The Sheep-Stealers

The
Sheep-Stealers

By

Violet Jacob

(Mrs. Arthur Jacob)

London
William Heinemann
1902

First Edition, August 1902

Second Impression, September 1902

All rights reserved

This Edition enjoys copyright in all
countries signatory to the Berne
Treaty, and is not to be imported
into the United States of America

To my Mother

CONTENTS

[BOOK I]

[CHAPTER I
THE TWO COMMUNITIES]

IN the earlier half of the nineteenth century, when most of the travelling done by our grandfathers was done by road, and the intercourse between districts by no means far apart was but small, a tract of country lying at the foot of the Black Mountain, which rises just inside the Welsh border, was as far behind the times of which I speak, as though it had been a hundred miles from any town.

Where the Great Western engines now roar down the Wye valley, carrying the traveller who makes his journey in spring through orchards full of pink blossom, the roads then lay in peaceful and unsophisticated quiet. Soon after leaving Hereford, the outline of the mountain might be seen raising itself like an awakening giant, over green hedges and rich meadowland from the midst of the verdure and cultivation.

Between its slopes and the somewhat oppressive luxuriance through which the river ran, a band of country totally unlike either of these in character, encircled the mountain’s foot, and made a kind of intermediate stage between the desolate grandeur of the Twmpa (as the highest summit was called) and the parish of Crishowell with its farmyards and hayfields far beneath. The lanes leading up from Crishowell village were so steep that it was impossible for carts to ascend them, and the sheep-grazing population which inhabited the hill farms above, had to go up and down to the market-town of Llangarth, either on foot or on ponies brought in from the mountain runs. The “hill-people,” as the slower-witted dwellers in the valley called them, came seldom down except on market-days, when the observer mixing in these weekly gatherings in Llangarth market-place, might distinguish them as a leaner, harder race with a wider range of expression, due possibly to their larger outlook on the natural world. They were neither entirely mountain nor entirely valley bred, though retaining something of each locality, and something of the struggle between nature and civilization seemed to have entered into them, giving them that strenuousness which all transition must bring with it.

They lived, too, in the midst of what one might call a by-gone element, for the fields and uplands round their homes were full of the records of preceding generations. Strange graves scattered the hill-sides, ancient dates were cut in the walls of their houses, names identical with those on forgotten tombs might be found on outbuildings, and, in the hedges of the perpendicular lanes, stones stood here and there which tradition vaguely designated as “murder-stones,” showing where the roadside tragedies of earlier times had taken place. Local history told, too, of bloody battles fought round the spurs of the mountain in ancient British times, and, at one spot, a mound, visible to the eye of archæology, marked the place where three chieftains had been buried after one of those fights. Perhaps it was this which had given the name of “The Red Field” to a small farm at a short distance from the plateau. Imaginative people finding themselves in that region of neither yesterday nor to-day might have felt the crowding-in at every step of dead personalities, past customs and passions, in fact, a close treading on their heels of generations which had lain for years in their graves in Crishowell churchyard, or in the burying-places beside the little Methodist chapels.

An element of superstition which all this could not fail to bring with it, stalked abroad through those misty fields and lonely pastures, and, one can hardly wonder that at the time of which I am speaking, it was a powerful factor in the lives of the illiterate shepherds and even of the better-educated farmers who owned sheep-runs on the mountain. Stories were extant of strange appearances seen by late riders on the bridle-tracks, and certain places were passed, even by daylight, with a great summoning-up of courage.

One of these shrines of horror was an innocent-looking spot called “The Boiling Wells,” in the middle of a green track stretching over the Twmpa’s shoulder, where a flat piece of slate rock jutted from the turf, and three small springs of water bubbled eternally up through the earth. Near this place two young farmers, returning at dusk from a sheep-run, had had an experience which they and all the hill-people were not quick to forget, for they had arrived breathless one evening at the Red Field Farm to detail to an open-mouthed audience of farm-labourers how they had been overtaken by a thunderstorm near the Boiling Wells, and how, as they neared the water, the horses had refused to pass it, wheeling round and flying from something visible only to themselves. Then the two men had become aware of a man’s figure hovering in the dusk, and a luminous face had peered at one of them from between his horse’s ears. At sight of this they had fled as fast as their terrified beasts could carry them, and, after galloping wildly in the increasing darkness for some time, they had been brought to a stand by finding themselves running against the fence which divided Red Field Farm from the mountain land.

In fact, the tales of fear which grew around this and other places in the neighbourhood were endless, though sceptics hinted that these strange things happened oftener on market-days than on any others, and that those who claimed to have seen more than their neighbours owed their pretensions more to having been what was called “market-peart” than to anything else. Still, the effect on the public mind was disquieting, and, in winter evenings, it kept many inside their doors or in the inspiriting vicinity of the farm buildings.

To the dwellers in Crishowell village, who were disinclined to question anything, all these tales, as they came down to their ears from the higher regions, were unmitigated horrors, to be accepted as best might be and retailed at corners over pipes with much repetition and comment, coloured here and there to suit the narrator’s cast of mind. Living in their bit of valley where wages were small, needs few, and public-houses many, they had scant ideas beyond the round of weekly work, which terminated, in many cases, on Saturday night in a prolonged visit to some favoured inn, and a circuitous return to the domestic hearth afterwards.

Sunday, indeed, brought to these unsophisticated labourers its veneer of respectability. A bucket of water in the back garden, an inherited Sunday coat, a virtuous resolve not to smoke in any part of the churchyard in which the parson could see them, converted them from a quarter to eleven till half-past twelve, noon, into a chastened community which filed noisily into the battered pews of Crishowell church, there to remain till the final “Amen” let them loose upon the joys of a Sunday dinner in the family circle. After this, they might cast from them the garments of righteousness and sit about on gates with acquaintances to whom they apparently never spoke.

Though the hill-people descended into Crishowell, the Crishowell people rarely went up among their neighbours; only the Methodists among them journeyed upwards to attend the Chapels with which the higher land was dotted. In out-of-the-way corners by the thickly intersecting lanes these grim, square, unadorned little buildings were to be found. The wayfarer, coming unexpectedly upon one as he turned some sudden angle of his road, might pause to glance over the low wall which divided its unkempt precincts from the public path, at the few crooked tombstones rising amid a wilderness of coarse hemlock which spread even to the Chapel door, imparting a forlorn effect to the spot, and pervading the air with its rank smell. Many of these places were falling into disrepair from disuse, as, in summer weather, the meetings would often be held on the hill-side, where the short turf would bear marks until the next heavy rain of iron-bound heels and heavy feet which had trodden in a ring round the spot. When the wind chanced to sit in the east, the sound of the hymns and psalms would come down with a kind of wail, by no means unimpressive, though somewhat prolonged and nasal, to the nearer parts of the valley, the favourite themes of death and judgment to come seeming singularly appropriate to the hard, fervent faces and the background of frowning mountain from which they sounded.

If it was a narrow religion which had obtained such a grasp upon these upland men and women, it was yet one from which they gained a great deal that few other things could have taught, and virtues adapted to their exposed life grew up among them, possibly in obedience to those laws of supply and demand which are part of Nature’s self. Children reared in unyielding austerity, forced to sit meekly through hours of eloquence against which their hearts rebelled, while their bodies suffered in silence, groaned under their trials. But, when they had crossed the threshold of grown-up life, the fruits of these experiences would show in a dormant fund of endurance and tenacity, submerged, no doubt, by the tide of every-day impressions, but apt to re-appear in emergencies as a solid rock rises into view at low water.

Such were the two communities living close together on the borders of two nations, nominally one since the middle ages, but, in reality, only amalgamated down to a very few inches below the surface.

[CHAPTER II
RHYS][ 1]

IT was the day after Christmas. The frost and snow, supposed to be suitable to the time, had held off from the West country and were waiting ready to pounce upon the world with a new year. The evenings had been damp and chilly of late, with not a breath of wind stirring to lift the fog which hung over the Black Mountain and pressed like a heavy, dead hand right into Crishowell village.

On the green track which led along the plateau at the foot of the Twmpa the air to-night lay still and thick. Noises made by the animal world were carried a long distance by the moist atmosphere, and sounds were audible to people who had learned to keep their ears open for which they might have listened in vain at ordinary times. The water, running through wet places, could be heard distinctly trickling among roots and coarse grasses and patches of rush, as well as the quick cropping of sheep and occasional scuttering of their feet over muddy bits of path; and along the track from the direction of Llangarth came the dull thud of a horse’s advancing hoofs and the constant sneezing of the animal as he tried in vain to blow the clinging damp from his nostrils. As they loomed out of the fog which gave to both horse and man an almost gigantic appearance, the rider, without waiting to pull up, slipped his leg over the pommel of the saddle and slid to his feet, the horse stopping of his own accord as he did so.

It was almost too thick to see more than a yard in front of one’s face, and Rhys Walters stood a moment peering before him with narrowed eyes into what looked like a dead wall of motionless steam. Then he bent down to examine the spongy ground. It oozed and sucked at his boots when he moved about, and he frowned impatiently as he knelt to lay his ear against it. While he listened, a sound of distant running water made itself faintly heard through the windless evening, and his horse pricked his ears and turned his head towards it. The young man remounted and rode abruptly to the left, in the direction of the Boiling Wells.

As he went along with the rein lying loose on the bay horse’s withers, the animal made a sudden plunge and swerved violently aside as a sheep appeared out of the mist and ran startled across the path under his very nose. But Rhys seemed hardly to notice the occurrence, except by a stronger pressure of his knees against the saddle, for he was thinking intently and the expression on his hard countenance showed that he was occupied with some affair much more difficult than horsemanship, which had been a simple matter to him from his very earliest youth.

He was a man to whom one physical exercise was as natural as another, his firmly-knit frame being equally adapted to everything; and, though rather over middle-height than under it, he conveyed the impression of being very tall, more by his leanness and somewhat high shoulders than by actual inches. His hands and feet were well-shaped, though the latter fact was not apparent, on account of the stout leather leggings and clumsy boots which he wore, and every movement of his spare figure had the attraction of perfect balance and unconsciousness of effort.

His long face was one which few persons of any discernment would have passed without a second glance; fewer still could have determined what it actually expressed. He had eyebrows of the real Welsh type coming down low towards the nose, the eyes underneath being set near together and looking either brown or grey according to the light in which they were seen. They were usually called brown, to match the tanned complexion and dark hair to which they belonged. His cheekbones were high, his nose long and pointed, though the refinement which it might appear to indicate found its unexpected contradiction in a straight and unsensitive nostril.

When he spoke, Rhys used much less gesticulation than was common to his countrymen (for he was three-parts a Welshman), but his thin lips moved a great deal and the quick turns of his close-cropped head—he kept his hair short when it was the fashion among men to wear it rather long—showed that he did not by any means possess the true phlegmatic temperament. Above all, he looked entirely at one with the natural and animal creation around him. Had he been a poorer man, he might easily have been taken for a poacher, had he been a richer one, for a country gentleman of active and sporting tastes; as a matter of fact, he was neither of these, being a farmer and the son of a farmer. His earlier childhood had been spent in what one might almost call savagery, and the rest of his youth in Hereford Grammar School, where, except for a far more polished speech and accent than was natural to his position, he had learnt but a certain amount of what his parents wished him to acquire. He had also learned much of which they, in their greater simplicity, had never dreamed.

Of these two, Eli Walters and his wife, only Mrs. Walters was alive, and she lived with Rhys at Great Masterhouse, a farm standing high in Crishowell parish on the skirts of the mountain land. It was a long and ancient stone house which had consisted of one storey until Eli had added an upper floor to suit his more modern ideas of convenience, and, as this outcome of his full purse and soaring mind extended but half the length of the dwelling-house, it gave the approaching stranger a notion that it might be some kind of religious building with a squat tower at one end. Owing to the impossibility of dovetailing a proper staircase in, the upper rooms were reached from outside by a ladder with a weather-beaten railing running up it. To this protection Eli, who occupied a room at the top, had often had reason to be grateful, for the excellent beer produced in Hereford town had played a larger part in his latter years than was altogether decorous; many a time, on winter nights, Mrs. Walters, sitting below in the kitchen, had listened sternly to his uneven footstep in its spasmodic descent to earth.

Great Masterhouse looked towards the Twmpa, and, from the kitchen window, the view presented to the eye a strip of turf forming a parade-ground for troops of cocks and hens. This sloped to a tortuous little stream, upon which the ducks, having picked up everything worth having near home, might cruise down to a pool in search of more alluring gluttonies. At the south side of the house lay the strip of garden that was all of which the farm could boast. It was used for vegetable-growing alone, and wore a dreary aspect all the year round, enlivened only for a short time in spring, when a pear-tree, trained up the dead wall of the additional storey, broke out into a green and white cloud. Old Walters, it is true, had taken some interest in the few yards of flower-bed it had contained in his lifetime. He had planted sweet-williams, peonies and such like, for he was a man who loved beauty in any form, though, unfortunately, he had been as apt to see it in the bottom of a beer-jug as in any other more desirable place.

His wife cared for none of these things, for she regarded the culture of what merely pleased the eye as a wanton throwing away of time. It seemed to her to be people’s duty to make themselves as uncomfortable as possible in this world by way of suitable preparation for the next. So, after Eli had finished alike his drinks and his gardenings and been carried down the hill to Crishowell churchyard, the flowers disappeared from the poor little garden, and rows of sensible cabbages and onions raised their aggressive heads from the places they had left empty.

At the back was a great yard surrounded by outbuildings, and this place gave to Great Masterhouse the only picturesqueness it possessed. From it one looked at the curious old back-door which opened on a stone passage to the kitchen, and might admire the solid oak and heavily-moulded lintel. Inside there was a niche in the wall into which a strong wooden beam could be shot, while above it a porch projected bearing the date 1685. Patches of golden-brown stonecrop sprawled over this, and a heap of dried bracken which lay upon the doorstep for all who entered to clean their boots upon, added to the antiquated effect. Such had been Rhys’ home during his twenty-seven years of life.

At his father’s death, when Great Masterhouse with the good slice of land belonging to it passed into his hands, he was fully prepared to do his duty by his inheritance, and in this he was supported by his mother, who was a practical woman, as well as by his own dislike of being bested in the affairs of life, a failing to profit in any way by his advantages. In other words, he hated to be done, and she, like many other worthy persons whose minds are professedly set above this froward world, hated it too.

Mrs. Walters had been right in many deeds of her married life, though she had not, perhaps, made her sterling virtues very attractive to her husband and son. Those inclined to blame her for this were too quick in forgetting that her life had been no bed of roses, and that to one of her type, daily contact with a weak, idle nature like that of Eli was a perpetual martyrdom. She was an utterly humourless woman, and her want of humour, which is really no less than the want of a sense of proportion, added a thousand-fold to her trials.

She took everything too hard, giving to each untoward trifle which crossed her path the value of a calamity, with the result that the mountain she had created fell and crushed her. She was truthful and upright in the highest degree, and though her hardness and pride repelled her husband and her want of elasticity wearied him to the verge of madness, her integrity was a matter of admiration to him. His weaker spirit might have been dominated by hers, but for that touch of originality in him which forbade his being entirely swayed by another. He was a man addicted to cheerful company, joviality and good-fellowship; in conversation he was a desperate liar, which made him none the less amusing to his friends on market-days, and they rallied round him with unfailing constancy, receiving his sprightly ideas with guffaws of laughter, slapping their own legs, or other people’s backs—whichever chanced to be handiest—as his wit struck them in assailable places.

When he first married, Eli was very much in love with his unsuitable companion, but the day soon came when he grew tired of her. He wearied of her dark, hawk-faced beauty, and her narrowness of mind oppressed him; his want of seriousness also bred a contempt in her heart which she allowed him to feel plainly. It was not long before this led to quarrels—of a mild kind, it is true—but enough to make husband and wife see the mistake they had committed; and when their first child, a boy, arrived, Anne Walters wrapped herself up in her baby’s existence, finding in it an outlet for the intense feeling which had all her life been dormant, and was now awake in her for the first time. At Rhys’ birth, some two years later, she had little to bestow on him but a well-meaning interest, for her whole soul was occupied with her eldest born; so Eli, longing for companionship of some kind, took possession of him and proceeded to alternately spoil and neglect him.

Between the two, as the child grew older, there existed a curious relationship, more like a defensive alliance between two small powers against a greater one than anything else, tacit, unspoken, and, strange to say, better understood by the boy than by the man.

Eli stood in awe of his wife, and young Rhys knew it; he was not afraid of her himself, for fear was a sensation he was physically incapable of feeling, but he saw in his father’s society a road of escape from Anne, whose unsympathetic attitude towards his youthful errors was at once dull and inconvenient. A worse education for a little boy could hardly be imagined, and Rhys’ shrewdness was perhaps a source of greater danger to his character than any quality he possessed; he was too acute to be deceived in Eli, and he knew perfectly the worth of an affection which, though genuine of its kind, would not hesitate to neglect him if it grew tired of him, or to sacrifice him if he stood in the way.

The one great good which he got out of his profitless childhood was an intense familiarity with outdoor life. The sky was his ceiling, the earth his carpet, and he wandered about the pastures around, the mountain above, and the valley below, with the same assurance that other little boys of his age felt in wandering about their nurseries. He knew the habits of every living creature and every nesting-place for miles; he could climb like a mountain-sheep or run like a hare, and his observation of Nature became so highly developed as to make him, in some respects, very like an animal. He knew the meaning of every sound, distant or near, and the whole world teemed with voices for him which it generally keeps for birds and beasts alone.

It was only natural that he should be attracted by the delights of poaching, and an inveterate poacher he became; he set nets for partridges and laid night-lines in the trout-streams of the valley, and no outdoor rascality entered his head which he did not immediately attempt. On the few occasions on which he was caught, Mrs. Walters, after rebuking him severely, took him to his father and insisted on his being thrashed, and when this happened, Rhys knew that there was no escape; so he took his punishment with as much equanimity as he could, merely resolving to work his next escapade on more careful lines.

When he was five years old his brother died; had he lived to be older he might have done something to humanize the selfish and uncivilized little boy, and his death, which was the blackest grief that Anne had ever known, seemed to turn the poor woman’s already hard heart into stone. With her elder child she lost the one real interest she had contrived to glean from her narrow life, and when the funeral was over and there was nothing left but an aching blank, she turned further from her husband and the boy, shutting herself round with a wall of indifference. Rhys was absolutely nothing to her. She was glad that he was so strong and healthy, and sorry that he was so disobedient; beyond that she hardly gave him a thought. He was a sealed book to her—a sealed book with a binding which offended her and which it did not occur to her to open.

It was just at this time that an earnest preacher, a light in his sect and a man of extraordinary personal influence, came to hold meetings among the Methodists of the mountain district, and Anne went to hear him speak. With her grief, her silent bitterness, and her unsatisfied life, she was an ideal subject upon which this man’s zeal could act. Before he had well begun what he called his “struggle for her soul,” the work was half done and the issue decided; the hard doctrines and straitened ideas which he preached appealed to her in a way that nothing else could; the wholesale condemnation of sinners which he announced was entirely in accordance with a type of mind that had ever hated the Devil more than it had loved God, and she threw herself wholly into the sea of his relentless Christianity, for there were no half-measures with her.

