——!”

She had the momentary satisfaction of knowing that she had touched him on the raw, for he flushed darkly, but she regretted it an instant later. He strode up to her, an ugly look in his face, and said in a thickened voice: “Contempt, eh? We’ll see that!” He flung his arms round her before she could evade him, chuckling deep in his chest.

She was a strong woman, and as tall as he, but found herself helpless. He was immensely powerful, and seemed to control her struggles without any particular effort. “Kiss and be friends, now!” he said, his breath hot on her face.

A dry cough sounded from the staircase; a voice devoid of all expression said: “I beg pardon, miss: might I have a word with you, if convenient?”

Coate swore, and released Nell. For a moment she confronted him, still unafraid, but white with anger, her eyes blazing. Then she swept past him, and went up the stairs to where her grandfather’s valet stood awaiting her. He stepped aside, bowing politely, and followed her to the gallery off which her own and her grandfather’s apartments were situated.

“Thank you!” she said curtly. “I’m much obliged!”

“Not at all, miss,” said Winkfield, as though such interventions were an accustomed part of his duties. “It was fortunate that I happened to be at hand. If I may say so, I feel that Mr. Coate would feel himself more at home in a different class of establishment. Perhaps, a hint to Mr. Henry—?”

“Quite useless! Don’t disturb yourself, Winkfield! I’ll take good care never to be alone with him again!”

“No, miss, it would be wiser, I expect. But if Sir Peter knew—”

“Winkfield, most earnestly I forbid you to breathe one syllable to him!”

“No, miss, and indeed I have not! But he knows more than we think for, and it’s my belief he’s fretting over it. He keeps asking me things, and wanting to know where you are, and the day he sent for Mr. Henry to come to his room he was too much like his old self—if you understand me!”

“We should not have allowed it. It put him in a passion, didn’t it?”

“Well, miss, he never could abide Mr. Henry, but you know as well as I do that it won’t do to cross Sir Peter. What I didn’t like was the way seeing Mr. Henry seemed to make Sir Peter feel his own helplessness more than he has done for a long time now. Several times he’s said to me that he’ll make us all know who’s master at Kellands before he’s booked. Then he gets restless, and testy, and I know he’s been brooding over it, and raging in his mind because he hasn’t the power to do so much as get up out of his chair without he has me to lift him.”

She said in a breaking voice: “Oh, if he had but died when he had that stroke!”

“Yes, miss, I’ve often thought the same. It comes hard on a gentleman like Sir Peter to be as he is.”

“Winkfield, you have not told him that my cousin has a friend staying here?”

“No one has told him that, miss, unless Mr. Henry did, but he knows it well enough.”

“On no account must he be permitted to set eyes on the creature! We must—we must get rid of the pair of them!”

“Yes, miss, that’s what I have been thinking myself. But without we tell Sir Peter the whole there’s not much we can do. If it was only Mr. Henry, it would be enough for Sir Peter to tell him to be off: we could do the rest—if I may make so bold as to say so, Miss Nell! But that other! I don’t doubt Sir Peter would have him out, if he had to send for a law-officer to do the trick, but, by what Dr. Bacup says, it would bring on another stroke if he was to get agitated.”

“No, no!” Nell said, dashing a hand across her eyes.

“No, miss, that’s my own feeling. I couldn’t do it—not after all these years. We must hope that we can send Mr. Coate off without bringing Sir Peter into it.” He added thoughtfully: “Betty forgot to put a hot brick in his bed last night, but he made no complaint. It won’t do to damp the sheets, as I have told Rose, because we don’t want him laid up on our hands; but I’d say he was one as is partial to good living, and that mutton you had for dinner yesterday, Miss Nell—well! Let alone Mrs. Parbold scorching it on the spit, which she did, and the tears running down her face, Rose tells me, because we all have our pride, and no one can send up a better dressed dinner than she can!”

“Winkfield!” Nell choked, between tears and laughter. “It was shocking! I was never so mortified!”

“No, miss, I’m sure! But Sir Peter had the wing of a chicken, poached just as he likes it, and a curd pudding with wine sauce,” said Winkfield consolingly. “And Huby has been busy in the cellar all the morning, and no doubt he will warn you, miss, not to touch the burgundy at dinner. If you should be at liberty now, Sir Peter has been asking for you this hour past.”

“I will come to him directly. I must put off this old riding dress: you know how much he dislikes to see me shabbily gowned!”

She hurried away to her own bedchamber, to strip off the well-worn habit in which she spent the greater part of her days, and to put on instead a morning-gown of green velvet, not perhaps fashioned in the latest mode but not yet showing such signs of wear as would be perceptible to her grandfather. Ten minutes later she entered the dressing-room which formed an antechamber to Sir Peter’s big bedroom, and tapped on the door between the two. It was opened to her by Winkfield, who gave her a significant look, but said nothing, and at once went away, leaving her alone with her grandfather.

“Nell?”

She crossed the floor to the wing-chair that stood beside the wide fireplace. “Yes, sir. Now, don’t, don’t scold me, for I have passed the most amusing morning!” she said, bending to kiss Sir Peter’s brow.

He did not raise his head, which was sunk forward on his breast, but he glanced up at her under his brows, and lifted his right hand. The other was almost powerless, and lay lightly clenched on his knee. “Well?” he said.

His utterance was a little slurred, and he seemed to speak with a slight effort. He was the wreck of a once big man, the flesh having wasted away from large bones. His left side was semi-paralysed, and it was only with his valet’s assistance that he could move from his bed to a chair. He wore always a brocade dressing-gown, but every day it was Winkfield’s duty to arrange a freshly laundered neckcloth round his neck in the style he had adopted years earlier.

Nell took the hand held up to her, and sat down beside him. “Well! I conveyed our new gatekeeper to Tideswell, as you know, while Joseph took care of the pike.”

“H’m! I trust he behaved himself!”

“With all the propriety in the world, sir! You need not look so suspiciously: he is most truly the gentleman.”

“Much you know!” he grunted. “Playing off the airs of an exquisite, I daresay.”

“Oh, no! nothing of the kind! He’s a soldier, not a fribble, dearest! I thought his coat was very well cut, but it was quite plain, and put me in mind of the coats Jermyn used to wear.”

“Scott,” said Sir Peter. “If he was a Captain, and ain’t hoaxing you! Most of the military men go to him—or they did, in my day.”

“Very likely. At all events, there was no fault to be found with his air, or address, and I think you would say that he has a well-bred ease of manner. I found him excellent company, and I am sure he must have great delicacy of principle, for he was most steady in refusing to drive with me into the town! He said that it would not do, and obliged me to set him down before we reached it.”

Sir Peter grunted again. “What did you talk of?” he demanded.