Eli looked on at the spectacle with apprehension, quailing as he thought of her possible attempts at his own conversion to the paths of the more active and elaborate righteousness. But as time went on, and he found that his personal salvation formed no part of his wife’s plans, he was a good deal relieved and felt very grateful to the preacher, welcoming anything which helped to keep them separate and divert her attention from his comfortable habits of life. He never interfered with her in any way, though he would sometimes stroll into the kitchen when a meeting was being held there, loitering about and pretending that he was not quite sober, while he internally enjoyed the agonies she suffered from fear that her decorous guests should suspect what she perceived with horror. Thus did the malicious old farmer gratify his sense of humour.

So the years passed on until it occurred to the pair that Rhys’ education should be considered. He must go to school, and they resolved to send him to the Grammar School at Hereford. The small amount of pride that Eli had was centred in the pleasant thought that he was, in his calling, a rich man. With all his laxity he had been shrewd in business, and could look round on his possessions with the knowledge that there was enough and to spare for his son and his son’s son after him. The boy should better himself in life, should have the education which he had lacked, should spend his money with the best of the gentlefolks’ children with whom he would be brought into contact at Hereford. The end of it was that Rhys, considerably interested in his new position, found himself one morning on the top of the Hereford coach with a Bible given him by Anne in one pocket and half-a-sovereign given him by Eli in the other. He was very much pleased with the half-sovereign.

His feelings as he rolled along were mixed. He could not but welcome the prospect of the livelier interests and companionships before him, but, at the same time, he knew very well that that freedom which had been the breath of his nostrils would be his no longer; and, until he saw how much he might be compensated for its loss in other ways, he could not exactly rejoice. As regards any sentiment at leaving his parents, he had not much.

He did not flatter himself that either would miss him to any distressing degree, and though he felt a little lump in his throat as he bade good-bye to his father, the sensation had passed almost as soon as he was out of sight. No, a new world was opening, and he prepared to plunge into it with a curiosity at once suspicious and hopeful.

Education in those days was neither so cheap nor so general as it has become now, and boys like himself, and even the children of much more well-to-do farmers than was Eli Walters, had to content themselves with what schooling could be got in their native villages. Hereford Grammar School was chiefly attended by sons of professional men, and many of the neighbouring squires were satisfied to let their boys pick up all the learning they needed there. When Rhys, with his uncultivated country speech, made his appearance, many were inclined to despise him, holding aloof from him as from a being vastly inferior to themselves; and, when they found out, as they soon did, that his father was a common farmer who worked with his hands, some became actively aggressive and began, after the manner of boys, to practise small cruelties upon the new-comer.

But they had caught the wrong man, and it was not long before their mistake was brought home to them. Rhys, with all his faults, was no shivering milksop fresh from his mother’s apron-strings, but a hard and cautious young savage, with a heavier fist than most of his oppressors could boast of, and a cheerful willingness in using it freely.

So, though the bigger lads taught him the healthy lesson that there were higher powers than himself, his contemporaries soon decided that it was wiser to leave him alone. Besides, how was juvenile snobbishness to resist the attractions of one who could make such catapults and slings, knew things that only gipsies and poachers understood, and was familiar with phases of outdoor life which they had never so much as imagined? Though he made few friends during the six years he spent at school, he had many admirers, and as, little by little, his accent dropped from him and he adopted the manners of his associates, he began to be looked upon as something of a personage, and left school with a veneer of sophistication which hid from ordinary view the fact that he had no more changed in character than a man changes who accustoms himself to the perpetual wear of his Sunday clothes.

When he returned to Great Masterhouse and settled down to help his father on the farm, he was accepted by his kind as a much-travelled and very fine young man. On market-days in Llangarth, Eli was not a little proud of his tall son with his green tail-coat and superior air, and he smiled complacently to see how the young fellows nudged each other as he went down the street, and what admiring glances were cast after him by the farmers’ daughters. Among the latter he produced the same effect as an eligible duke might in a community of society young ladies. Poor old Eli, lying on his death-bed a few years later, told himself that it would not be his fault should Rhys be unsuccessful in life.

* * * * * *

Rhys Walters rode along the plateau until he passed the Boiling Wells. There he turned again eastwards, going down an old grass-grown watercourse, the bed of which had become something like a path. The mist was not so thick, and a light showed through it a short way in front, like a little staring eye with long shining eyelashes piercing the damp. As he neared the house from which it proceeded, a door opened, letting a luminous stream into the fog, and a head peered out.

“Be that Mr. Walters?” said a voice.

“Here I am,” replied Rhys, slipping from his horse.

The man came out and led the animal away to the back of the house, and Rhys entered, wiping the damp from his hair.

[1] Pronounced “Reece.”

[CHAPTER III
THE DIPPING-POOL]

A GROUP of men, sitting round a blazing fire, some on heavy wooden chairs, some on a long settle, looked up as he entered. All were smoking. Those on the chairs gave them a deferential push back when they saw the new-comer.

“Very damp night outside,” observed Rhys, nodding to the company.

“Indeed, so it be, sir. Come you in here near to the warm-ship, Master Walters,” said a jolly-looking individual who sat closest to the chimney-corner, pointing invitingly to his next neighbour’s chair. His next neighbour, an undersized man with a goat’s beard, called Johnny Watkins, jumped up obediently.

“Thanks, thanks, don’t disturb yourself,” said Rhys politely, seating himself in the corner of the settle, “this will do very well for me.”

The fire-place round which they were gathered was the broad kitchen range of the Dipping-Pool Inn, in which modest establishment bar and kitchen were one and the same place. Being situated in such an out-of-the-way spot, it was too little frequented by any but the few travellers over the mountain to make any addition profitable, Hosea Evans, the landlord, whose sign hung outside, entertaining his guests comfortably in the kitchen. He was assisted in his business by one Mary Vaughan, who stood in what would have been the character of barmaid in a larger hostelry, and brought to the company such drinks as were called for from the inner room in which she sat. Within the memory of a few old people, the dried-up bed of the brook, which made a rough path to the house, had been a swift stream running into a pool before the door. This had been used for sheep-washing at one time, and Hosea, when he took the little inn, had not troubled himself to invent a new name for it; so, though its appropriateness was not apparent, the “Dipping-Pool” it remained.

It was an unpretending, whitewashed house, squatting in the green creek as though ashamed to be seen within range of the public eye. Many people thought that it had reason to be so, as its present proprietor had borne an indifferent character for honesty in certain small ways, and had left Llangarth, where he had formerly lived, on account of the inconvenient attitude of local opinion. He was a thick-set, smiling man, of florid complexion, round whose broad face the red hair, beard, and whiskers formed such a perfect halo, that now, as he entered the kitchen and his head appeared over a wooden screen standing at the door, it produced something of the effect of a sunrise.

“Well, Mr. Walters,” he began, when he had shut the door of the inner room carefully and sat down cumbrously beside Rhys, “and how be you minded to do?”

The company took its pipe out of its mouth and turned its gaze upon the young man. There was a pause. “There’s a good deal against it,” said Rhys, returning the stare, “but let’s have a drop of something hot before we sit down to the matter. How about the kettle, Hosea, and a bottle of spirits?”

“Wal, I don’t have no objection, not I,” hazarded Charley Turnbull, the man by the chimney-corner, drawing a large hand across his mouth, and reflecting that Rhys would pay for it.

A call from Hosea brought in Mary Vaughan. She stood waiting while he gave the order with her eyes fixed upon Rhys, who was studiously contemplating his muddy boots; he never so much as looked up to bid her good-evening.

“When you’ve brought the liquor, don’t be settin’ up, girl,” said the landlord. “Go you up-stairs and leave we to our bysiness. I’ll mind the hearth.”

Mary’s look wandered over the assembly, lighting for a moment upon Rhys Walters; her eyes were large and brilliant, and shone out of her serious face like flames; there seemed to be a slow fire behind them. She made no reply, but brought what was wanted, leaving the room with an indistinct good-night.

“If her did get to know, it would not do for we—indeed that it would not,” remarked Johnny Watkins, shaking his head.

“Lawk! no; her would soon tell the old man,” answered Turnbull. “Be the door fast behind her, Hosea?”

“Yes, sure.”

“But put you the key well into the hole,” continued Charley, “that there be no sound to go through.”

“Be her a wag-tongued wench?” asked a man who had not yet spoken, and who, having come from a distance, was a stranger to some of those present.

“No, no,” replied Hosea, “but her father do keep the toll-gate down below Pig Lane.”

“Ah, well, to be sure.”

The company again sat silent while the kettle was put on to boil and the fire stirred up; a shower of sparks flew out as Hosea punched and turned the logs with a plebeian-looking poker.

“Master Rhys—beg pardon, Mr. Walters, sir—no offence. Us have knowed ye since ye was no more nor a little lump of a boy,” began Charley, who regarded himself as spokesman, with the every-day result that he was quietly accepted as such. “If you be to come along of us at the time we know of, us have thought, and indeed we all do say”—here he looked round upon the men for corroboration—“that Rebecca bein’ a Bible person and a leading woman of power and glory in this job, we will be proud if you be she.”

The orator stopped and replaced his pipe in his mouth as a kind of full-stop to the sentence.

Rhys Walters had never before considered himself in the light of a “Bible person,” and he smiled slightly. “Is that your wish?” he inquired, scanning the faces in the firelight.

“Yes, surely,” said Johnny Watkins, his squeaky voice audible above the murmur of assent. “Stevens and I were sayin’”—here he pointed to a man, who, finding himself brought under popular notice, wriggled in his chair with mingled anguish and enjoyment—“just before you come in, sir, what a beautiful female you would be.”

Rhys, who had about as much resemblance to a woman as a pointer has to a lap-dog, laughed, and the others, at this, laughed too, while Johnny Watkins began to perceive in himself a wit of the highest order.

“It’s very well I’m a clean-shaved man,” said Walters, stroking his lean jaw. “It wouldn’t have done for your style of looks, Hosea.”

The company, being one to which a personality never failed to appeal, again roared with laughter, and Watkins saw with dismay that a greater than he had arisen; he made one mighty effort.

“Yes,” he remarked, at the pitch of his penetrating voice, “yes. An a’ might have set fire to the toll-gate with a’s whiskers!”

Hosea turned upon him an awful glare, for his red hair had long been a weapon in the hands of his foes. He had no sprightliness of retort, but he was determined that Johnny’s pleasantries should not continue for want of a solid, knock-down blow.

“If I had a beard like a billy-goat waggin’ about under an ass’s face,” he said solemnly, “I’d keep it out o’ the sight o’ folks, for fear it might be made a mock of—that I would.”

Johnny Watkins gave a gasp which made his beard wag more vehemently than ever, and retired abashed into silence.

Rhys had not come through the fog at that hour of the evening to listen to profitless disputes. The matter in hand, which was a projected attack upon a toll-gate not far from Llangarth, interested him more now that he had become the prominent person in it, for he had arrived at the inn uncertain whether or no he would lend active support to the affair, it being more of a piece of out-of-the-way amusement to him than anything affecting his opinions.

At this time a wave of wrath which had a considerable foundation of justice was surging over South Wales. By a general Highway Act, a new principle of road-government had been brought in, under which the trustees of turnpike roads might raise money through tolls, sufficient to pay the interest of the debts and keep the highways in repair. For this reason the gates were withdrawn from the operation of the Highway Laws, the tolls increased in amount, and every means used by those in authority to uphold the revenues of their trusts. The gates had, in some cases, been taken by professional toll-renters, men who came from a distance, and who were consequently regarded with suspicion by the intensely conservative population of the rural districts. These people, having higher rents to make up, had refused to give credit to farmers, or to allow them to compound for tolls on easy terms as had been formerly their custom.

The effect of all this had been to rouse the public to a state of fury, which had resulted, in many places, in serious riots. In carrying out the provisions of their respective Acts, the trustees were under little or no control; they erected fresh gates, interpreted the laws as they thought fit, and there was no appeal from their decisions. Added to these difficulties, a succession of wet harvests, and the fall in price of live stock had reduced the farmers’ capital, and they and their dependents resented, as well they might, the new devices for raising money out of their emptying pockets.

The first riot had broken out at Carmarthen, and was the signal for a series of like disturbances all over the country. Although it had taken place in May, and now, as Rhys Walters and his companions sat by the Dipping-Pool fire, the year had almost reached its end, the reign of terror created was still going on, though it had not, so far, begun in Breconshire. The Carmarthen rioters had banded themselves together about three hundred strong, under a person whom the law never succeeded in identifying, and who, assuming the name of “Rebecca,” appeared dressed as a woman and mounted upon a black horse. “Rebecca and her children,” as they were called by the terrified neighbourhood, marched upon one of the gates in the town armed with every conceivable kind of weapon, pitchforks, pistols, hay-knives—to say nothing of the crowbars and the mallets which they carried with them and with which they intended to destroy the bar. “Rebecca” had been chosen as a name for their captain in reference to an Old Testament text, which tells how Rebecca, bride of Isaac, on leaving her father’s house, was blessed by Laban in these words: “Let thy seed possess the gate of those that hate them.”

About two o’clock in the morning the strange tribe, some mounted and some on foot, had appeared near the toll and placed sentinels in the surrounding streets; and, before the astonished inhabitants, roused from their beds by the noise and the loud orders of Rebecca, could realize what was happening, the work of destruction was going bravely forward, the rioters using their implements like demons, not only upon the toll-bar, but upon all who tried to hinder them.

The toll-keeper came to his door remonstrating with the mob, but his appearance provoked a shower of stones, and he fled back into shelter pursued by shouts and jeers. His wife, a brave woman and a much better man than her husband, then came out and stood quietly in the middle of the road, and, in the lull of surprise which her action provoked, entreated the leader to spare the house, as her child lay dangerously ill within. One or two of the more ruffianly flung stones at the woman, but Rebecca turned upon them, dealing one of them a blow which sent him staggering, and announcing her intention of going to find out the truth.

Then, in the grey early light, the extraordinary figure, gigantic in its female dress, dismounted and stalked after the distracted mother into the toll-house. When it emerged, the order was given to retreat, and the cavalcade dashed through the wrecked gate and disappeared in various directions into the country, just as the local police, according to time-honoured custom, were arriving half-an-hour too late. One or two dismounted stragglers were caught and punished, but the ringleader and most of the offenders escaped, though every effort was made to trace them; but it was whispered with bated breath that Rebecca rode abroad in distinguished company, and that many of the younger farmers, and even the gentry, were not above suspicion.

After this matters grew worse and worse. The success at Carmarthen encouraged the lawlessness that broke out on every side, and in some districts there was hardly a toll-bar remaining intact. Seeing this, the magistrates took decided action, the military were called out and special police enrolled, with the result that when the opposing forces met, each encounter was more serious and bloody than the last.

The panic spread on all sides. People told each other lying tales of cruelties practised by the devastating hordes, with details which made the hair of the respectable stand upright, while children who had read of Rebecca in their Bible lessons and now gathered from their elders that she was actually going about, fancied that Old Testament days had come back. They were prepared at any moment to meet any sort of Sunday character, from Joseph in his coat of many colours to Satan himself, horned, tailed, black, and pitchforked, and without a stitch of clothes upon his unhallowed person.

“I think I shall have to come with you, neighbours,” said Rhys, “and we had better be stirring and settle our doings. We should be ready for the first week of the year, for we don’t want the moon rising on us too early. She ought to be up about eleven; that would do well enough. We’d be done and home by then.”

“And how about horses?” inquired Hosea. “Them knowin’ old badgers in Llangarth will soon see who’s movin’. An’ ye can’t dress up a beast as ye can a man.”

“Trew enough,” observed Charley Turnbull solemnly. He was beginning to wonder how he could get hold of a horse of some one else’s.

“As to that, I shall ride a young mare I haven’t had above a week. She’s never been seen in the valley, and a lick of white paint down the faces of some o’ your nags, and a white stocking here and there makes a wonderful difference. Those who have white-footed ones can use the blacking brush. And you must risk something,” added Rhys, looking hard at Turnbull, and guessing his thoughts exactly.

“Woman’s clothing be a fine protection,” remarked Stevens; and Turnbull wished he had not been so reckless in giving away the part of Rebecca.

“Be you to ride all o’ one side like the wenches do?” inquired the man who came from a distance, “or will ye put your leg across the saddle like a Christian?”

“Oh, I’ll ride astride,” said Rhys, “or I shan’t be able to lay about me so well if need be.”

“Petticoats an’ all?”

“I suppose so.”

Here a roar of laughter went up at the thought of his appearance, which Mary could hear plainly in the room overhead.

Had poor old Eli been in his son’s place, the whimsicalities of his own costume would have given him hours of study and enjoyment. But it was not so with Rhys; humour was not predominant in him. He did not live sufficiently outside himself for that.

“I must look round for some sort of clothes,” he said, rather stiffly. “It would be well for everybody to have something to hide their faces. I’ll get Nannie Davis up at the farm to lend me an old sun-bonnet.”

“An’ I’ll give ye a brown bit of a gown my sister Susan left here when her was over for Crishowell feast September last,” volunteered Hosea. “It’s been hangin’ behind the door ever since.”

“An’ I’ll find ye a cloak more fit for a skeercrow than for any other person,” said a man called Jones. “Will ye have it?”

“Oh, yes, it’ll do,” replied Rhys.

“G’arge! an’ you’ll be a right hussy! Fit to skeer the old limb without any o’ we.”

Here there was another laugh.

“When ye spoke o’ skeercrows,” observed Johnny Watkins, who had been silent much longer than he liked, “it minds me o’ a crewel turn one o’ they figgers served my poor mother. Father could never abide the sight o’ one since.”

Rhys looked encouragingly at Johnny. He was nothing loth to change the subject. “What was that?” he asked.

“It were when old Hitchcock were parson down at Crishowell. He and his lady had a great notion o’ each other, an’ when each fifth of August come round—bein’ their marriage-day—any one as did go to the Vicarage with a ‘good luck to ye, sir and madam,’ or ‘many happy returns o’ the day,’ got a bottle o’ beer from Madam Hitchcock to take home an’ drink their good health in. My mother, though she were a bit hard o’ seein’, did use to go, an’ never missed a weddin’-day from the time her come to the parish to the day her was taken up on high. One year, as her went, her peered over the garden wall an’ dropped a bob to the parson as he was in the midst o’ the onion-bed standing quiet an’ lookin’ at the fruit. At the house, the missis were at the window an’ her bobbed again. ‘Wish you luck o’ this day, ma’am,’ says she. ‘Thank you, Betty,’ says madam, smilin’ sweet. ‘And good luck to the Reverend Hitchcock that’s standin’ among the onions outside. Never did I see the reverend parson look so well an’ handsome,’ says mother, smilin’ an’ laughin’ more than was needful, her bein’ a bit bashful. The lady give a look at her so as poor mother were fairly dazed, an’ down come the window wi’ a bang an’ madam was gone. Mother waited there three-quarters of an hour full, until a lad were sent out to tell her to go home an’ no ale. One day as her an’ father was passin’, her said to father, says mother, ‘Hitchcock be a wonderful man for flowers. Never a day do I go by but he’s there squintin’ at them.’