“Oh, all manner of things!” she replied easily. “He told me many—many interesting things about the Pyrenees, for instance!”

“He did, did he? Fellow sounds to me like a damned nincompoop!” said Sir Peter irascibly.

She laughed, but blushed too. “Oh, no! In fact, I fear he must cause his family the gravest anxiety with these whimsical starts of his! You, I think, would like him, sir. I have not, of course, seen him with a team, but I fancy he has good, even hands.”

“That’s as may be. But what the devil’s he doing at the tollhouse?”

“Oh, diverting himself! I think he finds life sadly flat.”

He said no more, and she picked up a newspaper, and glanced through it, knowing that although he might weary soon of conversation he liked to feel that she was in the room. She thought he had fallen into a light sleep, but he startled her suddenly by saying in an abrupt tone: “Who is the fellow you have staying in the house?”

“Henry, Grandpapa?”

“Don’t be a fool, girl—or think me one! I want none of your bamboozling! Who is he?”

“Oh, Coate!” she said indifferently. “A friend of my cousin’s.”

“Why hasn’t he been brought to see me?”

“Because I am persuaded you would give the poor man one of your famous set-downs, sir,” she replied, with great coolness. “He is not quite up to the trick, you know.”

“Then what the devil does Henry mean by bringing him to my house? Henry’s half flash and half foolish, and any friend of his is bound to be a loose fish!”

She was alarmed, for his colour was considerably heightened, and there was a note in his voice which warned her of rising temper. She said: “Oh, pray don’t send him away, sir! To be obliged to entertain my cousin would not suit me at all! I am grateful to Coate for bearing him company, and never see either of them, except at dinner.”

“What brought Henry here? What is going on in my house, Nell? By God, I will not be hoaxed and humdudgeoned! Do you take me for a child, or a lunatic?”

“No, sir, but indeed I don’t know what should be going on! You know that we settled it between us that Henry is escaping from his creditors! That was your notion, do you remember? and I am pretty sure you were right.”

He stared at her, his eyes fierce under the jutting brows. “Don’t lie to me, Nell! don’t lie to me! You’re on the fidgets—blue-devilled! They’ve cut up your peace between the pair of ’em, eh? Damme, I should have seen to it you had a respectable female to keep you company!”

“Now, that would indeed cut up my peace!” she said, laughing. “My dear sir, I cannot decide which of us would most deserve pity—me, or your respectable female! A widow, of course, and elderly, with the strictest notions of propriety! I should be the death of her!”

He beat his hand against the arm of his chair, in a gesture of fretting impotence. “There is no one to look after you. I might as well be coffined!”

She managed to possess herself of his hand, and held it between both of hers. “Dearest, this is the merest irritation of the nerves! I am beset by protectors!”

He moved his head impatiently. “Servants, servants! That won’t fadge!”

She said coaxingly: “You must not be so cross, sir: indeed, there is no reason for you to be vexed! If I needed a protector—which I assure you I do not!—I should send a message to the toll-house, and desire my military giant to come to my aid! I daresay he would be very happy to hurl out of your house anyone you chose to indicate.”

He seemed to be diverted. He looked at her intently, and she was thankful to see that the angry spots of colour in his face were fading. “He would, would he?”

“Certainly! He is a very obliging person, and has expressed his willingness to serve me at any time!” she said, with a saucy look. “And if we should feel the need of a man capable of ridding our house of invaders—which, however, I do not at all anticipate—he would be the very one for the task! I am persuaded, my dear sir, that he would mill cannisters, darken daylights, and draw corks with all the gaiety in the world! Like Hotspur, you know, in that passage which always makes you laugh! Fie upon this quiet life! I want work! is what he would say!”

He smiled rather grimly. “Baggage!” he said. “Did I teach you that language?”

“Yes, to be sure you did, and a great deal more beside!” she said merrily. This drew a laugh from him, and an adroit question putting him in mind of a contest he had once witnessed she soon had the satisfaction of seeing him restored to tranquillity. He dropped into a doze presently, and the knowledge that his memory was erratic encouraged her to hope that when he awoke he would have forgotten the episode.

It seemed as though it had indeed faded from his mind. He did not speak of it again, and she had the comfort, when she went away to change her dress for an evening-gown, of seeing him settle down to his dinner in quiet good spirits.

The relief was short-lived. Her own dinner was partaken of in the company of her cousin and Mr. Coate. She sat at the head of the big table, entirely mistress of the situation, maintaining with quelling composure a conversation of such inane propriety as must, she hoped, lead her unwanted admirer to revise his opinion of her charms. He was apparently conscious of a little awkwardness in meeting her again, and seemed anxious to reinstate himself in her good graces; but before very long he was ogling her, and paying her broad compliments expressed in terms that could only disgust. She was almost glad when these were interrupted by an outcry from her cousin against the burgundy, which he declared, with an angry look at Huby, to have been watered; but civility obliged her to desire Huby to fetch up a fresh bottle, which was not at all what she had wished to do. Then she caught sight of the butler’s face, and her vexation yielded to an almost overmastering wish to burst out laughing. Every feeling had been offended: he was looking as outraged as though he had not, in fact, committed just that crime.

The uncomfortable meal dragged on; she rose at last from the table, and was about to retire to the sanctuary of Sir Peter’s room when the hopes she had been cherishing were shattered by the entrance of Winkfield into the room, with a message from his master. Sir Peter, he announced, begged that Mr. Coate would do him the honour of drinking a glass of brandy with him.

Nell gazed aghast at the valet, but he very slightly shook his head. She knew her grandfather well enough to guess that Winkfield judged it to be more dangerous to oppose his will than to permit Coate to be seen by him. She turned her eyes towards Coate, and said as calmly as she could: “I must beg you, sir, not to linger in my grandfather’s room. I need not remind you, I daresay, that he is a sick man.”

“Oh, don’t fear me!” he said, with one of his loud laughs. “I shall be very happy to visit Sir Peter—famous sportsman, wasn’t he? We shall deal capitally!”

In an agony, she watched him precede Winkfield out of the room. Her cousin’s voice broke into her agitated thoughts. “I must say I’m deuced glad the old gentleman’s sent for Nat!” Henry said, refilling his glass. “I wonder he shouldn’t have done so before, for it’s only civil, after all. What’s more, it’ll do him good. He’ll like Nat: you see if he don’t! Nat’s devilish good company—just the man to cheer the old gentleman up!”

“Just the man to kill him!” she said, in a shaking voice. “One look at him will be enough to throw him into a passion! How could you bring such a creature into this house? how could you?”

“Oh, pooh, you know nothing of the matter! My grandfather likes a good sportsman, and Nat’s a buck of the first head! Up to every rig and row in town, too. They’ll go along like winking!”