“‘Lawk, you poor foondy[1] woman,’ says father, ‘do parson have straw round a’s legs? ’Tis the skeercrow.’ An’ when he found how the dummy had cheated him out o’ his beer, never could he look one i’ the face again. ’Twas crewel, that it was.”

[1] Foolish.

[CHAPTER IV
AT THE YEW-STUMP AND AFTER]

THE mist lifted a little as Rhys Walters left the Dipping-Pool and turned out of the watercourse on to smooth turf. He could not help smiling as he thought of Charley Turnbull’s misgivings, though in his heart he sympathized with them more than he would admit, even to himself.

He looked forward with pleasure to the coming raid, and with still more to the prominent part he was to play in it, but through his pleasure ran the devout hope that he would not be recognized. Not that he feared the law more than he feared anything else, but his respectability was dear to him, as dear as his love of adventure, and the struggle to eat his cake and have it was a part of his inmost soul.

Only one person at Great Masterhouse was to know his secret, and that was Nannie Davis, an old servant who had belonged to the establishment since his birth, and who had screened and abetted many of his boyish pranks. She was built on an entirely opposite pattern to her mistress, and the unregenerate old woman had often felt a positive joy in his misdoings, the straitened atmosphere which clung round Mrs. Walters being at times like to suffocate her. From her Rhys intended hiding nothing. He knew that, whatever protest she might see fit to make, she would neither betray him nor grudge him the clothes necessary to his disguise. His plan was, briefly, to tell his mother that he had business in Abergavenny, a town some fourteen miles on the other side of the mountain, and, having ostentatiously departed for that place, to make for the Dipping-Pool. To the Dipping-Pool also he would return when he had seen the adventure through, and from thence in a day or two home in peace. At least so he trusted.

The direct line from the inn to Great Masterhouse took him past one of the many remains of old buildings to be found round the mountain. Only a yard or so of broken wall indicated where a long-disused chapel had stood, and the roots of a yew marked the turf; where passing animals had scraped the bark with their hoofs, reddish patches proved what manner of tree the solitary stump had been. Some stones had been quarried from the ground close by, leaving a shallow pit almost overgrown with grass.

It was a dismal enough place, he thought, as he rode past, and his heart almost stopped as he heard his own name sounding from the quarry. Having found superstition inconvenient he had long ago rid himself of it, still the voice in the mist sent a perceptible chill through him.

“Rhys! Rhys!” came from the hollow, and a figure was distinguishable by the old wall.

He turned towards the spot, but the horse reared straight up; he had his own ideas about things which sprang out of mists. Rhys was never cruel to animals, seldom even rough, and he patted his neck, gripping him tightly with his knees and pressing him forward with those indescribable noises dear to horses’ hearts.

The voice rang out again, this time with a very familiar tone.

“Mary! Is that you?” he called sharply, dismounting by the wall.

“Oh, Rhys!” she cried, as he came face to face with her, “don’t you be angry! I’ve come all the way from the Dipping-Pool so as to see you here.”

And as she caught sight of his expression, she burst into violent weeping.

He stood in front of her frowning, though the sight of her distress touched him a little through his vexation. She had always touched him rather—that was the worst of it.

“What have you come here for?” he asked, feeling great misgivings as to the reason. “Come, sit here like a good girl and tell me. Lord! your dress is dripping. ’Tis like a madwoman to go running over the country these damp nights.”

And he drew her down upon the yew-stump and put his arm about her. The horse began to crop the short grass. He was completely reassured, and like many who considered themselves his betters, he found his stomach a source of much solace and occupation. Mary leaned her head against Rhys, and her sobs ceased as she found his arm round her; she was cold and wearied, and she was suffering an anxiety that was more than she could well bear.

“Rhys,” she said, “I know all about it. Mr. Evans was telling Turnbull o’ Tuesday evening, an’ I heard every word. Don’t you go—don’t you. I’ve come all the way through this lonesome place to ask you.” And she clung to him, imploring. He sat silent for a moment.

“Damnation,” he said at last between his teeth.

Mary’s tears broke out afresh. “Now you hate me for it, I know,” she sobbed, breaking away and standing before him, a slight wild figure against the clearing atmosphere. “But oh! how could I help it?”

“Nonsense,” said the young man impatiently, “come back and don’t be a fool. I couldn’t hate you, and that you know.”

“Is that true?” she asked, clasping her hands and fixing her large eyes on him. The wet mist had made her hair limp and heavy, and a lock of it showed on her shoulder, under the cloak she had thrown over her head. Even tears, cold, and wet could not make her anything but an attractive woman, and he put out his hand and took hers. It was like a piece of ice.

“You silly wench,” he said, pulling her towards him and kissing her. “Why do you come out like this, catching your death of cold? Not but what I’m glad you came, all the same, for I don’t seem to see you now-a-days, as I used to. What is it you want me to do?”

“Don’t go to the toll-gate wi’ them Rebecca people,” she begged. “It’s a black business, and oh! if you were to get caught what would they do to you? Rhys, there’s a man in Carmarthen jail that I used to know, and I’ve heard tell that they won’t let him out for years an’ years. And what would become of me?”

“Mary,” he said sharply, “have you told any one of this?”

“Never a soul have I spoken one word to, as God above made me,” she answered. “’Twas likely I’d tell any one, and you in it; why should you think so bad of me, Rhys? I’d never mistrust you like that. An’ for my own sake——”

He interrupted her with another kiss.

“Don’t be angry, my dear, I don’t distrust you at all. And I love you truly, Mary, indeed I do.”

“Well then, if you do, you’ll promise not to go along with Evans an’ the rest, won’t you?” she coaxed, putting her arms round his neck. “Promise, promise.”

“I can’t, Mary, I can’t, so there’s an end of it.”

“Very well,” she said in a trembling voice, “then good-bye, for I’d best be going.”

She took up a corner of her cloak, and pressed it to her eyes; there was something infinitely pathetic in the gesture. It was an acceptance of so much—more even than lay in that one interview.

“Dear, don’t you be afraid,” said Rhys, “there’s not the smallest chance of any of us being caught. We have it spread all over the country, that there’s to be a fine to-do that night at the gate by the river, and every constable will be down there and out of our way.”

“But the soldiers,” said the girl; “they say they’re hanging about everywhere. They’ll be pouncing out upon you—mark my words—wi’ their swords an’ dreadful things, and, like as not, you’ll be killed. Oh, Rhys! Rhys!”

“The soldiers will all be at the Wye gate with the police, you little blockhead, if there are any at all.”

“Ah! you can’t tell.”

“Well, if they do come,” exclaimed he, with a laugh, “they’re not likely to catch me. If there’s a run for it, I fancy I know this country better than any young fool that ever put on a yeomanry uniform and thought himself a soldier. Since you know so much, Mary, I may as well tell you the whole job. I’m to set out for Abergavenny two days beforehand, but I shan’t go there, I shall go to the Dipping-Pool.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said simply, “for then I’ll see you.”

“And so,” he went on without heeding her, “if the yeomanry should get wind of it and come down to the gate, I shall have a good mare under me, and I’ll be into Abergavenny before the news of it gets even as far as Great Masterhouse. There’s a man there who will swear to my having been in his house two days.”

“But how do you know they’ll keep their mouths shut—them at the Dipping-Pool, I mean? There’s that Watkins, it’s anything for talk wi’ him.”

He struck his fist on his knee.

“I’ll break every bone in his sneaking body if he says a word now or after, and so I’ll tell him. He’s frightened out of his life of me as it is, and I’ll scare him still more.”

“Oh, Rhys, you’re a wild man,” she sighed, “and your look makes me cold when you talk like that. Listen now, you won’t hurt my father? He’s an old man, but he’s not one o’ those to stand by and see his gate destroyed without a word. I mind him well when he could use his hands wi’ the best.”

“I won’t lay a finger on him, Mary.”

The girl’s heart smote her, when she remembered how her father’s danger had weighed on her mind, as she sat waiting for Rhys to come by. Since seeing him, the old man had become but an afterthought; and yet, she had always been reckoned a good daughter. But her world had turned on a different pivot for the last six months. She recognized that and sat silent.

“You needn’t fear about him,” continued her companion, observing the lines of repressed pain round her closed lips.

“I wasn’t thinking of that; Rhys, you know what I’m thinking about. It’s not the word for a maid to say to a man, but I must. When—when is it to be, Rhys?”

He plucked up a piece of grass and turned it over and over in his fingers before he answered. To say the truth, he had no desire to marry any one just now. That he loved the girl beside him he could not deny; that she loved him and had trusted his word completely was a fact of which he was profoundly aware. Of another fact he was profoundly aware too, and that was, that, if he were to make her rue it, he would be a blackguard. He did not want to be a blackguard, and he hated the thought of her being in trouble; she was good and true and loving, and she had, in spite of her position, a refined and delicate beauty he never saw among the girls who made eyes at him in Llangarth and giggled when he spoke to them. She would look lovely in the pretty clothes and the surroundings his money would buy for her. And, as he understood love, he loved her.

But what was she? An inn servant; there was no getting over that. His mother would be horrified were he to bring back a wife taken from such a place. For this, it is true, he cared but little, for the antagonism which had existed in his boyhood between himself and Mrs. Walters had stayed unchanged. They were on more equal terms, that was all. What he chose to do he would do. All the same his pride rebelled a little at the thought of marrying Mary, for he liked making a figure in the eyes of his neighbours.

For a few seconds neither of them spoke. The horse had ceased cropping and was pricking his ears; he whinnied softly, so softly that the sound was hardly more than a gurgle in his throat, but it was enough to make Rhys spring up and seize him by the bit. He led him down the sloping side of the old quarry, dragging Mary with him, and the three stood together at the bottom, Rhys in his shirt-sleeves, holding his coat over the animal’s head. The trot of horses came near as they waited stock-still and breathless in their shelter; evidently the riders, whoever they were, would pass very near, and the sound of voices was audible between them and the direction of the Dipping-Pool. The horse began to stamp about.

“Mary,” whispered Rhys, “they’re coming close past us and they must see this brute. Do you lie down flat by the wall and I’ll mount and meet them. I’ll be bound they are lost in the mist and will think I am in the same plight. I can lead them a bit wide of here, and, when they’re passed, go you home. I’ll get on to Masterhouse; it’s late, and I’d have to be leaving you in any case.”

“But,” she said anxiously, as though there had been no interruption, “you haven’t answered me. Tell me; it’s to be soon, oh! isn’t it?”

“After the toll-gate business,” he answered. She held up her face and they kissed each other; then he hurried on his coat, threw himself into the saddle and disappeared over the top of the quarry.

He rode straight to the right across the path by which he judged the riders to be advancing. As they came upon him, he slackened his pace and stood, as though irresolute which way to take. The new-comers pulled up and hailed him. “Hoy! sir!” shouted the foremost of the two.

He turned and saw a man, some years younger than himself, followed by another, whom at a rapid glance he took to be his servant. The master seemed little more than a boy; he had a young, fresh face, and curly hair flattened in rings upon his forehead by the moisture of the air. He might have stood for an equestrian statue of frank and not too intellectual youth. The servant carried a valise, and was mounted on an elderly-looking flea-bitten grey.

“I have lost myself in this infernal mist,” observed the young fellow, coming towards him, as he had hoped, and leaving the quarry on his left.

“Indeed, sir! So have I,” replied Rhys.

“Plague on it for that,” he went on, “for now you can’t tell me which way to go.”

Walters smiled a little. “I don’t know where you are bound for,” he remarked.

The other laughed out.

“Lord! I had forgotten that. Well then, my name is Harry Fenton, and I am going down to my father’s at Waterchurch.” He said this all in a breath, as though anxious to get it out and go on to more, if need be.

“Then you are Squire Fenton’s son, of Waterchurch Court,” said Rhys, who had suspected his identity ever since he came in sight.

“Yes, that’s who I am. And who are you?”

The social standing of this competent-looking man puzzled him hugely. Curiosity and admiration, too, struggled within him like dogs on a leash, while good manners kept a faltering hold on the string. “Excuse me, sir,” he added, reddening, “if I am impertinent.”

“Not at all, sir,” replied the other; “my name is Rhys Walters.” This information seemed to convey something to the younger man, for he opened his eyes very wide and looked eagerly at his companion.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, “then you are Walters of Great Masterhouse.” Then he reddened again as he remembered that he was talking to a farmer whom he did not know, and had omitted the “Mister.”

“At your service,” said Rhys.

“It’s surprising to find you lost,” observed Harry, treading as accidentally upon the truth as if it had been a lady’s dress.

Rhys smiled, this time internally. Like a devout lover he loved strategy, even more for herself than for what she might bring him.

“I have heard that you know your way in places where no one else does,” continued young Fenton.

“Masterhouse is so near the mountain that one has to be pretty sharp these dark nights. But I’ve been baffled this time. However, I have a suspicion where we are now. With your leave, sir, I’ll go with you for a little and put you on the right track.”

“I should like that very much,” said Harry, gratefully, “but my home and yours lie so far apart that it would be taking you much out of your road.”

“The mist is clearing, so that, when I’ve left you, I can canter home in twenty minutes. It will be no trouble.”

“Oh, thank you indeed; I am afraid my poor mother will think I am bogged, or have fallen in with Rebecca; women are always nervous,” said the boy, with a male air which was entirely lost on Rhys. At the mention of women his thoughts had flown to the quarry hard by, and he was anxious to push on and leave the coast clear for Mary’s escape.

They went steadily forward, side by side, the elder man steering west along the plateau, to where the lanes began to run down to Crishowell, the younger riding unquestioning alongside. The servant jogged quietly along in the rear.

“That’s a good-looking nag you have under you, Mr. Walters,” remarked Harry, when they had gone some way, “and he seems in good condition too.”

Rhys pinched the bay’s neck critically.

“Not bad,” he said. “Yes, he’s a nice little beast. I like him as well as any I’ve got.”

“Ah,” said Harry, “and I suppose you have plenty more like him.” He sighed wistfully, remembering his fellow-traveller’s reputed wealth. He loved horses dearly, but though he was Squire Fenton’s eldest son, the one he was riding represented his whole stud. While there were Bob and Tom and Llewellyn to be provided for, he had to do as best he could with one, and Bob and Tom and Llewellyn shared his tastes. Not that he grudged his brothers anything, for he was much too generous, but he could not help envying the man beside him. He wished, too, that he had something to serve as a yeomanry charger besides his own horse, for, by all accounts, there would be work soon. That was what was bringing him home.

“There have been tremendous doings at Carmarthen,” he remarked, after a pause.

“Yes,” said Rhys, quietly, “and I suppose we shall soon see the same here. I believe the yeomanry are to come out too. There’s a great raid pending in these parts.”

“That’s what I have come down for,” replied his companion, a glow of interest rising in his face. “They’ll have us out at last, and I hope we shall get some fun for our pains. Have you heard much about it?”

“It’s a good deal talked of. They talk too much, these rioters,” replied Rhys with a short laugh, riding up closer to Fenton. “Never you mind, sir, how I know it, but know it I do. It’s to take place before long, and it’s to be the Wye gate, down by the river at Llangarth.”

“By Gad! is it? Well, we’ll come out as strong as we can and be a match for the whole crew. You are a yeomanry man, aren’t you?”

“No, I am not. Though I have often thought——”

“Ah, but you’ll come out, surely Mr. Walters!” interrupted Harry, cutting the sentence short, “a man like you, with the Lord knows how many horses and men!”

“I should dearly like it,” answered Rhys, “but I am going to Abergavenny very soon, and I cannot tell when I may have to be off. It’s an urgent matter. It may just fall out that I’m at Abergavenny when I most want to be here; and I can’t put it off either, or go till I’m sent for.”

“What a monstrous pity!” There was vexation in Harry’s voice. Besides his zeal for law and order as exemplified by fighting and pursuing, he was strongly attracted by this man and longed to see more of him.

They had come down the side of a straggling thorn hedge, and now, at its angle, they halted by a gate.

“Now,” said Rhys, “this lane will take you down into Crishowell. There’s no mist below, if I know anything, and you’ll see your way to Waterchurch easily. So here we will part.”

The boy held out his hand.

“A thousand thanks for your company,” he said cordially. “And you won’t fail us if you can help it, will you?”

“If it’s possible to be there, I’ll be there somehow,” was the reply.

And in that Rhys Walters spoke truth.

[CHAPTER V
REBECCA]

AS though to drop connection with its predecessor and to start the world afresh, the new year brought a change of weather. The wind, which for some time had lain in the south-west, was veering round to the east, and the sodden earth was drying herself rapidly. Rheumatism was becoming a less general theme for conversation in Crishowell, and people’s clothes were again seen hanging out to dry in gardens. Forlorn-looking strings, which had stretched nakedly from pole to pole, now upheld smocks, petticoats, and well-patched trouser-legs, whose active prancings in the breeze almost made the spectators’ legs leap in sympathy. Four or five old men, whose goings-out and comings-in gauged the state of the barometer as accurately as if they had been occupants of pasteboard “weather-houses,” were to be met about; and Bumpett, the pig-driver, whose excursions into foreign parts a few miles away made him an authority on all matters, opined that a frost was not far off. He also added that the roads would be “crewell hard” by the Wye toll-gate, and that we “should see what we should see.” This information made the women look mysterious and snub those of their sex who had not been observed in talk with the great man; the men said less, though they smoked their pipes in a more chastened manner.

Meanwhile, the storm which had been brewed over the Dipping-Pool fire was ready to burst.

In a steep upland lane, about nine o’clock one evening, a little band of horsemen was coming quietly down towards the valley. The high banks crowned with ragged hazel on either hand and the darkness around (for the moon was not due for an hour or so) made it difficult to distinguish who or what they were. As gaps in the bank let in a little extra illumination, and stars began to assert themselves over the dispersing clouds, it could be seen that they were about twenty-five in number, and that all, with one exception, wore masks. They were fairly well mounted, and the strange person who kept a few yards ahead of the rest rode an animal which any one, knowing even a little about a horse, would have picked out at a glance. She was a liver-chestnut mare just under sixteen hands, with a shoulder such as was rarely to be found in the motley crowd of horseflesh at local fairs. Youth and a trifle of inexperience were noticeable in her among the sober-stepping and sturdy beasts following, and she mouthed her ring-snaffle as she went. Her long bang tail swung at each stride, and her length of pastern gave her pace an elasticity like that of a Spanish dancer.

But if the mare was a remarkable figure in the little procession, her rider was immeasurably more so, being, apparently, the tallest female who had ever sat in a saddle. Her long cloak and voluminous brown skirt fell in a dark mass against the beast’s sides, giving her figure a seeming length and height double that of any of her companions. On her head she wore a large sun-bonnet, tied securely over a shock of hair which looked false even in the scant light; the lower part of her face was muffled in her cloak, so that but little feature could be seen. The strange woman rode astride, and, as an occasional puff of wind lifted her skirt, it revealed leggings and boots; one lean, brown hand on the rein was visible under the concealing drapery, and the other carried a heavy thorn stick. From under the shock of hair looked the eyes of Rhys Walters.