She could not trust herself to answer him, but hurried out of the room, bent on warning Rose of what might at any moment befall. Her way led her past her grandfather’s apartments, and, after hesitating for a moment, she softly opened the door into the dressing-room, and looked in. Winkfield was there, and greeted her with a smile of reassurance. He said in a low voice: “You need not be afraid, miss. I fancy Sir Peter does not mean to lose his temper with that person. Remarkably calm, he is.”

“It must do harm!” she whispered. “You know how much he dislikes men of Coate’s stamp! I am fearful of what the consequences may be! Could you not have prevented it?”

“It seemed to me, miss, that once the master had formed a determination to see Mr. Coate it would be wiser to do as he bade me. He will not be opposed. And to fob him off with excuses would be to set up the very irritation to his nerves which Dr. Bacup has particularly warned us against.”

She sighed, listening anxiously to the sound of voices in the room beyond. “You will not go out of earshot, Winkfield?”

“I shall not leave this room, miss. We cannot but be uneasy, but I fancy Mr. Coate is comporting himself as well as he knows how, besides being set a little in awe of the master.”

It was true. Coate, ushered formally into Sir Peter’s room, was indeed a trifle over-awed. He had a disconcerting feeling that he had been granted an audience, and the immobility of the gaunt figure in the wing-chair did nothing to dispel this. As he stood for a moment on the threshold, unusually uncertain of himself, he was aware of being scanned from head to foot by a pair of eyes, deep-sunken, but as hard and as fierce as an eagle’s. He began, without knowing it, to fidget with the elaborate folds of his neckcloth. A hand the colour of parchment found, and raised to one eye, a quizzing-glass. It was levelled at him; he thought all at once that the room was overheated. The glass was allowed to fall. “How do you do?” Sir Peter said courteously. “You must forgive my inability to rise from this chair, Mr. Coate.”

“Oh, not at all! don’t give it a thought! Never one to stand upon ceremony! Sorry to find you in queer stirrups, sir!”

“Thank you,” said Sir Peter, in a thin voice. “Pray be seated! I regret that circumstances should have prevented my making your acquaintance before, Mr. Coate. I apprehend that I have had the honour of entertaining you for some days. I trust my people have attended to your comfort?” Mr. Coate thought fleetingly of unaired sheets, underhung mutton, and watered wine, and said that he had no complaint to make. A slight lifting of his host’s brows then made him wish that he had phrased this assurance differently.

Sir Peter made a sign to his valet, and said: “Do you mean to make a long stay in Derbyshire, sir?”

“Oh, as to that—!” said Coate, watching Winkfield pour brandy into two glasses. “Daresay you know how it is! One needs to go into the country on a repairing lease every now and then, and my friend Stornaway having begged me to bear him company—well, the long and the short of it was that I told Mawdesley—you are acquainted with his lordship, I daresay: capital fellow! one of the Melton men!—he must not look for me immediately. ‘Why, how is this?’ he cried. ‘You do not mean to miss the cubbing! Here am I depending upon you to give us all a lead!’  But I was adamant. ‘My friend Stornaway has a claim upon me,’ I said. ‘I am promised to him, and there is no more to be said.’”

“Ah, you hunt in the Shires?” said Sir Peter.

“Oh, lord, where else should a man hunt? No humbug country for Nat Coate! Neck-or-nothing Nat: that’s what they call me! No fence you can’t get over with a fall, I say!”

Sir Peter, who had thought it one of Mr. Assheson Smith’s sayings, smiled, and sipped his brandy. He encouraged his guest to talk, and when he saw his guest’s glass empty, he begged him to refill it. Under this genial influence Mr. Coate expanded like a peony on a hot summer’s day, and thought he had achieved so excellent an understanding with his host that he was fatally emboldened to compliment him upon his granddaughter’s looks and high spirit. He said that he did not mind owning that he had not expected to find his friend’s cousin such a dashing chipper, and wound up this tribute by giving Sir Peter to understand that although he had steered clear of marriage and was not to be thought a fellow that was hanging out for a wife, he was damned if he wasn’t beginning to change his mind.

It was at this point that Winkfield entered the room. He said that he fancied that Mr. Henry was waiting for Mr. Coate in the library; and since he stood holding the door in the evident expectation of ushering his master’s guest out of the room immediately, there was nothing for Coate to do but to bid Sir Peter good-night, and take himself off. This was not accomplished without his shaking Sir Peter’s hand, and saying, with a wink, that he was happy to have met him, for he rather thought that they had reached a very tolerable understanding.

Having closed the dressing-room door behind the guest, Winkfield returned to the bedchamber, and began quietly to clear away the glasses.

“Winkfield!”

“Sir?”

“You may get me to bed!” Sir Peter said harshly.

He did not speak again until he lay between the sheets, and the valet was drawing the curtains round his bed. Then he said, in quite a strong voice: “Send Joseph up to me in the morning!”

“Very good, sir,” Winkfield said, carefully lowering the wick of the lamp he had carried into the room.

Sir Peter watched him, a grim smile curling his mouth. “I’ve had notice to quit, Winkfield, but I can stick to my leaders still, by God!”

Chapter 7

CAPTAIN STAPLE, having been set down by Miss Stornaway at the toll-house, lost no time in changing his raiment for garments more suited to his new calling. He found the shirts he had bought a trifle harsh to the skin, but by the time he had removed his boots with the aid of the jack he had purchased (and which, he knew well, would rapidly ruin them) and exchanged them for coarse gray stockings and a pair of brogues; and had knotted one of the coloured neckcloths round his throat, in tolerable semblance of a Belcher-tie, he was very well-pleased with his appearance. He was inclined to think he looked his part, but this view was not shared by Ben, who, returning from his labours at the Blue Boar, made no secret of his disapproval. He said that flash coves didn’t wear coloured shirts or leather waistcoats.

“I’m not a flash cove,” replied John.

“Yes, you are!” Ben insisted. “Everyone knows that!”

“Who is everyone?” demanded John.

“Well—everyone! Mr. Sopworthy, and Mrs. Skeffling, and Farmer Huggate!”

“Did you tell them so?”

“No! I says as you was me cousin, but Farmer Huggate says as Beau’s a proper high-bred ’un, which me cousin wouldn’t have come by honest.”

“The devil!” ejaculated John.

“It’s all rug!” Ben said consolingly. “Mr. Sopworthy told Farmer Huggate as mums the word, ’cos I heard him.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” said John, somewhat taken aback.

“Ay, ’cos of Miss Nell.”

“Because of—What did he mean by that?”

“I dunno,” said Ben, uninterested.

John did not pursue the subject; and, the grating of cartwheels coming to his ears a few minutes later, went out to attend to his duties. A heavily laden tumbril, drawn by an enormous cart-horse, was slowly approaching from the direction of the village, the driver strolling beside his horse. At sight of John, he called out: “Open up, mate, will ’ee? There ain’t nothing to pay: I got a load o’ manure.”

John lifted a hand, in token that he had heard the request, but addressed himself to a stocky, middle-aged man who was seated on the bench outside the toll-house, purring at a short clay pipe. “Hallo!” he said. “Aught I can do for you?”

“Thank ’ee, I’m just having a bit of a set-down on this here bench of yours—if so be as you’ve no objection?”

“You’re welcome,” John said, going to open the gate.

“Fine day!” remarked the driver of the tumbril, with great affability. “Newcomer, ain’t you? It weren’t you opened to me when I was along last week—leastways, I disremember that it was.”

“That’s right,” John replied, his eyes on the tumbril. “What’s your load?”

“Why, I telled ye! Manure!”

“I know you did, but it looks to me like lime.”

“Lord bless us, wherever was you reared?” exclaimed the driver, with a fine show of astonishment. “Lime’s manure, cully, all right and tight!”

“Yes, and also it ain’t exempt from paying toll!” retorted John, grinning at him. “What kind of a knock-in-the-cradle do you take me for, dry-boots? You hand over the half of a fiddle!”

“How was I to know you was a downy one?” demanded the driver, philosophically accepting defeat. “I thought you was a cawker.”

“You go and milk a pigeon!” recommended John, handing him a ticket, and accepting in exchange three greasy coins.

He shut the gate again behind the cart, and walked back to the house. The man on the bench, removing the pipe from between his teeth, said: “I dessay you get a good few coves trying to chouse you out of the toll.”

John laughed. “Yes, when they think I’m a greenhead.”

“Been at the gate long?”

“I’m only taking charge of it while the true man’s away. Gatekeeping’s not my trade.”

“I suspicioned it weren’t. What might your calling be, if I’m not making too bold to ask?”

“Trooper,” John replied briefly. He had come to a halt a few paces from the bench, and was looking down at the stocky man, wondering who and what he might be. He had the accent of a Londoner, but the wide-brimmed hat he wore, the short, full coat of frieze, and the gaitered legs suggested that he might well be a bailiff, or a farmer. “Native of these parts?” he asked.

The man shook his head. “Never been in this here county afore. It’s too full of hills for my taste. I’m here on a matter o’ business. There’s a certain party as I’m acting for as has a fancy to buy a property hereabouts, if he could find what might suit him. I seen one or two, Buxton-way, but I dunno as any of ’em are just what I’m after, and the prices certainly ain’t. You know of anyone wanting to sell a decentish place, with a bit o’ land, not too dear?”

“No, but I’m not a native either.”

“Ah, pity! What’s your monarch—if you ain’t this cove?” enquired the man, with a jerk of his thumb up at the fascia-board.

“Jack Staple. What’s yours?”

“Stogumber—Gabriel Stogumber.” He glanced round, as Ben came out of the toll-house, and said: “Hallo! Didn’t I see you at the Blue Boar this morning? What are you a-doing of here?”

“I lives here!” said Ben indignantly.

“Oh, you lives here! Beg parding, I’m sure, Master Booberkin!”

“He’s Brean’s son,” interposed John. “I’m his cousin.”

“Oh, that’s how it is, is it?” said Mr. Stogumber, looking from one to the other. “To be sure, I did think you was too young to be his pa, and yet again too old to be his brother. How do ye like it in these parts? You seen a bit of service, I dessay?”

“Ay, several years.”

“I should think it must seem a dull sort of a place,” observed Mr. Stogumber. “I’m from Lunnon meself, and it looks to me like nothing ever happens here, nor ever will. I been setting on this here seat close on half an hour, and I seen one dung-cart go through the pike. Meself, I like a bit o’ bustle—mail-coaches, and stages, and such. It’s all according to taste, o’ course. By the way they all stare at me in the village, back yonder, it’s easy to guess you don’t see a stranger here above once in ten years.”

This slur cast upon his birthplace aroused Ben’s pugnacity, and he at once began to enumerate all the unexpected vehicles which had passed the pike during the foregoing twelve months; and to reckon up on his fingers every newcomer to the district, from a bagman, detained in Crowford by a heavy fall of snow, to Mr. Coate, the Squire’s guest. Mr. Stogumber, apologizing with exaggerated humility for his error, added that Ben had forgotten to include his large cousin in the list. “And I’m sure he’s big enough for two,” he said. “What part of the country do you come from, Mr. Staple?”

“Hertfordshire,” responded John.

“Now, that’s a part I do know,” said Mr. Stogumber.

He then proceeded to discourse amiably on this topic. His manner was that of a naturally loquacious man, willing to fall into conversation with any stranger, but it appeared to John that the casual questions which fell from time to time from his lips were all directed to one end: he wanted to know the exact locality of John’s home, and what he had been doing since his supposed discharge from the Army. He seemed interested also in the whereabouts of the official gatekeeper, but Ben, bored by his idle chat, had drifted away, and John was able to evade his questions. He suspected Mr. Stogumber of being an informer, and thought that it would not be long before he received a visit from the trustees. But Mr. Stogumber, taking his leave presently, was still very affable, and said, somewhat surprisingly, that he expected to remain in the district for a day or two, and would no doubt see John again.

The rest of the day passed without incident. Nightfall brought on a slight recurrence of Ben’s dread of his father’s unknown visitor, but since the Captain had thoughtfully provided himself with a pack of playing-cards during his expedition to Tideswell he was very soon diverted by being initiated into the mysteries of casino. The Captain, good-naturedly instructing an eager if not very apt pupil, was glad to see that sundry sounds from outside the house went unnoticed. But just as Ben, with a squeal of triumph, succeeded in lurching him, an owl hooted from somewhere close at hand, twice. This brought the boy’s head up in a flash. He sat listening intently, and when the cry sounded again, jumped up from his chair, and ran to the door, shooting back the bolts, and pulling it open. John heard the creak of the wicket-gate into the garden, and a minute later soft, swift footsteps.

“’Evening to you, bantling!” said a crisp voice. “Is all bowman?”

“Ay! Me dad ain’t here, but it’s all rug!” Ben said eagerly. “Can I take Mollie? Can I, Mr. Chirk?”

He stood back, to allow a thin man in a long coat with several shoulder capes to enter the kitchen. Mr. Chirk stepped over the threshold, and checked, his keen, bright eyes staring at Captain Staple, who had not risen from his chair, but sat idly shuffling the cards, and looking with considerable interest at the newcomer. Mr. Chirk, a wiry man of medium height, wore, besides his great-coat, a wide brimmed and greasy hat, a muffler knotted about his throat, and a pair of spurred boots. The coat was stained and frayed, and the boots showed slight cracks, but he contrived in spite of these defects to give the impression of being a trim figure.