The whole company was formed of the same material which had met in the inn kitchen the day after Christmas, with several additions and with the exception of Johnny Watkins, whose heart had failed him at the last moment, and of Charley Turnbull, who was nowhere to be seen. Hosea Evans was there, unrecognizable in his black mask and cropped whiskers, for he had parted with a portion of these adornments, fearing that they might betray him. He had hesitated to shave entirely, lest people should be too curious about his reasons for doing so, and had merely trimmed them into less conspicuous limits with the scissors.

Every one was armed in some fashion or another. Sticks were the principal weapons, though two or three carried pitchforks, and one of the more ambitious spirits displayed an antiquated horse-pistol which he would have been sorely put about to fire. A few of Rebecca’s followers were afoot, and had brought with them a crowbar and a couple of serviceable mallets. These went more slowly behind the horses.

The element of burlesque which pervaded the affair was not lost upon Rhys, and it cooled him a little as he rode along, to think what a ridiculous troop he was heading. His own garments, too, offended him greatly, and he would have discarded them at the beginning, had he not been sure that some one else would have put them on, and, with them, assumed leadership of the band. He secretly determined to get rid of them as best he might, when the night’s work should begin.

Crishowell village was in the centre of a loop which the Brecon road made round it, and when the first few lights it contained at that hour were visible in front, the party turned into the fields, avoiding its vicinity and straggling along by hedges and by such cover as was available. The highway lay like a grey ribbon in the starlight, and they had the good fortune to cross it without meeting a human being; only a prowling fox sneaked up one of the ditches as they passed. They then entered the lane which opened before them, and, down it, made for the other side of the loop, for there, just at its end, stood the toll.

At a bend of the way, Walters ran into a rider who was coming to meet them, and the sudden stop which this caused in the narrow place had the effect of bringing every one smartly up against his predecessor’s tail. As the new-comer was caught sight of by the huddled-up pack, a loud laugh burst from all and made the empty lane ring.

“Be quiet,” cried Rhys angrily, under his breath. “You fools! can’t you keep from waking the whole place with your noise? Good God! what sort of a tom-fool have we here?”

Before the astonished young man stood a travesty of himself, dress, dark cloak, sun-bonnet, and all, the only additions being a mask and a white woollen comforter, one end of which hung down over a substantial back. The rotund cheeks of its wearer swelled out the bonnet, the strings of which were drawn almost to suffocation. The voice of Charley Turnbull escaped, with apparent difficulty, from these surroundings.

Since the evening at the Dipping-Pool, Turnbull had been in a state of the most cruel and poignant distress. Steven’s remark had brought home to him, too late, the truth that women’s clothes would be a more effectual disguise than all the masks and mufflers in the world; with keen vexation he realized that he had overlooked that. The police’s likelihood to pursue the ringleader at all costs was nothing to him, for he was a man of few ideas, and liable, when he had one, to make the most of it, to the exclusion of all others. That sentence, “Woman’s clothing be a fine protection,” rang in his ears from morning till night, and, what was worse, from night till morning.

As the days rolled on his agony increased. Often he was on the verge of breaking out of the project altogether, but thoughts of the jeers which would assail him robbed him even of the courage to do that. Finally, he came upon a plan to meet his difficulties, the result of which now brought him face to face with Rebecca and thus attired.

“Here I am, Mr. Walters, sir,” he began, “and I hope you won’t take it ill o’ me that I be come lookin’ so like yourself. You see, it were this way. I says to myself, I says——”

“Come on, come on,” interrupted Rhys, “we must be moving. And be quiet behind there, if you can. We are getting near the road.”

“I says to myself,” went on Turnbull, keeping abreast of the mare’s walk at the risk of being jogged to pieces, “there’s Mrs. Walters, I says, a God-fearing lady as ever stepped. What would she do if aught was to happen to you, sir? Ah, Master Rhys, we must think o’ them at home. So then, I thought this way—if there be two of us, them as be after us won’t know who to get hold on, they won’t indeed. So you see——”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” exclaimed the other, exasperated beyond bearing; “for God’s sake, get behind and let me be. We’re pretty nigh in sight of the lane’s end.”

A little way down the Brecon road, not more than a couple of furlongs off, rose the dark mass of the toll-house, its slates here and there catching the starlight. Indistinct black bars could be seen crossing the highway; above them burned the steady flame of the toll-gate light.

It was perfectly still, and not a footstep was to be heard coming or going as Rhys pulled up. Several of the men, small farmers principally, crowded round; their hearts were in the matter, and their eager faces looked steadfastly towards him through the fog of horses’ breath which the fast-approaching frost was making. To them the matter was sober earnest, and they meant to see it through to the end; the burlesque view of it occurred to them not at all. Those with the mallets and crowbar pressed up.

“Give me a stone, Price.”

One of the men picked up a flint. Rhys took it and turned in his saddle; he was getting excited himself. “Come after me down the grass,” he said, “and when you see the light go out, fall to.”

They cantered down the roadside to within a few yards of the toll-house, and paused.

Then they saw Rebecca’s cloaked arm go up, a stone whizzed through the air, there was a smash of splintering glass, and the light went out.

* * * * * *

At the same time another little body of horse and foot was gathered in no very patient frame of mind a couple of miles off. The Wye toll-gate in Llangarth stood at the beginning of the great bridge spanning the river on the north side of the town, and, as it had been rumoured that Rebecca was to make her descent upon that place, all the police available were waiting there on foot as well as about twenty horsemen picked from the flower of the Hereford yeomanry.

The latter were cooling their heels in the courtyard of the Bull Inn, which stood a little back from the street, while the police hung in a group round the side door of that establishment, some member of the force now and then moving off to look up the road for sign of the approaching rioters or for anything to break the monotony of their vigil. For six nights now they had been assembled in the same place with no more exciting termination than being marched to the Police Station and dismissed in the early morning, and they were getting heartily tired of the experience. An occasional stamp from a horse or a long-drawn yawn from one of the men was heard above the soft steady roar of the Wye, which was shallow below the bridge and purred like a contented animal over the shingle. The landlady looked out of a back window on her way to bed, holding her hand before the tallow-candle she carried. The light shone red through her fingers as she glanced out upon the gallant figure of Harry Fenton, whose smart uniform showed plainly in the glow streaming from the inn door upon the yard. It was the first time she had ever seen him, as Waterchurch lay some way off, and he had been much from home of late years.

Quarter to ten sounded from Llangarth Church, and a sergeant of police went to have another look up the quiet street. Harry gave his horse to the man next him to hold and strolled after him, the landlady at the window admiring the clank of his sword and the attractive jingle he made as he went.

As the two men stood at the corner, the silence of the street was broken by an uneven clattering, and a boy, much out of breath and weighted by an extremely heavy pair of country boots, came rushing towards them over the cobbles. Harry caught him as he was about to pass the courtyard. The boy tried to speak, but for want of breath was obliged to desist.

“Who is he?” asked Harry of the sergeant.

The policeman took him by the shoulder and turned him round as unceremoniously as if he had been a spinning-top, displaying the purple face of a boy about eleven years old.

“You’re Howell Seaborne, as works for the parson of Crishowell, aren’t you?” said the man. “Howlie, they call him, sir.”

“Ya’as a’ be. Can’t you leave oi alone, ’stead o’ shoikin’ that woy?”

“Wait a minute, give him breath,” said young Fenton.

The boy turned a pair of light, prominent eyes on the speaker, and, at the same time, saw his uniform and the soldiers in the yard. He thrust a grimy forefinger towards them.

“It’s them oi be come for!” he exclaimed, as he regained his wind. “Oi were down in Crishowell Loine, doin’ no ’arm, and oi see them comin’—comin’ all of a string wi’ sticks an’ guns——”

“But who? What?”

“Fifty men roiding an’ a great woman.”

“When? Where?” cried Harry, catching hold of him much more roughly than the sergeant had done.

“Yew’re ’urtin’ me, sir,” whined the boy. “Oi shan’t tell nothin’ till yew leave go.”

Fenton took away his hand with a gesture of irritation. “Come on, no nonsense,” he said, “tell me at once, where were you?”

“Down in the loine by Crishowell. They be all gone down to the goite on the Brecon road; an’ oi’ve been runnin’ fit to burst to fetch the soljers. It’s Rebecca, it is.”

In two minutes the yeomanry were dashing out of the court, the police holding by the soldiers’ stirrups, meaning to keep up with them as long as they could, and to drop off when the pace should become too much for them. The boy flattened himself against the wall as they went by. When they were round the corner, he tied up a loose bootlace and looked about him. Then he went to a pump which stood on one side and jerked the handle; a stream of water flowed out as he put his head underneath and let it run copiously over his face. He had large front teeth and a retreating chin, and, in the cascade, he looked not unlike a drowning rabbit. When he had finished, he snuffled two or three times, rubbed his countenance with his coat-sleeve, and set out from the Bull yard at a steady jog-trot. How he could run at all in the boots he wore was a mystery, but long practice, no doubt, had made it possible.

When the soldiers had turned along the road to Brecon and got clear of the town, the police had, one by one, succumbed to the pace and might be seen upon the highway in threes and fours, stepping out as best they might.

The riders kept to the grass as Rhys had done, partly to muffle the sound of hoofs, and partly because the roads were fast hardening, and in some places had become actually slippery. The little wind there was was beginning to sting their ears, and the stars above to flash in the frost. The clouds had rolled completely off and lay in a dark bank along the western horizon; the night got gradually lighter. Harry and a senior officer rode a little ahead, neither saying a word to the other; their eyes were fixed on the stretch of road in front, and they breathed hard. Far behind, the constables pressed along with that hopeless feeling in their legs which the sight of retreating horses creates. Last of all toiled Howlie Seaborne in his big boots.

As Harry and his companion came round a slight bend, a sound, which, so far, had been but an unintelligible vibration, struck on their ears with meaning. The blows of heavy mallets were distinct, though the wind went from them to the dark mass which surged and swayed over the road in front. Lights were flashing from the toll-house, and the voices of men rose and fell above the noise of struggling hoofs. The two officers took their horses by the heads and drove in their spurs.

“Fenton,” said the elder man as they separated a few minutes later, in the midst of the mob, “whatever we do, let us get Rebecca.”

By the time the yeomanry arrived, the little crowd which had seen Rhys put out the light had swelled considerably, and people, hearing the noise, had rushed from neighbouring cottages, catching up pitchforks or any weapons they could lay hands upon. A brisk fight was in full swing; Rhys’ blood was up, and he had torn off the sun-bonnet and his voluminous garments and turned his high coat collar up over the lower part of his face. The false hair, which had been so securely fastened that it had refused to come off with his headgear, hung low over his eyes, giving him a wild appearance which fitted his violent gestures and the tumultuous scene around him.

When Harry came up and saw him in the thick of the struggle, never for one moment did he suspect that the rebel before him was the man who had ridden with him through the mist scarcely a week before. As his friend’s injunction about Rebecca reached him he looked eagerly around for some likeness to a female figure, but could see no trace of any such person, Charley Turnbull having, as the fight increased, ensconced himself safely behind an outhouse, where he stood unseen but ready to fly at any moment.

The rioters had been so much taken up with their work, and the turmoil had been so great, that it was as though a bolt were falling on them from heaven when they saw the yeomanry coming. Five or six of the mounted assailants had been forming a protection for those who were engaged in breaking up the gate with their tools, and among these was Rhys, with Hosea beside him. As their opponents charged at them and tried to dislodge them with their pitchforks, he leaned down from the young mare’s back and dealt sounding blows right and left. Blood was running from a wound in his knee, but he cared nothing for that, for the rage for fight was in his heart as he laid about him, the mare plunging now and then and forcing back the press before her.

Among those who were valiantly protecting the toll was Mary Vaughan’s father, the toll-keeper, a tall white-haired old man, whose great height and flowing beard made him a central figure in the mob. He had stood in front of his gate until overpowering numbers had forced him from his place, and now was charging bravely at Walters and his followers. Suddenly a cry rose from the defenders, “The soldiers! The soldiers!” and Rhys saw his men waver for a moment at the sound. “One more,” he shouted to those with the mallets. “Down with the gate!”

There was now only one post left standing, and the insurgents turned upon it at his cry for a last blow before they should scatter in front of the impending yeomanry and take to the country. The toll-keeper, dropping his pitchfork, threw himself like a game old bull-dog upon Rhys’ foot and tried to drag him from the saddle. Hosea gave a shout as Rhys turned round. The two men’s arms whirled simultaneously in the air, and two violent blows descended upon Vaughan; as Rhys struck out, a lump of mud and stone whizzed sharply in his face, and his stick came down upon the toll-keeper’s shoulder. Evans’ blow struck him full on his grey head, and, with a groan, the old man fell, as he had stood, at the foot of his shattered gate-post.

Hosea saw what he had done and was seized with terror, but his native cunning did not desert him; the advantage of Rhys’ near presence was plain. “Oh, Mr. Walters, you have killed him,” he cried loudly.

It was all the work of a moment. Rhys dashed the mud from his eyes and saw the senseless heap on the ground before him; and behind, two or three yeomen who were fighting their way towards him. With an oath, he sprang desperately through the mob and turned the mare’s head straight for the Black Mountain.

[CHAPTER VI
A DEAD MAN AND A LIVE COWARD]

WHILE Harry’s brother officer was leaning over the dead man on the ground, Charley Turnbull was in terrible difficulties in an adjacent field behind the toll-house. As he heard the sound of hoofs he guessed that the yeomanry was coming up, and he stole, with a trembling heart, across the grass to where a gap in the hedge promised safe egress on to the Brecon road. If he could but reach it without being seen, he would have a good furlong’s start. The gates from field to field were locked, he knew, and, being so, presented insurmountable obstacles to a man of his temperament. He urged his old black horse along as silently as he could, trying the while to unfasten the strings of his bonnet, which, in truth, were almost choking him; but his fingers shook, and his heart beat so violently that he felt almost as if it would throw him from his unaccustomed saddle. Turnbull never rode if he could help it.

As he reached the gap he left off pulling at his sun-bonnet, for he needed both hands with which to hold on to the reins. The horse cocked his ears, blew a long, snorting breath, and seemed anxious to test with his nose the nature of the difficulty he was asked to meet. Seeing the little ditch which divided the hedge from the road, he stuck out his forelegs stiffly in front of him, and snorted yet louder; he was a large, gross horse, with bunches of hair on his fetlocks, and his voice tallied with his appearance. Turnbull, in an agony lest the sound should reach the toll, where things were getting much quieter, gave him an angry blow. The beast started forward, pecked, crashed sideways through a stiff bit of wattle on one side of the gap, and landed by a miracle upon his ample feet in the hardest part of the road.

The yeomanry officer, while his men were scattered in pursuit of the rioters, was still giving instructions to the police over Vaughan’s body, when he heard a breaking of wood, and saw Charley’s fat figure coming almost headlong through the gap. Howlie Seaborne, staring round-eyed at the scene by the gate, looked up on hearing the sound. The long trot from the courtyard of the Bull Inn had told somewhat upon his appearance, which was a little more dishevelled than before.

“There a’ be!” he shouted. “There a’ be! That be Walters—’im as is Rebecca! Did yew ’ear Evans a-croin’ out?”

The officer knew that Harry was in pursuit of the murderer—whoever he might be—for he had seen him forcing his way after the big man who had made towards the hill. He had not heard Hosea’s cry, but Howlie’s words were enough; there, at any rate, was the very ringleader of the band, barely half a furlong off. He mounted quickly.

Charley had just presence of mind enough to pull his horse’s head towards Brecon, to cling with all his strength to the mane till he had righted himself in the saddle, and to set off at as great a pace as his underbred beast could muster. All that he could think of was those clattering hoofs gaining on him from the toll-gate, and his fear of the animal under him was as nothing to his fear of the man behind. Where he should make for he neither knew nor cared; flight—blessed flight—that was all that his scattered senses could picture. Again and again he struck his horse; use his heels he could not, for the simple reason that his wide skirt had got entangled in the stirrups as he came through the gap, and held his legs firmly bound to the leathers. Half-a-mile had not passed before his pace began to slacken, and, thrash as he might, he could not get the black horse to keep up the gallop at which he had started. Besides, he was getting breathless himself. The rider behind shot alongside, shouting to some one yet in the rear, and a strong hand jerked the bridle out of his convulsive grasp.

“I’ve got him!” cried the yeomanry captain exultantly to his follower as they pulled up, “Sergeant, jump off and have him out of the saddle. It’s Walters of Great Masterhouse—I thought he was a better horseman than that!”

The sergeant dismounted and seized the prisoner round the waist, but he clung like a limpet to the horse’s neck. Finally, a strong pull brought him heavily down in the road. Both man and officer burst into a peal of laughter.

“Sir, sir,” said the stifled voice from the ground, “I swear to Heaven, sir, I be’ant he. Indeed, indeed, I were just pushed sore against my will into this night’s work.”

“Who is the fellow?” asked the captain, when he had finished laughing. “The boy said he was Walters.”

The sergeant took out a knife and ripped the bonnet-strings apart; mask and bonnet fell together.

“It’s Charles Turnbull, sir,” he said, grinning widely. “Turnbull the auctioneer at Waterchurch village.”

“Are you sure it’s not Walters?” said the captain, who had never seen Rhys.

“No, no, sir, indeed I be’ant,” cried the auctioneer, scrambling to his feet, and stumbling helplessly in the skirt. “Rhys Walters o’ Masterhouse was dressed the same as me, but he’s off. Riding for his neck he is. I never struck a blow, sir, that I didn’t, for I were behind the toll-house, lookin’ on, and I says to myself——”

“That’ll do,” said the captain shortly. “Now then, sergeant, up with him again; you can leave his clothes as they are, for the police will want to see all that. Pick up that thing on the ground.”

The sergeant picked up the sun-bonnet with another grin, and then hoisted Turnbull into the saddle.

“You can pull the reins over the horse’s head and lead him,” said the officer, “he is not likely to try and escape. He hasn’t got courage enough even for that. And now for the lock-up at Llangarth.”

As the three started to retrace their steps towards the town, the bell from the church steeple rang out half-past ten; the sound floated out in their direction, for the chill east wind carried it sharply along the highway. The captain turned up the collar of his cloak, and wished that he were at home in his comfortable quarters with the blankets snugly over him. To trot was out of the question, for the auctioneer, having no reins to hold on by, and possessing no other means of securing himself on horseback, would inevitably come to grief, while he, the officer, was now responsible for his safety until he should deliver him into other hands at Llangarth. The sergeant hooked Turnbull’s reins over his arm, and blew upon his unoccupied fingers.

“It’s getting mighty cold, sir,” he hazarded.

“We can’t get on any faster with this bundle of old clothes to look after,” said the captain crossly; “if you keep your mouth shut, the cold won’t go down your throat.”

His temper was not improved by the prospect of the next couple of miles at a foot’s pace, and the toll was only just coming in sight. The road between them and it was dull and straight, and seemed interminable to two of the riders, Turnbull alone having no great desire to get to the end of the journey.

A deathly silence surrounded the ruins of the gate as they reached it at last, and only a couple of figures were moving near the house in that odd, diffused light which precedes moonrise, and which was beginning to touch up the eastern sky. To one of these, which proved on inspection to be Howlie Seaborne, the captain gave his reins as he dismounted. A light could be seen burning through the diamond-paned window. He put his foot on the plinth and looked in, but a half-drawn dimity curtain, and a pot in which a geranium was struggling for life, prevented his seeing what was passing inside. Stepping down again, he turned to the door, and, as it was ajar, pushed it softly open and went in. After one look at the room he removed his busby, and stood holding it in his hand.

A low bedstead made of unpolished wood had been drawn into the middle of the floor. The patchwork quilt which covered it trailed upon the carpetless flags, and had evidently been brought in a hurry from some more pretentious bed to spread upon this one. Upon it was the dead figure of the toll-keeper. He lay there waiting for the arrival of a magistrate from Llangarth, straight and still, as he would lie waiting for that other Judge who would one day come to judge his cause. He had wrought well, and his hands, laid simply by his sides, were still clenched. A dark bruise on his left temple from which the blood had oozed made a purple patch on his white, set face. His hair, grey, though abundant, was stained with blood; a pair of strong boots were on his feet, and the pipe he had just been smoking when he rushed out to meet the rioters was still in his pocket. Near him was the stick he had caught up from its corner by the door as he went, for a constable had found it by his body on the road and had brought it in. It had left its mark upon several skins that night.

Vaughan was a widower, his wife having been dead some years, but one of those nondescript female relations who rise up to stop gaps in the lives of the poor was in the house, and, as the yeomanry officer came in, she was blowing up the flickering fire with a pair of brass-bound bellows. A constable who had been left to watch the body sat in the background.

The captain stood silent, his shadow cast by the spasmodic firelight almost filling the small room. Everything was so still; the sound of the bellows jarred on the stillness; the trivial, persistent noise was like an insult to the presence which was there. He turned sternly to the woman at the hearth; her elbow rose and fell as she looked at him over her shoulder, the flames playing on the outline of her face. The constable in the distance coughed and spat.

A rush of sharp air came in at the door, and the bellows faltered for a moment, then went on again with redoubled vigour. The woman nodded towards the threshold.

“That be she—his daughter,” she explained as she turned again to the fire.

The soldier drew reverently back as a girl entered and sprang past him. She sat down on the flags by the bedside and took the dead man’s hand in her own two hands. Not a tear was in her eyes; she only gasped like a trapped animal, and the man listening could see how her lips opened and shut. The sound of the bellows drowned everything. He strode to the hearth and shook the woman violently by the arm. “For God’s sake, put away that infernal thing,” he said.

She rose from her knees and hung up the bellows in the chimney-corner, the fire-irons clattering as she searched about among them for the hook. When he looked round again he saw that the girl had fainted and was lying face downwards on the floor.

He turned to the bellows-blower, who, now that her occupation had ended, was standing idle by the fire; she took but little heed of what had happened.

“You had better do something for her,” he suggested after a pause. “Isn’t there another room that we could take her to? Poor thing, I can carry her there.”

“She’s a shameless wench,” said the woman without moving.

He went to the bedside and raised Mary in his arms. “Go on,” he ordered, nodding decisively towards the door at the back of the room, and the woman went sullenly forward, while he followed with his burden.

He laid the girl in a large wooden chair which was almost the only piece of furniture to be seen. Kneeling by her, he rubbed her palms until her eyelids opened vacantly, and she tried to sit up. As recollection dawned in her eyes she gave a sob, hiding her face.

“He’s dead, he’s dead,” she murmured more to herself than to her companions.

“Aye, he be dead,” responded the elder woman in her uncompromising voice, “and afore you’ve had time to bring him to disgrace too.”

“Sir, sir,” faltered Mary, turning to the captain, “how was it? How——?”

“Rhys Walters did it,” interrupted the woman shortly, “he killed him. Ah—he’ll swing for it yet.”

Mary got up like a blind person. Her hands were stretched out before her, and she walked straight to the wall till her face touched it. She put up her arms against it, and stood there like an image; only her two hands beat slowly upon the whitewashed stone.

“’Twould be well if she had a ring on one o’ they hands o’ hers,” observed the woman.

The scene was so painful that the man who was a participator in it could endure it no longer. Pity for the dead man who lay in the dignity of a death bravely come by, was swallowed up in pity for the poor young creature before him. One had faced death, the other had yet to face life. The two little hands beating against the wall, the hard, stupid face of the woman, the cheerless room, all were too horrible to a man of his disposition to be gone through with any longer. He could do nothing for Mary if he stayed, though he could not help feeling cowardly at leaving her to face the first moments of her grief with such a companion. A flutter of icy wind came through a broken pane near him, and his horse out in the road stamped once or twice; his mind ran towards the inn at Llangarth, and he thought of the bright, warm light in the bar.

“Here,” he said, holding out half-a-sovereign to the woman, “and mind you look after her.”

As he passed through the kitchen where the toll-keeper lay, his eye fell upon the bellows, and he shuddered. “Poor girl,” he said, “poor wretched girl.”

Howlie Seaborne was one of those rare persons whose silences are as eloquent as their speech. While the owner of the horse he held was in the toll-house, he stood placidly by its head, his eyes fixed upon the prisoner’s face; he grinned steadily. The formation of his mouth was unusual, for, while other people’s smiles are horizontal, so to speak, his, owing to his rabbit-teeth, was almost vertical.

At last Turnbull looked angrily at him. “’Twas you cried out I was Rhys Walters,” he said with a malignant glance.

If Howlie heard the words, there was no sign of the fact on his changeless countenance; his one idea appeared to be to see as much of the auctioneer as he could.

“I’ll remember this some day,” continued Turnbull; “do ye mind the hiding I gave ye at Crishowell auction last year? Well, ye’ll get another o’ the same sort.”

“Oi do,” replied Howlie, his words leaving his grin intact; “if oi hadn’t, yew moightn’t be a-settin’ up there loike a poor zany, an’ on yew’re road to the joil.”

Turnbull grew purple. “I’ll do for ye yet,” he said thickly.

At this moment the officer came out and got on his horse, throwing a copper to the boy as he let the bridle go.

“You’re a young fool, for all that,” he observed as the coin rang upon the road; “that’s not Walters of Masterhouse.”

“Naw,” answered Howlie, his gaze still fixed upon the auctioneer.

As the three men rode on towards Llangarth his boots could be heard toiling heavily up Crishowell Lane.

[CHAPTER VII
TO ABERGAVENNY]

THAT the toll-gate raid would end in a murder was the last thing expected by Rhys. In all the riots which had taken place since the beginning, nothing worse had happened than broken limbs and bruised bodies, such having been the luck of Rebecca and her followers that only a few captures of unimportant hangers-on had been made. Indeed, it is likely that without Howlie’s unseasonable prowlings and recognition of his adversary Turnbull, and his determination to pay off old scores, the matter might have had no greater consequences than the terrifying of society in general and the building up of a new gate.

As Rhys took the young mare by the head, and turned out of the crowd, a man who had been some way from Hosea when he shouted, was so much demoralized by the cry, that his hand, almost on one of the rioters’ collars, dropped to his side. In a flash there came back to Harry Fenton the evening he had strayed in the mist round the spurs of the Black Mountain, and his eyes were opened. This tall, shock-headed figure which was scattering the people right and left as it made for Crishowell Lane was the man he had ridden beside and talked to so frankly in the innocence of his soul. With wrath he remembered how much he had admired his companion, and how apparent he had allowed his interest to become. He had returned home full of talk about his new acquaintance, his good-nature in turning out of his road for a stranger, his fine seat on horseback, and now it made the boy’s face hot to think how Rhys must have laughed in his sleeve as his victim had fallen into the trap laid for him. He had been put on the wrong scent by the very ringleader of the mischief he had come so far to help in preventing. His wounded vanity ached; he had been tricked, bested, mocked, deceived. There was only one solace for him, and that was action, action which would not only be his refuge, but his bounden duty. He almost jerked the bit out of his horse’s mouth as he wrenched his head round and shot after his enemy, through the crowd and up the resounding highway on the young mare’s heels.

Rhys’ start was not great—about fifty yards—and Harry thought with satisfaction that he was better mounted than usual. His brother Llewellyn had lent him his horse, one lately bought, and the best that either of the young men had ever had. As long as the animal under him could go, so long would he never lose sight of that devil in front, if both their necks should break in the attempt. He would give Llewellyn anything, everything—all he possessed or ever would possess—if he might only lay hands on the man who had cheated him and whose high shoulders now blocked his view of the starlit horizon which seemed to lie just at the end of the open highway.

Rhys swung into the lane, and, once between the hedges, he drove in his heels; the road turned a corner a short way ahead, and he wanted to get round it while he had the lead of Harry. Further on there was a thin place in the hazels on his left, and he meant to get in on the grass, though in reality it took him out of his direct route to the mountain. But the going would be softer, and there was the chance of entangling his enemy in the geography of the trappy little fields.

He did not know which of the uniformed figures that had poured down to the gate was on his track, but he felt an absolute consciousness that the man behind was as determined to ride as he was himself, and he suspected who that man might be. As he came to the bend he looked back to make sure. He could not tell in the uncertain light, but he saw it was war to the knife; every line of the rider’s figure told him that. He turned the mare short and put her at the bank; that it was not sound he knew, but the hedge let through a gleam of standing water, and there was not enough resistance in it to turn her over if she made a mistake. She scrambled through, loosening clods of earth with her heels, but the good turf was on the further side, and she got through with a clatter of stones and wattle. They struck to the right across a field, and, when they were well out in the middle, Rhys saw that Harry had landed without losing ground, and he settled himself down to a steady gallop. As he reflected that his goal was nothing less than Abergavenny, and thought of the distance lying before him, he knew that his best plan was to hustle his pursuer while they were in the valley, and trust to his knowledge of hill tracks and precipices when they had left the pastures behind. It would not be a question of pace up there. All the same, fifteen long miles were in front of him, and behind him—manslaughter.

Directly in his way some hundred yards ahead a wide dark patch stretched across the meadow. He knew it to be a piece of boggy ground deep enough to embarrass a horseman, and too well fed by a spring below to freeze, but he also knew the precise spot at which it could be crossed without difficulty. The recent wet weather had made it bigger than usual, and he headed for it, hoping that Fenton would choose a bad bit, and at least take something out of his horse in the heavy clay. In he went, knowing that where there were rushes there was foothold, and keeping his eye on a battered willow-stump which stood like a lighthouse at the further border of the little swamp. A snipe rose from under his feet, a flash of dark lightning whirling in the greyness of the atmosphere. He was through and making steadily for the line of hedge before him.

But Harry had not hunted for nothing; ever since his earliest boyhood he had followed hounds on whatever he could get to carry him, and long years of riding inferior beasts had taught him many things. He had never possessed a really perfect hunter in his life, and he was accustomed to saving his animals by every possible means; mad with excitement as he was, he instinctively noticed the odd bit of ground, and pulled straight into the mare’s tracks. Walters, looking back from an open gate through which he was racing, ground his teeth as he saw how well he had steered his enemy.

Soon the ground began to slope away, and Rhys knew that they were getting near the brook running only a few fields from the road. Just beyond it was Crishowell village, and the land would ascend sharply as soon as they had left the last cottage behind.

The Digedi brook was as unlike the flag-bordered trout-stream of the midlands as one piece of water can be to another, for it rose far up in the Black Mountain near the pass by which Walters hoped to reach Abergavenny, and, after a rapid descent to the valley, passed the village, circling wantonly through the pastures to cross Crishowell Lane under a bridge. There was hardly a yard in its career at which its loud voice was not audible, for the bed was solid rock, and the little falls, scarce a foot high, by which it descended to the lower levels, called ceaselessly among the stones. The water-ousel nested there in spring, and wagtails curtseyed fantastically by the brink. In summer it was all babble, light, motion, and waving leaves. As the young man came down the grass, he saw the line of bare bushes which fringed it, and heard the pigmy roar of one of the falls. Flat slabs of rock hemmed it in, jutting into the water and enclosing the dark pool into which it emptied itself. On an ordinary occasion he would have picked his way through the slippery bits and let his horse arrange the crossing as his instinct suggested, but he had no time for that now. He took the mare by the head, and came down the slope as hard as he could towards a place just above the fall. He saw the white horseshoe foaming under him as they cleared it and the boulders on the edge, and he smiled grimly as he pictured Fenton’s horse possibly stumbling about among the rocks. He made straight for the highway, the mare’s blood was up, and she took the big intervening hedges like a deer.

They were now on the road, and he pulled up for a moment to listen for any sign of his pursuer, but there was no other sound than the barking of a dog in Crishowell. The slippery boulders had probably delayed Harry. He cantered on steadily past the village with its few lighted windows; as the barking had raised a reply from every dog’s throat in the place, no one heard him till he had passed the last outlying house, and he made for the steep lane leading up to where he had parted with Fenton on the night of their first meeting.

It was highly unlikely that he would come across any one at that time of night, for the Crishowell people went early to rest, like all agricultural characters, and the news of Rebecca’s attack on the toll could hardly have reached them yet. Now that he had time to think a little, he began to realize the full horror of the thing that had happened. He had killed a man; worse, he had killed Mary’s father; worse still, it was known that he had done so. Curse Hosea! curse him! Why had he been such a madman as to shout out his name? No one need have identified him but for the innkeeper’s crass folly. What he was going to do he knew not, beyond that he must make for Abergavenny, where he might possibly lie hidden for a time till he could devise some means of leaving the country. Poor little Mary too, his heart smote him as he thought of her; in one hour she had been robbed of her father, and was losing her lover—losing him as every beat of the mare’s hoofs carried him further away towards the great lone mountain that he had to cross that night somehow. He hoped the wet places up there would not have frozen over before he got through the pass, for it was hard underfoot already and the puddles crackled faintly as he rode over them. Every moment it was getting lighter, and he could see a piece of the moon’s face above the high banks of the lane. He put his hand down on the mare’s shoulder; she was sweating a good deal, though they had only come a couple of miles at most, but she was raw and excitable, and had pulled him considerably since they had come over the brook, taking more out of herself than she need have done. She had good blood in her—thank Heaven for that—and she would want it all. He had paid a long price for her, and, if ever money were well spent, it was then; the young fool behind him was not likely to get much out of his ride. He pulled up once again, just to make sure that Harry was nowhere near, standing in the shadow with his hand over his ear and the mare quivering with excitement under him. Yes, sure enough, there were galloping hoofs distinct on the stillness of the sharp night some way below. Fenton was in the lane.

On they went, sparks flying from the flints as the shoes smote hard upon them. The air grew more chilly as they got higher up and the road more slippery; Rhys leaned forward, encouraging the mare as she laboured valiantly up the heart-breaking slope. The banks flew by, gates, stiles; soon they were passing the ruined cottage that stood not a hundred yards from the egress to the mountain; he could see the bare boughs of the apple-trees that tapped against the battered window-panes.

Suddenly the mare lurched, scraping the earth with her feet, and the moon seemed to sway in the sky and to be coming down to meet the hedge. A crash, and she was lying on her off side with Rhys’ leg pinned underneath her. A mark like a slide on the blue, shining ground showed how the frost was taking firm grip of the world.

She struggled up again before he had time to find out whether he was hurt or not, and stood over him, shivering with fright. Fortunately she had hardly touched him in her efforts to rise, as his foot had come out of the stirrup, and he was able to pick himself up in a few seconds with a strong feeling of dizziness and an aching pain in his shoulder. His first idea was to remount as quickly as possible, but, when he put his foot in the iron, he almost fell back again on the road. Something hot was running down his face, first in slow drops, then faster; he could not raise his right shoulder at all, and his arm felt weary and numb. A gust of wind brought the sound of Harry’s galloping fitfully up the lane, making the mare turn half round to listen, her nostrils dilated; she seemed quite uninjured. Rhys seized the stick he had dropped as they fell, and, with it in his available hand, struck her two violent blows on her quarter. She plunged forward like a mad creature, and set forth for her stable at Great Masterhouse.

As she disappeared he dragged himself with great difficulty through the hedge on his right. Before him the fields fell away perpendicularly to the valley, and the moon was white on the grass that lay like a frosty, vapoury sheet round him. He saw a deep ditch running downward with the land, and had just sense and strength enough left to stagger towards it, a black, positive silhouette on the moon-struck unreality of the surrounding world.

As he rolled into it he lost consciousness, and so did not hear Harry Fenton a minute later as he tore past.

[CHAPTER VIII
MASTER AND MAN]

A MAN was sitting on the low wall which enclosed the spectre of a garden trimming a ragged ash-plant into the plain dimensions of a walking-stick. He worked with the neatness displayed by many heavy-handed persons whose squarely-tipped fingers never hint at the dexterity dormant in them.

It was easily seen that, in order to assign him a place in the social scale, one would have to go a good way down it; nevertheless, he reflected the facial type of his time as faithfully as any young blood enveloped in the latest whimsies of fashionable convention, though, naturally, in a less degree. The man of to-day who looks at a collection of drawings made in the early nineteenth century can find the face, with various modifications, everywhere; under the chimney-pot hat which (to his eye) sits so oddly on the cricketer, beneath the peaked cap of the mail-coach guard, above the shirt-sleeves of the artisan with his basket of tools on his back. As we examine the portraits of a by-gone master, Sir Peter Lely, Joshua Reynolds—whom you will—we are apt to ask ourselves whether the painter’s hand has not conveyed too much of his own mind to the canvas, making all sitters so conform to it as to reproduce some mental trait of his own, like children of one father reproducing a physical one. Those who find this may forget that there is an expression proper to each period, and that it runs through the gamut of society, from the court beauty to the kitchen wench, from the minister of State to the rat-catcher who keeps the great man’s property purged of such vermin. The comprehensive glance of the man on the wall as compared with the immobility of his mouth, the wide face set in flat whiskers which stopped short in a line with the lobe of his ear, dated him as completely as if he had been a waxwork effigy set up in a museum with “Early Victorian Period” printed on a placard at his feet. His name was George Williams, and, in the eye of the law, he was a hedger and ditcher by occupation; on its blind side, he was something else as well.

The garden, which formed a background to the stick-maker, was indeed a sorry place, forming, with the tumble-down cottage it surrounded, a sort of island in the barren hillside. A shallow stream on its way to the valley ran by so near the wall, that there was only room for a few clumps of thistle between it and the water. When the dweller in the cottage wished to reach civilization, he had to cross a plank to a disused cart-track making from the uplands down to the village. Hardly any one but the tenant of this unprofitable estate ever troubled the ancient way with his presence, but, in spite of this, Williams looked up expectantly now and then to where it cut the skyline a furlong or so mountainwards. Behind him the tall weeds which were choking the potato patch and the gooseberry bushes straggled in the grey forenoon light, and the hoar-frost clung to a few briars that stretched lean arms over the bed of the stream.

The cottage was built of stone and boasted a slate roof, though, what between the gaps showing in it and the stonecrop which covered the solid parts, there was little slate visible. One could assume that the walls were thick from the extreme breadth of the window-sills, and the remote way in which the pane stared out like an eye sunk deep in its socket. The window on the left of the door was boarded up by a shutter which had once been green, the other one being nearly as impenetrable by reason of its distance from the surface. Were any one curious enough to examine the latter, he might see that it was surprisingly clean; the place was wild, inhospitable, weed-sown, but not dirty. A faint column of smoke escaped from one of the squat chimneys which adorned either end of the roof.