“Come in!” John invited him.

“What’s this?” There was a note of menace in the voice; Mr. Chirk shot a quick, suspicious look at Ben.

“It’s only Jack: he’s a Trojan! He’s got a bang-up prancer, too. A big, rum prancer, he is, but he don’t know how to shake hands for a carrot, not like Mollie. Oh, Mr. Chirk, can I show Jack the way Mollie—”

“Stubble it!” said Chirk briefly.

“Ay, but—”

“Dub your mummer, will you?” Chirk growled. “If Ned’s away, I’ll brush!”

“Don’t lope off on my account!” said John, putting the pack of cards on the table, and rising to his feet. “Go and stable the mare, Ben!”

Chirk, whose right hand had sought a pocket lost in the folds of his coat, stepped back a pace. His hand came up with a jerk, a serviceable pistol in its grasp. “Stand fast, cull!” he said softly. “Seems to me young bottlehead here has been talking a trifle too free!”

“I ain’t, I ain’t!” asseverated Ben, distressed to perceive that his most valued friend was displeased with him. “I ain’t whiddled nothing, only as how Mollie shakes hands for a carrot! You don’t want to brush, Mr. Chirk! Honest, he’s a bang-up cove, else I wouldn’t ha’ dubbed the jigger! And we got some rum peck and booze, Mr. Chirk! There’s a round o’ beef, and a whole cheese, and——”

“Ben, go and stable the mare!” interrupted the Captain. “You can put up your pistol, friend: I’m not a police-officer! God save the mark, do I look like one?”

Mr. Chirk’s left hand had shot out to grasp Ben by the shoulder, but it relaxed its grip. “I’m bound to say you don’t,” he replied, keeping his eyes on the Captain’s face, and his pistol levelled. “Maybe you’re a swell-trap: I dunno that. What might you be doing here, if you ain’t a trap?”

“That’s a long story. Let the boy go!” said the Captain, walking over to the cupboard which served the toll-house as a larder, and collecting from its depths the beef which Mrs. Skeffling had roasted on the spit that morning, and a large cheese. Setting these on the table, he glanced at Chirk, on whose lean countenance a smile was hovering, and said: “You’ll find a loaf of bread in the bin over there.”

Chirk slipped the pistol back into his pocket. “You’re a cool hand, ain’t you?” he remarked curiously.

The Captain, emerging from the cupboard again with a jar of pickles and a pipkin of butter, said: “Do you expect me to break into a sweat because you point a gun at me? I’ve been hoping you might come here sooner or later.”

“Oh, you have, have you?” said Chirk. “And why—if I’m not making too bold to ask?”

“Well, as far as I can discover,” said John, holding a large jug under the spigot of his new barrel of beer, and watching the ale froth into it, “you may be the only person who can tell me where Ned Brean may have gone to.”

“Ain’t he here?” demanded Chirk.

“No, and hasn’t been, since Friday evening.”

“Well, may I be stuck in the nitch!” exclaimed Chirk, considerably astonished. “What should have taken him to lope off?”

“Don’t you know?”

Chirk shook his head. “Don’t young Ben know?”

“No. He went out, telling Ben he would be back in an hour or so, and he hasn’t been seen or heard of since.”

“Strike me lucky!” said Chirk blankly. “Wonder what his lay is? He ain’t one as suffers from windmills in the head neither. Nor he wouldn’t pike on the bean without he took Ben along with him—leastways, not to my way of thinking.”

The Captain laid a plate and a knife and fork before him. “Help yourself! Is he fond of Ben?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” temporized Chirk. “He’s a hard sort of a cove, if you take me, but he done his duty by the boy, so far as he was able.” He picked up the carving knife, but lowered it again, looking in a puzzled way at his host. “I don’t know where Ned is, nor what lay he’s on, and another thing I don’t know is what your lay is! And nor I don’t know what the likes of you are doing in this ken, because from the way you talk you’re a nib-cove!”

“Oh, I’m here by accident!” replied John, pouring the beer into two mugs. “I came to the pike on Friday night, and found Ben alone, and scared out of his wits, so as I had had enough of the weather, and he was afraid to be alone, I racked up for the night—thinking that his father would very likely return before morning. But he didn’t, so here I am still.”

“So here you are still!” agreed Chirk, looking at him very hard. “I suppose you’re minding the gate, what’s more!”

“That’s it.”

“Well, if it is, you must be dicked in the nob!” said Chirk frankly.

John grinned at him. “No, I’m quite sane. I’ve several reasons for remaining here. Besides, I don’t know what the devil to do about the boy. He’s scared of being sent to work in Sheffield, if his father don’t return, and I’ve promised he shan’t be thrown on the Parish.”

“Scared of that, is he?” Chirk gave a short laugh. “Ay, he might well be! That’s the way I started, when my old dad tipped off. By the time my mother had buried him decent we were properly dished-up. A couple of hordes—what you call shillings, Mr. Nib-Cove!—a groat, and three grigs was all she had left in the stocking. So I went to work in a factory. Not here: up north, it was. Just about Ben’s age, I must ha’ been. Three years I stayed, and I ain’t forgotten, though I’m turned forty now, nor I never will, not if I reach fourscore! I loped off when my mother went to roost.”

“Was that when you took to the bridle-lay?” John asked.

“A peevy cove, ain’t you?” Chirk said. “What d’ye want to do? Cry rope on me? Who told you I was on the bridle lay?”

“Who told you I was a green ’un?” retorted John.

Chirk smiled reluctantly, and applied himself to the beef. “Danged if I know what you are!” he said. “But I wasn’t a rank-rider all them years ago. Lordy, when you get to be that you’re top-o’-the-trees! I started on the dub-lay, and worked my way up.”

“Is it worth it?” John asked curiously.

Mr. Chirk smiled a little wryly. “It’s all according to the way you look at it,” he replied. “You might be lucky, and end up with the dibs in tune, but I ain’t met many as did. It’s a free life, and if you’ve a taste for excitement there’ll be plenty o’ that. The chances are you’ll go up the ladder to bed—at York Gaol, with a Black-coat saying prayers, and the nubbing-cheat ready to top you. It’s well enough when you’re young, but when you get to my time o’ life, and maybe have a fancy to settle down—well, that’s where the rub comes, and no remedy! If I could lay my hands on a bit o’ balsam—and I don’t mean a truss with six or seven goblins in it, and a couple o’ diamond rings which turn out to be Bristol stone!—no, some real mint-sauce: a monkey, in some old gager’s strong-box, or even a couple o’ plums: why, I don’t know but what I wouldn’t turn to pound dealing! A tidy little farm, maybe. But I’m not a lucky cove: never have been!”

John got up to refill the ale-jug. “What’s Bream’s lay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

John laughed. “A stupid question, Mr. Chirk! You wouldn’t tell me, if you did. But I want to find the man.”

“Hark ’ee!” said Chirk. “If you was thinking, because I stable the mare here now and then, and maybe have a bite o’ supper with Ned, he’s a fence, or a baggage-man, you’re going beside the cushion! He ain’t—not to my knowledge! This ain’t my beat, and I don’t come here in the way o’ business. What brings me here is another matter: private, you may say! If you’re willing I should leave the mare for an hour, well! If you ain’t—well again! I’ll brush!”

“Oh, quite willing!” John said. “I’m even willing to believe you don’t know what may have befallen Brean, or where to get news of him—if you tell me so, man to man.”

Chirk looked at him with narrowed, searching eyes. “What’s in your mind?” he asked abruptly.

“Who is the man who visits Brean secretly, after dark? The man Ben is afraid of?”

Chirk pushed his chair back from the table. “What’s this? Trying to gammon me, gov’nor? You’ll catch cold at that!”

“No, it’s the sober truth. That’s what had Ben in such a sweat of fear, the night I came to this place. Some stranger he’s never seen, nor been allowed to see. Brean pitched him a Canterbury tale to keep him from spying on the pair of them: told him if this mysterious visitor saw him he’d send him to work in the pits. If a tree so much as rustled out there—” he jerked his head towards the back-door—“the boy turned green with fear.”

“Sounds to me like a bag o’ moonshine!” said Chirk incredulously. “Why, he went off, happy as a grig, to put Mollie through her tricks! He’s not scared!”

“Oh, not now! I told him no one could harm him while I was here, and he believed me.”

A gleam of humour lit Chirk’s eyes, as they ran over his host. “I should think he might,” he agreed. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Wonder why the bantling never said a word to me about it? Him and me’s good friends, and he tells me most things. Ned’s a hard man, like I said, and he’s not one to take notice of brats, even when they’re of his own get. A monkey’s allowance is what he gives Ben: more kicks than ha’pence!”

“How long is it since you were here last?” John asked.

“Matter of three weeks.”

“I’ve a shrewd suspicion it’s happened since then. A pity! I had hoped you might know something. I’ve a notion there’s something devilish queer afoot here, but what it is, or how Brean came to be mixed up in it—if he is—I can’t guess. I shouldn’t think it could be what you call pound dealing, however: this visitor of his seems to be uncommonly anxious he shan’t be seen, or recognized.”

Chirk dived a hand into his pocket, and drew forth a snuff-box. It was a handsome piece, as its present owner acknowledged, as he offered it, open, to John. “Took it off of a fat old gager a couple o’ years back,” he explained, with engaging frankness. “Prigged his tatler, too, but I sold that. I’m a great one for a pinch o’ merry-go-up, and this little box just happened to take my fancy, and I’ve kept it. I daresay I’d get a double finnup for it, too,” he added, sighing over his own prodigality. “It’s worth more, but when it comes to tipping over the dibs there ain’t a lock as isn’t a hog-grubber. Now, look ’ee here, Mr. Nib-Cove——”

“I wish you will stop calling me that!” interrupted John. “If it means, as I suspect it may, that you take me for some town-tulip, you’re out! I’m a soldier!”

“Oh!” said Mr. Chirk, helping himself to a generous pinch of his snuff. “No offence, Soldier! Now, maybe I could drop in at one or two kens which I knows of, and where I might get news o’ Ned Brean; but he never spoke a word to me about this cull which comes to see him secret. I’m bound to say it sounds to me like a Banbury story, but you ain’t no halfling, nor you don’t look like one o’ them young bloods kicking up a lark, and I don’t misdoubt you. I don’t twig what any boman prig should be doing in a backward place like this, but I’ll tell you that there’s ways a gatekeeper might be useful to such—if you greased him well in the fist! If so be as you was wishful to take a train o’ pack-ponies through the pike, and no questions asked nor toll paid, for instance!”

“Yes, I’d thought of that,” John agreed. “I’ve seen it done, but not here. Dash it, man, this is Derbyshire!”

“Just what I was thinking myself,” nodded Chirk. “In the free-trading business, Soldier?”

John laughed. “No, only for a week or two! I was picked up at sea once by a free-trading vessel, and made the voyage in her. A famous set of rascals they were, too, but they treated me well enough.”

“I should think,” said Chirk dryly, “them coves at Bedlam must be looking for you all over! You ain’t got a fancy to go on the rum-pad for a week or two, I s’pose?”

“Not I!” John grinned. “It’s pound dealing for me! Try it yourself!—I might be able to help you.”

“Thanking you kindly, I’d as lief stand on my own feet! Nor I don’t see why you should want to help me.”

“As you please! When you see Rose Durward, give her a message from me!”

This brought Chirk up on to his feet, with a scrape of his chair across the floor, and a dangerous look in his eye. “So that’s it, is it?” he said softly. “A man o’ the town, are you, Soldier? Would that be why you’re being so obliging as to keep the gate for Ned? Quite in the petticoat-line, I daresay! Well, if you’re to her taste, she’s welcome!”

“Tell her,” said the Captain, carefully trimming the lamp, which had begun to smoke, “that I’ll be hanged if I know what she finds to take her fancy in a damned, green-eyed, suspicious, quarrel-picking hedge-bird, but I’ll stable his mare for him—if only to please her!”

Considerably taken aback, Chirk stood staring at him, his humorous mouth thinned, and a challenging frown in his eyes. “There’s not a soul but her knows why I come here,” he said. “Not a soul, d’ye hear me? So if you know it, it looks uncommon like she told you, Soldier! P’raps you’ll be so very obliging as to tell me how that came about?” He had thrown off his greatcoat when he sat down to the table, but his pistol lay beside his plate, and he picked it up. “I’m a man as likes plain-speaking, Soldier—and a quick answer!” he said significantly.

“Are you?” said the Captain, a hint of steel in his pleasant voice. “But I am not a man who likes to answer questions at the pistol-muzzle, Mr. Chirk! Put that gun down!” He rose to his feet. “You’ll get hurt, you know, if you make me go to the trouble of wresting it away from you,” he warned him.

An involuntary grin lightened the severity of Chirk’s countenance. He lowered the pistol, and exclaimed: “Damme, if you don’t beat all hollow, Soldier! It ain’t me as would be hurt if I was to pull this trigger!”

“If you were to do anything so mutton-headed, you’d be an even bigger gudgeon than I take you for—which isn’t possible!” said John. “I’ve a strong liking for Rose, but I don’t dangle after women ten years older than I am, however comely they may be!”