The ash-plant which Williams was trimming had two strong suckers sticking out of the root. When it was held upside down, the position in which it would eventually be carried, Nature’s intention of making it the distinct image of a rabbit’s head was clear to the meanest imagination. George’s imagination was not altogether mean, and he whittled away diligently, smiling as the thing grew more life-like in his hands, and so much absorbed that he gradually forgot to watch the track and did not see a small figure coming down it till it was within a few yards of him.

The person arriving on the scene had such a remarkable gait that one might have singled him out from fifty men, had he been advancing in a line of his fellow-creatures instead of alone. As he came closer, it grew odder because the expression of his face could be seen to counteract the expression of his legs. The latter proclaimed indecision, while the former shone with a cheerful firmness; looking at him, one was prepared to see the legs fold inward like an easel, or widen out like a compass, plunge sideways up the bank, or dive forwards down the road. For this, as for all other phenomena in this world, there was a reason. The man had driven pigs for nearly fifty years of his life.

The healthy red of his cheeks was an advertisement for this disquieting trade, and his twinkling eyes and slit of a mouth turned up at the corners as if they had caught something of their appearance from the pigs themselves. Prosperity cried from every part of James Bumpett, from the seams of his corduroy trousers to the crown of his semi-tall hat. He carried a stick, but he did not use it to walk with, for long habit had made him wave it smartly from side to side.

Williams transferred his legs deferentially from the inside to the outside of the wall as the old man approached, and stood waiting for him to come up.

The Pig-driver seated himself beside him and plunged immediately into his subject.

“Is it aught with the business?” he asked. “I come down at once when I got your message.”

“No,” replied the younger man, “it’s this way. It’s about Mr. Walters o’ Masterhouse. He’s there below—an’ his head nigh broke.” He pointed backwards to the cottage with his thumb.

“Lord! Lord!” ejaculated Bumpett.

“He told me to send word to you. ‘Bumpett,’ he says, ‘Mr. Bumpett at Abergavenny; don’t you forget,’ an’ he went off with his head agin my shoulder. How I got him along here I don’t rightly know. He’s a fair-sized man to be hefting about.”

The old man looked keenly into George’s face.

“What did he want with me?” he inquired.

“Indeed I never thought for to ask him,” said Williams simply. “’Twas two nights ago, I was going up by Red Field Farm to look round a bit”—here both men’s eyes dropped—“and about one o’clock I was nigh them steep bits o’ grazing, an’ come straight on to him. Lying down in the ditch he was, not twenty yards from Crishowell Lane. I didn’t know what to make of it.”

“Well, to be sure!” exclaimed Bumpett. “Was it drink?” he asked after a pause.

“Drink? no!” cried George. “I took a piece of ice from the road and put it on his head. He come to then. I never saw such a look as he give me when he saw me, and he fought like a wild beast, that he did, when he felt my hand on him, though he was as weak as a rabbit when I got him up. ’Tis plain enough now why, though indeed I did wonder then. He’s done for Vaughan the toll-keeper, too; knocked him stone dead.”

Bumpett stared blankly. For once in his life he was quite taken aback.

“He was out wi’ Rebecca,” explained Williams. “I guessed that by the strange hair he had tied all over his head so firm it were hard to get it loose.”

“What did you do with it?” inquired the Pig-driver sharply.

“Brought it with me,” said the young man. “Was I to leave it for some o’ they constables to find?”

“Well, indeed,” observed Bumpett, “you’re a smarter lad than I took ye for. I don’t mind telling ye that I thought to see him along o’ me in Abergavenny by now.”

“You’ve had to tell me a thing or two before this,” said George rather sullenly.

“Ye’ve told no one?” inquired Bumpett suspiciously.

“Not I,” said George. “What’s the use of pulling a man out of the law’s way if you’re to shove him back after? I thought once I’d have to get the doctor, he was that bad, ranting and raving, but he’s stopped now.”

“I suppose I’d better go down and see him,” said the Pig-driver, rubbing the back of his head meditatively with his hand. “What are we to do with him, Williams?”

“I can’t turn him out,” answered the young man, “I don’t like to do that.”

“By G’arge, he couldn’t have got into no safer place too,” chuckled Bumpett. “We’ll keep him a bit, my lad, an’ he might lend a hand when he gets better. He’ll have to know what sort of a nest he’s lighted on, sooner or later, if he stops here.”

Williams gave a kind of growl.

“When the country’s quieted down a bit we’ll have to get him off out o’ this. Straight he’ll have to go too, and not be talkin’ o’ what he’s seen. Did they take any of the others, did ye hear?”

“They got Turnbull the auctioneer, and about a dozen men from Llangarth; them on the horses were that rigged up wi’ mountebank clothes you couldn’t tell who was who—so I heard tell in Crishowell. And they were off over the Wye, an’ into the woods like so many quists. The yeomanry tried the wrong places in the water, and some of them was pretty nigh drowned. There was no talk of chasing—they’d enough to do pulling one another out.”

“Well, well, to be sure!” exclaimed the Pig-driver again with infinite relish, his cheeks widening into a grin as he listened, and his eyes almost disappearing into his head. Then he sighed the sigh of a man who broods upon lost opportunities.

George whirled his legs back into the garden in the same way that he had whirled them out, and steered through the gooseberry bushes towards the cottage followed by his companion. Entering they found themselves in a small room, dark and bare.

Although smoke might be seen to issue from the chimney at this side of the house, it was curious that not a vestige of fire was in the fire-place. A table stood under the window, a few garments hung on a string that stretched across a corner, and two bill-hooks, very sharp and bright, leaned sentimentally towards each other where they stood against the wall. A piece of soap, a bucket of water, and a comb were arranged upon a box; at the end of the room were a cupboard, and a wooden bedstead containing neither bedclothes nor mattress. Besides these objects, there was nothing in the way of furniture or adornment.

Bumpett glanced round and his eye reached the bedstead.

“Name o’ goodness, what have ye done with your bedding?” he inquired, pausing before the naked-looking object.

“It’s down below.”

A partition divided the cottage into two, and George opened a door in this by which they entered the other half of the building. Chinks in the closed-up window let in light enough to show a few tools and a heap of sacks lying in a corner. These were fastened down on a board which they completely concealed. The Pig-driver drew it aside, disclosing a hole large enough to admit a human figure, with the top of a ladder visible in it about a foot below the flooring. The young man stood aside for Bumpett to descend, and when the crown of the Pig-driver’s hat had disappeared, he followed, drawing the board carefully over the aperture.

The room below ran all the length of the house, and a fire at the further end accounted for the smoke in the chimney. Fresh air came in at a hole in the wall, which was hidden outside by a gooseberry bush planted before it; occasional slabs of stone showed where the place had been hollowed from the original rock, and the ceiling was studded with iron hooks. Near the fire was a great heap of sheepskins, surmounted by George’s mattress and all his scanty bedding, on which lay Rhys Walters, his head bound round by a bandage, and a cup of water beside him which he was stretching out his hand for as they entered.

“Here’s Mr. Bumpett,” announced Williams, going gently up to the bed.

“Well,” said Rhys in a weak, petulant voice, “this is a bad look-out, isn’t it?”

“Indeed, and so it is,” answered the old man, as if he had been struck by a new idea.

“And I don’t know when I can get up out of here.”

“Bide you where you are,” interrupted the Pig-driver. “You couldn’t be safer, not if you was in Hereford jail itself,” he concluded cheerfully, sitting down on the bed.

Rhys frowned under his bandage.

“That’s where I may be yet,” he said, “curse the whole business.”

“I’d been lookin’ out for ye at Abergavenny,” said Bumpett, “an’ not seein’ ye, I thought all had been well, and ye’d gone off licketty smack to Evans’s.”

“If I could get hold of Evans, I’d half kill him,” said Rhys between his teeth. “He cried out my name, and I had to ride for it, I can tell you. Give me a drop more water, Williams.”

George went to the opposite wall and drew out a stone, letting in the pleasant babbling noise of the brook. The foundations of the cottage were so near the water that he stretched his arm through, holding the mug, and filled it easily. In flood-time the room was uninhabitable.

“I thought there was nothing that could touch that mare of mine,” continued the sick man, as George went up the ladder and left the two together, “but young Fenton’s mind was made up to catch me, though I’d have distanced him if this damned frost hadn’t been against me. I could have dodged him in the mountain and got him bogged, maybe.”

“Well, well, you’re lucky to be where you are,” remarked Bumpett. “There’s no one but Williams and me do know of this place. Best bide a bit, and when they give up searchin’ for ye, ye can get down to Cardiff somehow.”

Rhys made no reply; his thoughts went to Great Masterhouse, to its fields, to the barns round which he had played as a child, to its well-stocked stable, to the money it was worth, and he groaned. He was a beggar practically, an outlaw, and the life behind him was wiped out. Many things rose in his mind in a cloud of regret, many interests but few affections; nevertheless, now that she was absolutely lost to him, he longed for Mary.

For some time neither of the two men spoke.

“’Tis a bad job indeed,” broke in Bumpett as he got up to leave. He was a man of his tongue and the silence irked him.

“Where are you going to now?” said Rhys listlessly.

“Down Crishowell way,” answered the Pig-driver. “I’ve got business there. Mr. Walters, I’ve got a word to say to you afore I go. Do you know that this place you’re in belongs to me?”

“To you?” said Rhys; “I thought Williams rented it from Red Field Farm.”

“Ah, ’tis called Williams’,” replied Bumpett, sitting down again, “but I do pay for it. I may make free with you in what I’m saying, for I’m helping to keep you from the law, and it’s right you should help to keep me. Give me the oath you’ll swaller down what I’m telling you and never let it up again.”

“What can I do to you, even if I want to?” asked Rhys bitterly.

“Swear, I tell ye.”

“I swear it, so help me God,” repeated Rhys, his curiosity roused.

“Though I began drivin’ o’ pigs, I’m the biggest butcher in trade at Abergavenny, am I not?” cried the old man, putting his hand on Rhys’ knee and giving it a shake. “Well, I sell more mutton than I ever buy. Do ye understand that? Do ye see what you’re lyin’ on?” He pointed to the sheepskins. “George is my man and he finds it for me—him an’ others I needn’t speak of. We’ve taken toll of you before this.”

And, as he chuckled, his eyes disappeared again.

Walters tried to sit up, but grew giddy at once and dropped back on his pillow. He drew a long breath and lay still. The last words made him hate the Pig-driver, but as, at present, he owed him everything, he reflected that hatred would be of little use to him.

“How do you get it all up to Abergavenny?” he inquired at last.

“Ah, you may well ask. And ’tis best you should know, for I’ll be glad to get a hand from you when you’re up again. Do ye know the Pedlar’s Stone? There’s not one o’ they zanys along here will go a-nigh it.”

Rhys knew the place well. On the way to the mountain, about a mile further up, a little rough, stone cross stuck out of the bank, its rude arms overhanging the hedge. It marked the spot where a pedlar had been murdered some hundred years back, and none of the working people would pass it after dark, for even in the daytime it was regarded with suspicion.

“The sheep comes here first, George he knows how. Do ye see them hooks in the ceiling? Did ye take note of the trap ye come down here by? No, I warrant ye didn’t, ye was that mazed when ye come. It’s all cut up here, an’ after that it goes up jint by jint to the place I’m telling you. Williams, he can get two sheep up between ten o’clock and one i’ the morning. If ye go along the hedge behind the stone, there’s a big bit o’ rock close by with a hole scraped in underneath it. It’s deep down among the nettles, so ye wouldn’t see it if ye didn’t know. That’s where they lie till I come round afore daylight wi’ the cart on my way to Crishowell. Crishowell folks thinks I’m at Abergavenny, and Abergavenny folks thinks I’m at Crishowell.”

Though in his heart Rhys hated the Pig-driver for what he had been doing to him and others like him, he could not help admiring his astuteness; but he made no comment, for admiration came from him grudgingly as a rule where men were concerned.

“Now,” said the old man, “I’ll say good-day to ye, Mr. Walters, I must be gettin’ on.”

He clambered up the ladder, leaving Rhys alone.

[CHAPTER IX
TWO MEETINGS]

GEORGE and the Pig-driver left the cottage together a few minutes afterwards. Both men had business in Crishowell, and as Rhys Walters was now well enough to be left alone for a few hours, Williams had no scruple in turning the key on his charge and starting with his patron for the valley.

The hoar-frost hung on everything. Around them, the heavy air enwrapped the landscape, making an opaque background to the branches and twigs which stood as though cut out in white coral against grey-painted canvas. Bumpett felt the cold a good deal and pressed forward almost at a trot, looking all the more grotesque for the company of the big, quiet man beside him. Some way out of the village they parted, being unwilling to be seen much together.

When he went to see George, Bumpett generally got out of his cart as soon as he had crossed the mountain pass, sending it round by a good road which circled out towards Llangarth, and telling his boy to bring it by that route to Crishowell; he thus avoided trying its springs in the steep lanes, and was unobserved himself as he went down by Williams’ house to the village. At the carpenter’s shop, where it went to await him, he would pass an agreeable half-hour chatting with the local spirits who congregated there of an afternoon.

He was the most completely popular man in the neighbourhood. For this he was much indebted to the habits of his pig-driving days, when he and his unruly flock had travelled the country on foot to the different fairs. Then many a labourer’s wife had lightened his journeys by the pleasant offer of a bite and a sup, and held herself amply rewarded by the odd bits of gossip and complimentary turns of speech by which the wayfarer knew how to make himself welcome. Now that he had become a man of money and standing, this graciousness of demeanour had not left him; nay, it was rather set off by the flavour of opulence, and gave meaner folk the comfortable assurance of being hob and nob with the great ones of this world. Nevertheless, the name of “The Pig-driver” stuck to him; as the Pig-driver they had known him first, and the Pig-driver he would remain, were he to be made Mayor of Abergavenny.

Rounding a corner, the old man came upon an elderly, hard-featured woman who stood to rest and lean a basket which she carried against the bank.

“Oh! Mr. Bumpett,” she exclaimed as he approached, “oh! Mr. Bumpett.”

“Come you here, woman,” he said in a mysterious voice, taking her by the elbow, “come down to the brookside till I speak a word wi’ you.”

“Oh! Mr. Bumpett,” she went on, “so ye’ve heard, have ye?”

“Sh——sh!” cried the Pig-driver, hurrying her along, “keep you quiet, I tell you, till we be away from the lane.”

The Digedi brook ran along the hollow near, and at a sheltered place by the brink he stopped. Both he and his companion were out of breath. The woman sat down upon a rock, her hard face working.

“Indeed, I be miserable upon the face of the earth,” she cried, “an I can’t think o’ nothing but Master Rhys from the time I get out o’ my bed until the time I do get in again, and long after that too. An’ there’s Mrs. Walters a-settin’ same as if he were there and sayin’ to me, ‘Never speak his name, Nannie, I have no son. Dead he have been to the Lord these many years, and now, dead he is to me. His brother’s blood crieth to him from the ground.’ I can’t abide they prayers o’ hers.”

“Will ye listen to me?” said Bumpett sharply. He gave as much notice to her lamentations as he did to the babble of the brook.

“Ah, she’s a hard one, for all her psalms and praises! Never a tear do I see on her face, and there’s me be like to break my heart when I so much as go nigh the tollet in the yard and see the young turkey-cock going by. Law! I do think o’ the smacks poor Master Rhys did fetch his grandfather, when he were a little bit of a boy, an’ how the old bird would run before him, same as if the black man o’ Hell was after him!”

She covered her face with her shawl. The Pig-driver was exasperated.

“Will ye hold yer tongue?” he said, thumping his stick on the ground, “or I won’t tell ye one blazin’ word of what I was to say. Here am I strivin’ to tell ye what ye don’t know about Mister Walters, an’ I can’t get my mind out along o’ you, ye old fool! Do ye hear me, Nannie Davis?”

At the sound of Rhys’ name she looked up.

“If I tell ye something about him, will you give over?” asked the Pig-driver, shaking her by the shoulder.

“Yes, surely, Mr. Bumpett,” said Nannie, “I will. I be but a fool, an’ that I do know.”

“He’s safe,” said Bumpett. “Do ye hear? He’s safe. An’ I know where he is.”

“And where is he?”

“Ah! that’s telling. don’t you ask, my woman, an’ it’ll be the better for him.”

Nannie had quite regained her composure, and an unspeakable load rolled off her mind at her companion’s words. Ever since the morning when the mare had been found riderless, sniffing at the door of her box at Masterhouse, and the news of the toll-keeper’s death and Rhys’ flight had reached the mountain, waking and sleeping she had pictured his arrest.

“So long as he bides quiet where he is, there’s none can get a sight o’ him,” said the old man, “and when we do see our way to get him off an’ over the water—to Ameriky, maybe—I and them I knows will do our best. But he’s been knocked about cruel, for, mind ye, they was fightin’ very wicked an’ nasty, down by the toll.”

“Is he bad?” asked Nannie anxiously.

“He was,” replied Bumpett, “but he’s mending.”

“And be I never to know where he be?”

“You mind what I tell ye. But, if ye want to do the man a good turn, ye may. Do ye know the Pedlar’s Stone?”

Nannie shuddered. “There’s every one knows that. But I durstn’t go nigh it, not I. Indeed, ’tis no good place! Saunders of Llan-y-bulch was sayin’ only last week——”

The Pig-driver cast a look of measureless scorn upon her.

“Well, ye needn’t go nigh it,” he interrupted. “Ye can bide twenty yards on the other side.”

“Lawk! I wouldn’t go where I could see it!”

“Ye must just turn your back, then,” said Bumpett crossly.

“But what be I to do?” inquired Nannie, who stood in considerable awe of the Pig-driver.

“Ye might get a few of his clothes an’ such like, or anything ye fancy would come handy to him. Bring them down to the stone when it’s dark, an’ I, or a man I’ll send, will be there to get them from ye. Day after to-morrow ’ll do.”

“I won’t be so skeered if there’s some I do know to be by,” said she reflectively.

“Can ye get they things without Mrs. Walters seein’ ye?” inquired he. “It would never do for her to be stickin’ her holy nose into it.”

Nannie laughed out. Her laugh was remarkable; it had a ring of ribaldry unsuited to her plain bonnet and knitted shawl.

“No fear o’ that. Mrs. Walters says to me, no more nor this mornin’, ‘Take you the keys, Nannie,’ she says, ‘an’ put away all them clothes o’ his. Let me forget I bore a child that’s to be a disgrace to my old age.’ ’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good, ye see. But I must be gettin’ home now, Mr. Bumpett.”

So they parted.

As George entered Crishowell by another way, and got over the last stile dividing the fields from the village, the church bell began to sound. The first stroke was finishing its vibration as he laid his hand on the top rail, but he had gone a full furlong before he heard the next. They were evidently tolling. A woman came out of her door and listened to the bell.

“Who’s to be buried?” inquired Williams, as he passed.

“’Tis Vaughan the gate-keeper,” she answered, “him as was killed Tuesday.”

The young man proceeded until the road turned and brought him right in front of the lych-gate of the church; it was open, and the Vicar of Crishowell stood bareheaded among the graves. He went on by a path skirting the wall, and slipped into the churchyard by another entrance. A large yew-tree stood close to it, and under this he took up his stand unperceived; the bell kept on sounding.