“You’re Quality, and they’re not particular where they throw out their damned lures—just for a bit o’ sport to while away the time!” muttered Chirk.

“I shan’t be particular where I throw you out, if you make me lose my temper!” said the Captain grimly. “What the devil do you mean by talking of a decent woman as if she were a light frigate?”

Mr. Chirk flushed, and pocketed his pistol. “I never thought such!” he protested. “It just put me in a tweak, thinking—But I see as I was mistaken! No offence, Soldier! The thing is, I get fair blue-devilled! There’s times when I wish I’d never set eyes on Rose, seeing as she’s one as is above my touch. She’s respectable, and I’m a hedge-bird, and no help for it! But I did set eyes on her, and the more I make up my mind to it I won’t come here no more, the more I can’t keep away. Then I knew she’d whiddled the whole scrap to you—”

“Nothing of the sort! She never mentioned you,” interrupted John. “It was her mistress who told me the story!”

Much abashed, Chirk begged his pardon. He then eyed him sideways, and said: “A regular Long Meg she is, but a mort o’ mettle, that I will say! Much like yourself, Soldier! Not scared of my pops! Did she tell you how it chanced that I met Rose?”

“She did, and it seemed to me that hedge-bird though you are you’re a good fellow, for you didn’t take their purses from them. Or were you afraid of Rose?”

Mr. Chirk chuckled reminiscently. “Ay, fit to tear the eyes out of my head she was! And her own sparkling that pretty as you never did see! But, lordy, Soldier, I never knew it was only a couple o’ morts in the gig, or I wouldn’t have held ’em up!”

“I believe you wouldn’t indeed. Does Rose know that you come to this house?”

“No. Only you, and Ned, and young Ben knows that—and only you knows what my business is!”

“Never mind that! Tell Rose you’ve met me! There have been changes up at the Manor since you were last here!”

“Squire been put to bed with a shovel?” asked Chirk. “Sick as a horse, he was, by what Rose told me.”

“Not that. But his grandson is at Kellands, with a friend. Name of Coate. What brings him into Derbyshire, no one knows: nothing good, I fancy!”

“Flash cove?” said Chirk, cocking an intelligent eyebrow.

“I’ll cap downright!” said John, in the vernacular.

The eyebrows remained cocked; Chirk patted his pocket suggestively.

“No, no!” John said, laughing. “Just try if you can discover what brought him to Kellands, and whether Ned Brean was concerned in it!” He saw a quizzical look in Chirk’s face, and added: “Don’t gammon me you can’t do it! If there’s havey-cavey business afoot, you can get wind of it more easily than another!”

At that moment, the door opened, and Ben slid somewhat warily into the kitchen. Aware of having incurred his friend’s displeasure, he did not venture to address him; but Chirk said encouragingly: “Come here, Benny!” and stretched out a hand.

Much relieved, he bounded across the room. “It’s all right and tight, ain’t it?” he asked anxiously. “And I give Mollie——”

“Never you mind about Mollie! You tell me this, son! Where’s your dad loped off to?”

“I dunno. She knows me, Mollie does! She——”

“Don’t you tell me no lies!” said Chirk sternly. “Your dad never loped off without telling you when he’d be back!”

“Well, he did!” said Ben, wriggling to shake off the grip on his shoulder. “’Leastways, he said he’d be back in an hour, but he never said no more. It don’t matter, Mr. Chirk! I got Jack instead, and we has a bang-up dinner every day, and he’s learnt me to play cards. I like him better than me dad, much! He’s a swell cove!”

“There’s a young varmint for you!” said Chirk, with some severity. “Now, you stand still, Benny, else you don’t give Mollie another carrot as long as you live! Did you ever know your dad go off like this before?”

Ben shook his head vigorously, and once more proffered the suggestion that his dad had been pressed.

“And all the same to you if he was, I suppose!” said Chirk. “Think, now! Didn’t he ever leave you to mind the gate before?”

“Ay. He did when he went to market, or the Blue Boar.”

“Did he leave you all night?”

“No,” Ben muttered, hanging his head.

“Benny!” said Chirk warningly. “You know what’ll happen to you if you tell me any more bouncers, don’t you?”

“Me dad said I wasn’t to tell no one, else he’d break every bone in me body!” said Ben desperately.

“Well, I won’t squeak on you, so he won’t know you whiddled the scrap. And if you don’t, I’ll break every bone in your body, so you won’t be any better off,” said Chirk calmly. “This ain’t the first time your dad’s loped off, is it?”

“Yes, it is!” Ben asseverated. “Only onct, before, he went off and told me to mind the gate in the night, and if anyone was to ask where he was he said to tell ’em he was laid down on his bed with a touch o’ the colic! And he come back before it was morning, honest he did!”

“Where did he go to?”

“I dunno! It was dark, and he woke me up—’least, he didn’t, ’cos there was a waggon, or something, went through the gate, and that woke me. And me dad said as I was to sit by the fire in here till he come back, and to keep me chaffer close, ’cos he was going out.”

“How long was he gone, Benny?”

“A goodish while. All night, I dessay,” replied Ben vaguely. “Nobody comed through the gate, and I went to sleep, and when me dad come in the fire was gone out.”

Chirk let him go. He glanced up at John, slightly frowning. “Queer start!” he remarked.

“Which way did that wagon go, Ben?” asked John.

After a moment’s reflection, Ben said that he thought it was going Sheffield-way. He added that they didn’t often get them along the road after dark; and then, feeling that the subject was exhausted, begged for a sugar-lump to give to the mare. John nodded permission, and he sped forth once more, leaving the two men to look at one another.

“It is a queer start,” said Chirk, rubbing his chin. “Danged if I know what to make of it!”

“What had the waggon to do with it? What was on it?”

“It don’t make a ha’porth o’ difference if there was a cageful o’ wild beasts on it, I don’t see what call Ned had to go along with it!” said Chirk. “If a party o’ mill-kens have been and slummed Chatsworth, and loaded the swag on to that there waggon, they might grease Ned in the fist to keep his mummer shut, but they wouldn’t want him to go along with them!” He pulled out a large silver watch, and consulted it. “Time I was brushing, Soldier! I don’t take the mare up to Kellands, so if you’ll let her bide in the shed till I come back, I’ll be obliged to you.”

The Captain nodded. “She’ll be safe enough. Think it over, Chirk!—and give my message to Rose!”

Chapter 8

IT was some two hours later when Chirk came back to the toll-house, and he found the Captain alone, Ben having been sent, protesting, to bed an hour before. The very faintest clink of spurred heels was all that warned John of the highwayman’s return; he caught the sound, and looked up from his task of applying blacking to his top-boots, just as the door opened, and Chirk once more stood before him. In answer to the questioning lift of an eyebrow, he nodded, and, setting the boot down, lounged over to the cupboard, from which he produced a couple of bottles. Whatever suspicions had still lurked in Chirk’s mind at parting, seemed to have been laid to rest. He cast off his coat, without taking the precaution of removing his pistol from its pocket, and, leaving it over the back of a chair beside the door, walked to the fire, and stirred the smouldering logs with one foot. “Where’s the bantling?” he asked.

“Asleep,” John replied, lacing two glasses of port with gin. “He wanted to wait for you to come back, but I packed him off—as soon as he’d shown me your Mollie.” He handed one of the glasses to his guest. “A neatish little mare: strong in work, I should think.”

Chirk nodded. “Ay. Takes her fences flying and standing. Clever, too. She’s the right stamp for a man of my trade. She wouldn’t do for a man of your size. What do you ride, Soldier?”

“Seventeen stone,” John said, with a grimace.

“Ah! You’ll need to keep your prancers high in the flesh, I don’t doubt.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s your good health! It ain’t often I get given flesh-and-blood: it’s to be hoped I don’t get flustered.” He drank, smacked his lips, and said approvingly: “A rum bub! Rose said as I was to tell you she’d be along in the morning to fetch your shirt. Proper set-about she was, when I told her I’d made your acquaintance: combed my hair with a joint-stool, pretty well!” He smiled reminiscently, looking down into the fire, one arm laid along the mantelshelf. Then he sighed, and turned his head. “Seems I’ll have to put a bullet into that Coate, Soldier. Rose is mortal set on getting rid of him.”

“She’s not more set on it than I am, but if you go about the business with your barking-iron I’ll break your neck!” promised John genially. “As good take a bear by the tooth!”

“The old gager—the Squire—saw him tonight,” said Chirk. “Sent for him to go to his room, which has put them all in a quirk, for fear it might send him off in a convulsion. It hadn’t—not while I was there, anyways.” He drained his glass, and set it down. “I’ll pike off now, Soldier, but you’ll be seeing me again. Maybe there’s one or two kens where I might get news of Ned.” A wry smile twisted his mouth. “I’m to take my orders from you, unless I’m wishful to raise a breeze up at Kellands. So help me bob, I don’t know why I don’t haul my wind before that climber mort of mine’s turned me into a regular nose!”

John smiled, and held out his hand. “We shall do!” he said.

“You may do! I’m. more likely to be nippered!” retorted Chirk; but he gripped John’s hand, adding: “No help for it! Fall back, fall edge, I’ve pledged my word to Rose I’ll stand buff. Women!”

Upon this bitterly enunciated dissyllable he was gone, as noiselessly as he had come.

The Captain’s first visitor, the following morning, was Rose, who stepped briskly into the toll-house soon after nine o’clock, cast a critical eye over Mrs. Skeffling’s handiwork, wrested from her clutches the torn shirt, and sallied forth into the garden in search of Captain Staple. She found him chopping wood. He greeted her with his disarming smile, and a cheerful good-morning. He then listened with becoming meekness to a comprehensive scold, which, although apparently aimed at the unsuitability of his occupation and his attire, was, as he perfectly understood, a punishment for having dared to discover the trend of her maidenly affections.

“But chopping wood is capital exercise!” he said.

“Capital exercise indeed! I’m sure I don’t know what the world’s coming to! And I’ll thank you, Mr. Jack, not to go sending messages to me that you’ll stable Mr. Chirk’s mare to please me! I never did! I declare I was never so mortified! I should be a deal better pleased if Mr. Chirk would take himself off, and not come bothering me any more, for I’m a respectable woman, and keep company with a highwayman I will not!”

“No, I do think he must abandon that way of life,” agreed John.

“It’s nothing to me what he does!” said Rose.

“Poor Chirk!”

Her face puckered. She whisked out her handkerchief and rather fiercely blew her nose. “It’s no manner of use, Mr. Jack!” she said, in a muffled tone. “You ought to know better than to encourage him! I can’t and I won’t marry a man who might be carried off to gaol any moment!”

“Certainly not: you would never know a day’s peace! Besides, it’s not at all the thing. But he doesn’t expect you to marry him under such circumstances as that, does he?”

She sat down on the chopping-block, and wiped her eyes. “No, he says he’ll settle down, and live honest, farming. But talking pays no toll, sir, and where is the money to come from to buy a cottage, let alone a farm?”

The Captain refrained from telling her that Mr. Chirk proposed to found his career as an honest farmer on the theft of some traveller’s strong-box, and merely said: “Would you marry him, if he were not a highwayman?”

She nodded, and disappeared into the handkerchief again. “To think, after all these years, and the offers I’ve had, I should take and fall in love with a common vagabond!” she said, into its folds. “Enough to make my poor mother turn in her grave! For I was brought up respectable, Mr. Jack!”

“So was I, and devilish dull I found it! But Chirk’s a good fellow: I like him. He’s head over ears in love with you, too.”

A convulsive sniff greeted this. “Well, if he wants to please me, he’ll stop holding people up, and so I’ve told him. Let him find Brean, like you want him to, and see if he can’t get rid of that Coate out of our house! But I’ll never marry any man while Miss Nell needs me—and need me she will, poor lamb, when the master goes! And that day’s not far distant.”

“I hope she won’t need you.”

This brought her head up. She looked very hard at him for a minute; and then got briskly to her feet, and shook out her skirts. “I hope she won’t, Mr. Jack—and that’s the truth!” She saw his hand held out, and clasped it warmly. “I have that torn shirt in my basket, and Mrs. Skeffling’s ironing your other one,” she said, reverting to her usual manner. “You won’t find she’s starched the points as they should be, but she’s done her best, and I hope, sir, it’ll be a lesson to you not to go jauntering about the country with only two shirts to your name!”

With these valedictory words, she took her departure; and John returned to his task of chopping wood. He was called from it by a shout of “Gate!” and went through the house to answer it, picking up the book of tickets on the way. A phaeton was drawn up on the Sheffield side of the gate; and holding the reins was Henry Stornaway, wearing a drab coat whose numerous shoulder-capes falsely proclaimed his ability to drive to an inch. A pair of showy, half-bred chestnuts, which the Captain mentally wrote down as bonesetters, were harnessed to the vehicle; and Mr. Stornaway was unable to produce any coin of less value than five shillings to pay for his sixpenny toll. He said, as John pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket: “Hallo! Don’t know you, do I? Where’s the other fellow?”

“Away, sir,” replied John, handing him his change.

“Away? Ay! But where’s he gone to?”

“Couldn’t say, sir,” said John, holding up the ticket.

“Nonsense! If you’re taking his place, of course you know where he is! Come on, now: no humbug!”