Crishowell church was a plain building, which possessed no characteristic but that of solidity; bits had fallen out of it, and been rebuilt at various epochs of its history, without creating much incongruity or adding much glory to its appearance. The nave roof had settled a little, and the walls were irregular in places, but over the whole sat that somnolent dignity which clings to ancient stone. The chancel windows were Norman, and very small; indeed, so near the ground were they, that boys, sitting in the chancel pews, had often been provoked to unseemly jests during service by the sight of unchurch-going school-mates crowding to make grimaces at them from outside. The porch was high, and surmounted by the belfry, and some old wooden benches ran round its walls to accommodate the ringers. As the sexton, who performed many other functions besides those of his office, had just returned from the fields, Howlie Seaborne, his son, had taken his place and was tolling till his father should have changed his coat. He looked like a gnome as he stood in the shadow of the porch with the rope in his hand. The sound of many feet was heard coming up the lane, and Williams took off his hat.

The procession came in sight, black in front of the white hedges and trees, moving slowly towards the lych-gate. First went the coffin, carried under its dark pall, and heading a line of figures which trailed behind it like some interminable insect. From miles round people had come; Squire Fenton and Harry from Waterchurch, the yeomanry officer who had been present at the riot, men from Llangarth, gentlemen from distant parts of the country, all anxious to pay the only respect they could to the undaunted old man whose duty had really meant something to him. Immediately behind the dead walked a girl muffled up in a black cloak. They were at the lych-gate. The bell stopped.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

The words reached Williams where he stood under the yew-tree, and something swelled up in his heart; abstract things struck him all at once as real. Life was real—death very real—to die fighting like Vaughan had died was real—certainly more real than stealing sheep. He stood thinking, hardly definitely, but in that semi-consciousness of thought which comes at times to most people, and from which they awake knowing a little more than they knew before. Whether they make their knowledge of use to them is another matter.

The Burial Service ran on to the end, and the people dispersed in twos and threes. Some gentlemen, whose horses were waiting at the smith’s shop close by, mounted and rode away after a few civil words with the Vicar; the labourers and their wives vanished quickly, the former hurrying off to their interrupted work, and the latter clustering and whispering among themselves. Soon the churchyard was empty, and nothing was left to show what had taken place but the gaping grave and the planks lying round it.

George remained a few minutes at his post under the tree before emerging and going out by the same gate as the mourners, but, when he did so, he saw that the girl had returned again and was sitting by the mound of upturned earth. His impulse was to go back, respecting her solitude, but Mary had heard his step and looked round at him. Their eyes met. He had never seen the toll-keeper’s daughter before, and her beauty and the despair written on her face touched him deeply in the stirred-up state of his mind. Remembering that he must shortly go back to Rhys, the man by whose fault he believed her to be sitting where she was, and share his roof with him for days to come, his soul recoiled. And yet, the truth was worse than he knew.

[CHAPTER X
FORGET-ME-NOTS]

HEREFORD town is one of those slumbrous cities, guiltless of any bait with which to lure the sight-seer, but possessing both a cathedral and an individuality of its own. It is a town which seems to have acquired no suburbs, to have grown up in its proper area out of the flat fields which lie around. But on the night of which I am speaking an unwonted stir was going on, a rumbling of vehicles through streets usually silent, and a great noise of voices and hoofs in the different inn yards. The Green Dragon, that stronghold of county respectability, was crowded from garret to basement, as the lights in every window proclaimed. Inside, chambermaids ran up and down-stairs, men-servants shouted orders from landings, and prim ladies-maids went in and out of bedrooms with the guarded demeanour of those who know, but may not reveal, the mysteries which these contain. The eyes of citizens were constantly gratified by the sight of chariots driven by massive coachmen whose weight seemed likely to break down their vehicles in front if unbalanced by rumbles behind. Into these last the smaller youth of the town deemed it a pride and a pleasure to ascend, when they could do so unnoticed, and to taste all the joys of so exalted a state until the vulgar “Whip behind” of some envious friend made the position untenable.

The cause of this uncommon activity in both town and urchins was that the officers of the Hereford Yeomanry were giving a ball, and from the remotest parts of the county people were flocking to it. The landlords thought well of such events, for innkeeping, like hop-growing, is a trade in which the speculator may compensate himself by one good harvest for several lean years.

From the assembly rooms a flood of light streamed over the pavement, and across it moved the uniformed figures of the hosts, resplendent in blue and silver, and congregating near the door—some to watch with solemn looks for consignments of their own relations, some, with lighter aspect, for those of other people.

The ball had not actually begun, but in Herefordshire, where such festivities were few, people liked to get as much of them as possible, and carriages were already arriving to disgorge be-feathered old ladies and be-wreathed young ones at the foot of the red-carpeted steps. The band began to tune up, and a general feeling of expectation pervaded the building. Harry Fenton was talking to his brother Llewellyn, who had been dining with him, and who was, with apparent difficulty, drawing on a pair of white kid gloves. More carriages rolled up, the doorway was getting crowded, the bandmaster raised his bâton; then the band slid into a mazurka—much in vogue at the time—and the colonel offered his arm to the county member’s wife. The floor filled rapidly.

Llewellyn Fenton was Harry’s youngest brother and the dearest friend he had in the world. Though he was only twenty-one, and consequently four years Harry’s junior, there had never been much real difference between the two, the elder being younger than his age, and the younger considerably older. Since their early boyhood they had held together, Harry clinging rather to the harder nature of Llewellyn, and now that they had grown up and gone their different ways, they took every chance of meeting they could get. The Squire on the other side of the ball-room caught sight of them standing together, and smiled as he saw them exchange nods and go off to their respective partners; he liked all his four boys, but Harry and Llewellyn were the pair which appealed to him most.

The evening went on cheerfully, and dance succeeded dance. The brothers had run up against each other again, and were watching a quadrille from the door of the supper-room.

“Llewellyn,” said Harry, taking hold of his arm, “who is that girl? There, look. Dancing with Tom Bradford.”

“I don’t know,” said his brother. “Let go, Harry.”

“Good heavens! isn’t she pretty?” he went on, unheeding, and gripping Llewellyn.

“Well, yes,” said the other, disengaging himself. “She is, there’s no denying that.”

“Do you want to deny it?” asked Harry, with a contemptuous snort.

“N—no, I don’t.”

The girl in question was dancing in a set immediately in front of them. She was a little over the middle height, though in these modern days of tall women she would probably pass unnoticed on that score. She seemed quite young, barely out of her teens, but her self-possession was as complete as that quality can be when it is mixed with self-consciousness—not the highest sort of self-possession, but always something. One could not blame her for being alive to her own good looks, they were so intensely obvious, and her complexion, which struck one at once, was of that rose-and-white sort which reminds the spectator of fruit—soft, and with a bloom on it like the down of a butterfly’s wing.

Seeing only the face one would guess it to be accompanied by rich golden hair, but this girl’s was of that shade which can only be described as mouse-coloured, and it grew light and fluffy, rather low on her forehead, its curious contrast with the warm complexion putting her quite out of the common run of red-cheeked, yellow-locked county beauties. Her neck was long and slim, and she carried herself perfectly when moving, though there was a lack of repose about her whole personality when she stood still. She was dressed charmingly in some shiny, silky stuff with a pattern of blue forget-me-nots running over it. On the front of her bodice she wore a small artificial bunch of these flowers, and a wreath of the same in her hair.

Many people besides Harry were looking at her, and she was evidently entirely aware of the fact.

For the rest of that dance he kept the eye of a lynx upon the unconscious Tom Bradford, and when that youth had finally resigned his partner to the chaperonage of a pleasant-looking spinster, he was off like an arrow after him. Llewellyn looked on rather grimly; he had some experience of his brother’s flames.

The more precise customs of those days required that young men should first be introduced to the chaperons of their would-be partners, and Harry found himself bowing before the lady whom Tom Bradford named as Miss Ridgeway. She in turn presented him to the girl beside her, who was fluttering her fan and smiling.

“My niece, Miss Isoline Ridgeway,” she said, throwing an approving look on the open-faced young fellow.

By some miracle it appeared that Miss Isoline was not engaged for the next dance, and as a portly Minor Canon appeared at this juncture and led away her aunt to the refreshment table, the two were left together. Harry’s heart beat; now that he was safely introduced to the object of his admiration he could not think what to say to her. Besides, he was afraid that Llewellyn was looking.

“I was—I mean—I have been trying to get introduced to you for ever so long,” he stammered out at last, quite forgetting that he had only caught sight of her about ten minutes before.

“Then I hope you are grateful to Mr. Bradford,” she replied.

“Yes, I am,” said Harry. “Tom is a very good fellow,” he added, more because the sound of his own voice was encouraging than for any other reason.

Isoline glanced over her shoulder towards her late partner, as if she would say that she did not think much of Mr. Bradford.

“He cannot dance,” she remarked.

“I hope you will find me no worse,” said loyal Harry.

“Oh no,” she replied, with a little laugh, “I am sure I shall not.”

“It is strange that I have never seen you before,” he said, “for you live in Hereford, don’t you? I have often heard your aunt’s name.”

“I lost my parents some time ago, and I have lately come to live with her. I am only just out of mourning.” And she looked down at her forget-me-not sprinkled dress.

He did not quite know what to say, but, as the next dance was beginning, he offered her his arm with a little bow.

Isoline Ridgeway danced divinely, and Harry felt as though he were flying into the seventh heaven—wherever that problematical spot may be—flying and sailing with the mouse-coloured head near his shoulder. The valse had been so lately introduced into England that, in the country, people were only beginning to take it up, and very few could dance it well, so these two, with their perfect accord and grace of motion, were remarked by many.

“Who is that pretty girl dancing with my boy?” asked Harry’s father of a neighbour. “They seem to be enjoying themselves.”

The old gentleman addressed adjusted his spectacles.

“That is Miss Ridgeway’s niece,” he replied.

“But, my dear sir, that conveys nothing to me,” said the Squire.

“Old Ridgeway was a solicitor in some Midland town, I believe, and a slippery scoundrel too. He settled here some time ago, but he has been dead twenty years or more. His daughter, Miss Ridgeway, lives in the same house still, and her sister was married to the present Vicar of Crishowell, near Llangarth. That is all I can tell you about them.”

“Indeed,” said the Squire, “I did not know that, though I know Lewis of Crishowell very well.”

“She is a good creature, Miss Ridgeway, and does a great deal among the poor. The niece seems more likely to do a great deal among the rich, if one may judge by her looks. They are not quite the sort of people one would have met here when I was young.”

“You are right—quite right,” said Mr. Fenton. And the two old gentlemen sighed over the falling away of their times as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them.

Meantime the valse had come to an end, and Isoline and Harry went towards the coolness of the entrance. “Sitting out,” for more than a very few minutes, was not countenanced then as it is now, and they stood together in the passage looking into the empty street.

“I shall be very sorry when to-night is over,” said he presently.

“So shall I,” she replied demurely. “I enjoy balls more than anything in the world. I wonder when I shall go to another.”

“Surely you will go to the Hunt Ball? It will be in less than a week.”

“No, I am going away,” said she, watching his face for the effect of her words, and not disclosing the fact that neither she nor her aunt had been invited.

“Going away!” echoed he, in dismay. “But where? Forgive me, but I thought you said you had only just come to Hereford.”

“I am going to stay with my uncle at Crishowell Vicarage while my aunt goes away for some months; she has been ill, and the doctor ordered it.”

“Oh, at Crishowell,” he said, much relieved. “That is not very far; I—I go to Crishowell sometimes. I did not know that Mr. Lewis was your uncle.”

“He married my aunt’s sister,” said Isoline, “but she is dead. It will be very dull there.”

“If I have to go to Crishowell on any business—or anything, do you think he will allow me to pay my respects to you—and to him, of course?”

“He might,” she answered, looking under her eyelashes. “At any rate, I will ask him.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Harry fervently.

Isoline was delighted. The prospect of five or six months in the unvaried society of her uncle had not been inspiring; she only remembered him as an unnecessarily elderly person who had once heard her catechism in her youth and been dissatisfied with the recital. It was hardly to be supposed that a young girl, full of spirits and eager for life, could look forward to it, especially one who had grown up in the atmosphere of small towns and knew nothing of country pleasures. But the horizon brightened.

“I think I must go back to my aunt now,” she said, with a little prim air which became her charmingly.

“But you will give me one more dance?” pleaded Harry. “What a fool I was to find you so late.”

“I have only one more to give,” she replied, “and that is the very last of all.”

“Keep it for me, pray, and promise you will stay till the end. I can look after you and Miss Ridgeway, and put you into your carriage when it is over.”

“Oh, yes, I will stay, if my aunt does not mind,” said Isoline, as they went back to the ballroom.

The elder Miss Ridgeway was an eminently good-natured person, and the refreshment administered by the Minor Canon had been sustaining, so she professed herself ready to remain till the end of the ball, and Harry, with deep gratitude, betook himself to his other partners till the blissful moment should arrive when he might claim Isoline again. He saw nothing more of Llewellyn, who had his own affairs and amusements on hand, and, for once in his life, he was very glad. It is to be feared that the girls with whom he danced found him dull company, as most of the time he was turning over in his mind what possible pretext he could invent for an early visit to Crishowell.

The last dance was Sir Roger de Coverley; a great many people had resolved to see the entertainment out, and, as Harry stood opposite Isoline in the ranks, he marked with pleasure that it promised to be a long affair. He had just come from an interview with the bandmaster, whom he had thoughtfully taken apart and supplied with a bottle of champagne, and the purposeful manner in which the little round man was taking his place among the musicians was reassuring.

Sir Roger is without doubt the most light-hearted and popular of country dances, nevertheless it is one in which a man is like to see a great deal more of every one else’s partner than of his own. Harry’s time was taken up by bowings, scrapings, and crossings of hands with the most homely daughter of the Minor Canon, while Isoline went through the same evolutions with a sprightly gentleman, whose age in no way hampered the intricate steps with which he ornamented the occasion. It was unsatisfactory—highly so—like many things ardently longed for and little enjoyed, and when the music stopped for an instant before merging itself into “God save the Queen,” and people were bidding each other good-night in groups, the young man ruefully led her back to her aunt, who was making for the place in which she had left her cloak. He waited for the two women to come out of the cloak-room, and then plunged into the street to find the modest fly which had conveyed his goddess to the ball. The air was bitter, for the winter sunrise was as yet far off. Coachmen were urging their horses up to the door, and footmen touching their hats to their respective masters and mistresses above them on the steps to signify that their carriages were waiting in the little string that had formed itself in the road. The fly was wedged in between an omnibus belonging to one of the town hotels and a large barouche, so there was a few minutes’ delay, in which Harry found time to remind Isoline of her promise about her uncle. Then he handed Miss Ridgeway respectfully in, held her niece’s fingers in his own for one moment, and the clumsy vehicle rolled away with a great clatter, leaving him standing upon the pavement. As he turned to go up the steps he noticed something lying at his feet, and, stooping, picked up an artificial forget-me-not.

[CHAPTER XI
THE BRECON COACH]

THE Green Dragon stood in High Street within sound of the Cathedral bells, and was the point of migration to the worldly part of the county, just as the Cathedral was the point of migration to the spiritual. The Hereford and Brecon coach started from its door, and one morning, a few days after the ball, a little crowd had collected as usual to see it off. It was nine o’clock, and the day had not sent out what little heat it possessed; the ostlers were shivering as they stood at the horses’ heads, and the guard blew on his fingers whenever he had the courage to take them from his pockets. The coachman, great man, had not as yet left the landlord’s room, in which he was spending his last minutes before starting, talking to the landlady by the fire, and occasionally casting an eye through the glass door which opened upon the main entrance where the passengers were assembling.

“Guard, guard,” cried an old lady, standing near a page who led a Blenheim spaniel, “will you kindly look among the boxes and see whether a small dog’s water-tin is there? It is marked ‘Fido,’ and has ‘Miss Crouch, Belle Vue Villas, Laurel Grove, Gloucester,’ printed upon the bottom.”

“It’s all right, ’m,” replied the guard immovably, “I saw to it myself.” The luggage had been put upon the coach a couple of hours earlier before the horses were harnessed, and he and the ostlers exchanged winks.

The page-boy sidled up to his mistress. “I’ve got it ’ere, mum—under my arm, mum,” he said, holding out the article.

The passengers smiled with meaning, and Isoline Ridgeway, who was among them, giggled audibly.

“If your memory for the mail-bags is not better than your memory for the luggage,” remarked Fido’s owner, “there are many who will have to wait for their letters, my man.”

The passengers smiled again, but this time not at the old lady.

Miss Ridgeway the elder had left the comfort of her snug Georgian house at this unusually early hour to see her niece off by the Brecon coach, which was to put her down at the toll-gate lately demolished by Rebecca, near the foot of Crishowell Lane, at which place her uncle was to meet her.

Isoline wore a fur-trimmed pelisse, and her head was enveloped in a thick veil, which her aunt had insisted upon her wearing, both as a protection against the east wind and any undesirable notice which her face might attract. The two ladies stood in the shelter of the Green Dragon doorway while the coachman, who had torn himself from the fire, was gathering up the reins, and the passengers were taking their seats. Miss Crouch, with Fido on her lap, was installed inside, and the guard was holding the steps for Isoline to mount, when Harry Fenton came rushing up wrapped in a long travelling-coat.

“Just in time!” he called out to the guard; “my luggage is on, I hope?”

He turned to Isoline’s aunt, hat in hand.

“As I am going down to Waterchurch to-day,” he said, “I hope you will allow me to look after Miss Ridgeway’s comfort and be of any use I can to her on the way.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fenton,” she replied, “I am pleased to think my niece has the escort of some gentleman whom I know. It will relieve my mind greatly.”

Isoline said nothing, but she smiled brilliantly behind her veil; then kissing her aunt, she got into her place, followed by Harry; the coachman raised his chin at the ostlers, who whipped the rugs from the horses, and they were off.

Is there anything in this steam-driven world, except perhaps trotting to covert on a fresh February morning, which gives a more expectant fillip to the spirits and a finer sense of exhilaration than starting on a journey behind four good horses? The height at which one sits, the rush of the air on one’s face, the ring of the sixteen hoofs in front, the rocking-horse canter of the off-leader ere he makes up his lordly mind to put his heart into the job and settle to a steady trot, the purr of the wheels on the road, the smell of the moist country as the houses are left behind, and the brisk pace now that the first half-mile has been done and the team is working well together—surely the man whose blood does not rise at all these, must have the heart of a mollusc and the imagination of a barn-door fowl.

Harry had travelled so often behind the blue roan and three bays that he knew their paces, history, and temper nearly as well as the man who drove them, and for some time his interest in them was so great as to make him almost unconscious of Isoline’s presence. As they bowled along she sighed softly, drawing up her rug round her. If it had not been for the society in which she found herself, she would willingly have changed places with Miss Crouch inside. The country conveyed nothing to her eye; it was cold, Harry’s want of appreciation was anything but flattering—and she was accustomed to think a good deal about what was flattering and what was not; it was rather a favourite word of hers. She had never looked at the horses, because it had not occurred to her to do so; in her mind they were merely four animals whose efforts were necessary to the coach’s progress. How could one wonder at her want of interest in ideas and things of which she had no knowledge? To her town-bred soul, outdoor life was a dull panorama seen at intervals through a plate-glass window. Nevertheless, had it been otherwise, she would not have changed her point of view much, being one of those women whose spirits rise at no exercise, whose blood is stirred by no encounter; you might have run the Derby under her nose without taking her mind from her next neighbour’s bonnet.

Presently Harry looked round and saw her arranging the rug that had fallen again.

“I beg your pardon,” he cried, “what an oaf you must think me, Miss Ridgeway! I promised to take care of you, and I don’t even see that you are comfortable.”

“It does not matter at all,” she said pleasantly, but with a little shudder in case he should take her words too literally.

“But you are cold, I am sure you are,” exclaimed he, beginning to pull off his heavy coat. “You must have this, it will go right over your dress—cloak—I don’t know what it is called.”

“No, no,” she protested. “Please, pray, Mr. Fenton, do not be so absurd. Look, I am all right. The rug only slipped off my knees.”

He tucked it elaborately round her and sat down, resolving to devote himself to her and to nothing else; and, as it was with a view to this purpose that he had timed his journey home, no doubt he was right.

“Where do you expect to meet Mr. Lewis?” he inquired. “I suppose at Llangarth?”

“I am to leave the coach at some toll-gate, I do not quite know where, but the guard understands, I believe, and my uncle will be there. I think it is only just being put up, for the Rebecca-ites destroyed it.”

“I have some reason to know that place,” observed Harry, with a sigh; “I would give a thousand pounds—if I had it—to catch the man who was at the bottom of that night’s work. I tried hard, but I failed.”

“How interesting; do tell me all about it,” said she. “You were there with the military, were you not?”

“The yeomanry, yes. But we did little good.”

“Were you in your regimentals? How I should like to have been there to see the yeomanry!”

“You would not have liked to see poor Vaughan, the toll-man, killed, though he was a fine sight standing up against the rioters.”

“But why did he come out if there were so many against him? Surely he would not have been killed if he had stayed inside until help came?”

“He was responsible for the gate,” said Harry.

“And he would have been blamed, I suppose,” said Isoline. “How unjust!”

“No, he wouldn’t have been blamed,” said Fenton. He was too young to reflect that people might belong to the same nation and yet speak different languages.

“Poor old man, how very sad,” said the girl. “Which of those dreadful rioters killed him?”

“A man called Walters—Rhys Walters—a very large farmer.”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Isoline; “then will he be hanged?”

“He will have to stand his trial for manslaughter—that is, when they catch him, if they ever do, for he is a wonderful fellow. I thought at one time I might have taken him myself, but he slipped through my fingers, I can’t imagine how to this day.”

“And were you near when he killed the toll-keeper?”

“I was, but I did not actually see it done. One of our men and two constables swore at the inquest that they saw Walter’s arm fly up and the man go down. It was so dark and everything was so mixed up that one could hardly tell what was happening, but an inn-keeper named Evans was close by, and he saw the blow struck. He was one of the men caught, and he confessed everything.”

She was really interested, and was listening with her lips parted.

“When I saw Walters making off I followed hard. I made up my mind I would get hold of him if I could, but he was on a good mare, and he took me over the worst places he could find; I very nearly came to grief among the boulders at a brook, the light was bad and they were so slippery, but I got through somehow, and I heard him in Crishowell Lane not far ahead. When he got to the top of it, he made for the Black Mountain as hard as he could, and I kept within sound of his hoofs till we were about a quarter of a mile from his own farm; then I heard him pull up into a walk. When I rode up I saw that the horse was riderless, so I suppose he must have slipped off somewhere along the foot of the mountain and left me to follow it. That was the second time he had made a fool of me.”

“Did you know him before?”

“I met him not far from that very place, as I was coming down to Waterchurch from London the day after Christmas. I rode from Hereford on, and lost my way in the fog by the mountain. He was groping about too, and he pretended to go out of his road to show me mine—devil that he is—but I know why he did it now.”

“Why?”

“He rode with me so as to talk about the riot, for every one knew that there would be one; so he put me on the wrong scent; he seemed to have some secret information about it, and it tallied with other rumours we had heard, so the police and the yeomanry were kept night after night at the gate by the river at Llangarth. If it had not been for a boy who saw the rioters making for the toll by Crishowell Lane, and who ran all the way to the town with the information, they would have got off scot-free. What would I not give to catch that man!”

“I am afraid you are very vindictive, Mr. Fenton.”

“They are scouring the country steadily,” continued he, unheeding, “but they can find no trace of him. It is extraordinary.”

But Isoline had grown tired of the subject now that the sensational part of it was over, and she directed her companion’s attention to some passing object.

The sun had come out, and she was beginning to enjoy herself; it was pleasant to be seen abroad too with such a smart-looking young fellow in attendance.

They chatted and laughed as the hedges flew by, and when the first stage was done and they pulled up before the creaking signboard of a village inn to change horses, both regretted that a part of their journey was over. Harry was too much engrossed to get down and watch the new team being put in—a matter which the coachman, who knew him well, did not fail to notice, and he and the guard exchanged comments.

“Hi, there!” cried a voice from the road, “have you got a place left for one?” A sturdy young man in leather leggings was coming round a corner, waving his stick.

Harry started up.

“Gad, Llewellyn, is that you?” he cried, looking down on the crown of his brother’s head.

“It is,” replied Llewellyn, putting his foot on the axle and swinging himself up. “Is there a vacant place anywhere, Harry?”

“Yes, a man has just left the one behind me. Miss Ridgeway, this is my brother, Mr. Llewellyn Fenton. Miss Ridgeway is travelling to Crishowell, and I am—I mean, I have—I was asked by her aunt to look after her.”

“Mornin’, sir,” said the guard, coming out of the inn and touching his hat. “Any luggage? Two vacant places, sir.”

“No, nothing; only myself.”

“I didn’t expect to see you, Loo. What have you been doing here?” asked Harry.

“Looking after pigs,” said Llewellyn, as he sat down.

Isoline opened her eyes; she thought that only people who wheeled barrows with pitchforks stuck in them did that.

“He is my father’s agent,” explained Harry.

Llewellyn was rather amused. Harry had not told him that he was going down to Waterchurch that day, so the meeting of the brothers was purely accidental. It did not escape him that two was company and three was none, for he marked Isoline’s little air of complacency at her entire absorption of her cavalier, and his having broken in upon her raised a faint but pleasant malice in him. It could not exactly be said that he disliked her, for he did not know her in the least, though he had observed her a good deal at the ball, and, considering that he had seen very little of the world, he was a youth wonderfully free from prejudice. But, had he put his feelings into thoughts, he would have known that he was irritated. Isoline glanced at him once or twice, and made up her mind that she hated him.

“Were you buying pigs then?” asked Harry, as they were trotting along the high-road again.

“Father wants a few young Berkshires, and I came to see some belonging to a man out here. It sounds low, does it not, Miss Ridgeway?” said his brother, looking at Isoline, and knowing by instinct that the subject was uncongenial.

“Oh, no, not at all, I assure you,” replied she, quite uncertain how she ought to take his remark. That pigs were vulgar was well known, nevertheless she could not help a vague suspicion that she was being laughed at. But Llewellyn’s face was inscrutable, and she could only move uneasily on her seat and wish him miles away.

For the rest of the journey the two young men looked after her carefully, Llewellyn vying with his brother in his attention to her every wish; but a snake had entered into her Eden, a snake who was so simple that she could not understand him, but who was apparently not simple enough to misunderstand her.

Sometime later they clattered through Llangarth, stopping at the Bull Inn, where Harry had been kept for so many hours on the night of the riot, and went along the Brecon road parallel with the river. The toll-gate by Crishowell had not yet been re-erected, and the bare posts stuck dismally up at the wayside by the little slate-roofed house. As it came in sight they observed a vehicle drawn up beside the hedge, and evidently awaiting the advent of the coach.

“That must be my uncle’s carriage,” said Isoline, beginning to collect her wraps.

They stopped at the toll, and the guard prepared to disentangle Miss Ridgeway’s possessions from the other luggage. Harry and Llewellyn jumped down, and the former went towards the strange-looking conveyance which was moored up under the lee of the hedge. He peered into the weather-beaten hood which crowned it, expecting to find the Vicar of Crishowell inside, but its only occupant was a huddled-up figure fast asleep. He shook it smartly.

Howlie Seaborne opened his eyes without changing his position.

“Wake up, boy!” cried Fenton, leaning over the wheel and plastering himself with a layer of mud by the act; “do you belong to Mr. Lewis?”

“Naw,” said Howlie.

“Then has no one come to meet Miss Ridgeway?”

“Here oi be, but oi belong to moiself an’ to no one else. Be her come?”

“Your uncle is not here, but he has sent for you,” said Harry, going up to the coach from which Llewellyn was helping Isoline to descend.

Howlie gave the old white mare in front of him a slap with the whip, and arrived in the middle of the road with a great creaking and swaying.

“Oi can’t take them boxes along,” he remarked, pointing to Miss Ridgeway’s luggage which stood in the road.

“Never mind, you can send for them after,” said Harry. “Guard, put them in the toll-house if any one is there.”

While this was being done, Isoline climbed up beside Howlie, and the young men wished her good-bye.

“You will ask your uncle?” said Harry, looking earnestly into the hood.

“Yes, yes,” she said, waving her hand. “Good-bye, good-bye, Mr. Fenton, and thank you for taking such care of me!”

Then the vehicle lumbered into Crishowell Lane with one wheel almost up on the bank.

“Can you drive, boy?” she asked nervously.

“Yaas,” replied Howlie; “can you?”

[CHAPTER XII
GEORGE’S BUSINESS]

IT was well into the middle of January, and a few days after Isoline’s arrival, before Rhys was sufficiently recovered from his injuries to move about; luckily for him, no bones had been broken, and George’s simple nursing, supplemented by the Pig-driver’s advice, had met every need. The slight concussion and the exposure had brought on fever, which left him so helpless and weak that he could not rise from his bed without help, while the strange place he was forced to inhabit held back his progress, for he could get no more fresh air than was admitted by the openings in the wall. When he was able to walk again, George would drag him up the ladder after night had fallen, and he would pace unsteadily about the potato-patch, ready to disappear into the cottage at the faintest sound of an approaching foot. But such a thing was rarely heard near their God-forsaken habitation, and, when it was, it belonged to no other than Bumpett. Had he searched the kingdom, he could not have found a safer place in which to hide his head, than the one chance had brought him to on the night of his flight.

Convalescence, once begun, makes strides in a constitution such as his. Every day added something to his strength, bringing at the same time an impatience of captive life, untold longings for a new horizon; by the time he was practically a sound man with the full use of his limbs, he was half mad with the monotony of his days. Besides this, Nannie, according to Bumpett’s order, had brought most of his everyday possessions to the Pedlar’s Stone, and, once in his own clothes, an intense desire for his past identity came upon him, embittered by the knowledge that his choice lay between an absolute abandonment of it, and prison and disgrace. All his life he had been accustomed to be somebody, and he felt like a man in a dream as he looked round at the sheepskins, the iron hooks, and implements of Williams’ illicit trade. Only a few miles divided him from Great Masterhouse; surely he had but to step out of these unworthy surroundings and go back to his own! Everything since his illness seemed unreal, his old self was the true one, this a nightmare, a sham. Nevertheless, between him stood that one night’s deed like a sentry and barred the way.

There was not even the remotest prospect of escape, for Bumpett, who made it his business to gather all the news he could about the search, had strongly impressed on him the necessity of lying low. When it should be given up as hopeless and vigilance relaxed, the time would be come, he said, to make for Cardiff, and get out on the high seas by hook or by crook. The knowledge of the fugitive’s hiding-place would remain entirely between the Pig-driver and George Williams, for the old man was firm in his refusal to divulge it to Nannie, devoted as she was, saying that what he had seen of women did not incline him to trust them with his secrets. “They be a pore set,” he observed, “they’ve room for naught i’ their heads but tongues.”

So Rhys and George made up their minds to live together for some time to come, though it was hardly a prospect that gave either much satisfaction. That the one owed a debt of gratitude to the other did not tend to make matters better, for being under an obligation to a person with whom one is not in sympathy, can scarce be called a pleasure, and Rhys was not at all in sympathy with George. Acutely sensitive as to what people thought of him, whether he actually respected their opinion or not, he soon saw that it was from no personal admiration or regard that he had been so carefully tended—as much would have been done for any human creature in distress. The sheep-stealer too was at all times a taciturn man with deep prejudices and strong loves and hates; simple and unpretentious to a degree himself, he loathed all pretension in others, and felt it hard to bear the airs of superiority and patronizing ways which were seldom absent from Rhys’ manner towards him. Coming from a runaway criminal to whom he was extending shelter they were absurd; but George did not think of that, for he had as little humour as Rhys, though its want arose from vastly different causes. The lighter aspects of life had passed him by, and he was hampered by the misfit of his double life to his eminently single mind. And whenever he looked at Rhys, the face of the girl in the churchyard rose before him.

It was the direst necessity which had induced George Williams to stray so far across the line of honesty, and bitterly he regretted the step. A couple of years before, he and his mother, a blind old woman, had inhabited a little hovel near Presteign, which belonged to the Pig-driver, for the old man owned many cottages in various parts of the neighbourhood. As she could do nothing towards their livelihood, the whole maintenance of the household fell upon the son, who worked hard at such odd jobs as he could get, and earned a small sum weekly by hedging and ditching. They lived very frugally, and with great management made both ends meet, until, one winter, the widow fell ill and took to her bed; then came the pinch. At the end of her illness the young man found himself in debt with arrears of rent and no prospect of paying; besides which, he was receiving messages from Bumpett every week to the effect that, if money were not forthcoming, they would be turned out of doors. Work was slack, and he was in despair; finally he went off to Abergavenny to interview his landlord, and to get, if possible, a little grace from the close-fisted old man.

It happened that, at that time, Bumpett was beginning to make a regular business of sheep-stealing; he had started by receiving the stolen goods from men whose private enterprise had led them to lay hands on the animals, and he ended by taking the responsibility of the trade on himself, and stipulating that the actual thieves should enter his employment and supply no other person. It had paid him well. George’s need was his opportunity; he wanted another active, reliable hand, and, knowing most things about most people connected with him, he perceived that this steady and trustworthy young fellow was the man for the place. He told him that he meant to offer him a chance on condition that he pledged his word to secrecy, and, when this had been done, he put before him a choice of two things; either he was to become his workman at a small fixed wage, living rent-free in the cottage which now sheltered Rhys, or he was to turn out of his present quarters the next day with a debt which he could not pay off. If he accepted the first alternative his debt was to be cancelled. This contract was to hold good for three years, during which time he was to serve Bumpett entirely, sworn faithfully to secrecy when the time should have elapsed.

It was a hard struggle with fate for the poor boy, and one in which he came off second-best; he took the Pig-driver’s terms with a heavy heart, and entered on his new occupation, going out for several nights with an expert thief, both in the near and more remote parts of the county, to see the way in which things were done. Afterwards he removed with his mother to their new abode, where the poor woman, being blind, dwelt till the day of her death without knowing how her son was occupied. She lived in that end of the cottage which did not communicate with the cellar, and George, who still kept his hedge and ditching work, easily persuaded her that it was to this and to the lower rent of their new home that they owed their comparative prosperity. She had now been dead about ten months, and he was still working out his time with his employer and longing for its end.

“What are you going to do?” asked Rhys one afternoon, as he saw George take a pickaxe and shovel from a corner of the cottage. The outer door was locked, and he had come up from below to escape the dullness of his underground dwelling for a while.

“Dig a hole in the garden,” replied the other, “I be goin’ out to-night, and maybe there’ll be something to bury afore morning.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Rhys.

“Well, I suppose you may as well begin some time, and, if you’re feeling right enough, I’ve nothing against it. It’ll be a change for you.”

“I am sick and tired of this place,” exclaimed his companion ungraciously, for he was somewhat piqued by the indifferent acceptance of his companion. He had condescended rather in offering his help.

“I’ll lock the door on the outside,” observed Williams, as he went out, “so you needn’t go below again.”

Rhys sat down by the hearth and listened to the strokes of the pickaxe among the gooseberry bushes outside. He took out his watch and counted the hours till night should come and he should go for the first time beyond the walls of the weary little garden which had become so hateful to him. Seven hours; it was an age to wait. But it went by at last.

In the dark of the moonless night the two men went out, taking with them the few implements needful to their work—a piece of rope, a small, very heavy hammer, and a long knife which George attached to a leather belt round his middle. Rhys carried a dark lantern, which for extra safety was muffled in a felt bag, and an old, tattered cloak. As they stepped across the plank into the track up the hillside, the smell of the chill night blew against his nostrils. The air was thick, only faintly penetrated by stars, and bearing with it a chill of approaching rain, but, to the captive, it was a taste of Paradise. He drew a long breath and rubbed his feet against the turf for the pure pleasure of feeling again its firm velvet, and there ran through his being that sense of expansion, mental and physical, which comes to many people in the wide stillness of the night world. Had he been a woman, he would have wept; as it was he did not analyze his feelings, but was merely conscious that he had been dead and that he lived again.

As they passed the Pedlar’s Stone they halted for a minute while George showed him the rock a few yards off under which the meat could be hidden until Bumpett should come to take it away. Rhys pushed his arm into the hole beneath and felt the lining of hay which was put there periodically for its better preservation. His hand was stung by the nettles growing round and above it.

When they reached the Twmpa’s foot they went westward and skirted the base, keeping as close to it as possible, then turned into a creek down which a rush of mountain-water was flowing between rocks.

Rhys understood nothing of his companion’s plan and was not inclined to question him, so he kept silence; though his interest was roused he had sense enough to know that obedience would further their work, and that trusting to Williams would be the best way of saving them both from the chance of discovery. The sheep-stealer stopped where the running water swirled into a pool and out again yet more violently through a narrow place in the rocks, and directed him to set down the lantern.

“We’ll come back here when we get our beast,” he said. “Listen, do you hear anything?”

Across the noise of the torrent came the faint baa of a sheep.

“There’s a flock not far off,” said George.

“There used to be a hut up here,” said Rhys, stretching out his arm towards the slope above.

“Aye, an’ likely there’s a man in it too,” replied the other. “I can’t see no light. Maybe he’s sleeping. He’ll have to hearken pretty smart if he’s to hear we.”

They crossed the water and began quietly to descend the hillside. Some way up they could see the dim forms of the sheep, above them again the shepherd’s hut, a faint excrescence on the sky-line. Williams uncoiled the rope he carried and twisted it round his body; in one hand he held the hammer.

“Now,” he said to Rhys, “put the cloak over your back an’ get on your hands and knees. Keep anigh me, and when you see me throw the sheep, down you wi’ the cloak over his head to stop his noise and hold him fast. I’ll do the rest.”

They crawled forward, one behind the other, stopping for several minutes at a time, flattened against the earth when they saw any animal look in their direction. The sheep were feeding unconsciously, having finished the first long sleep with which the animal world begins the night, and when they were close enough to see their white bodies take definite shape in the dull starlight, Williams chose his victim, a fine large wether on the outskirts of the flock. Rhys pressed close behind him.

They were well within a couple of yards of their game when the animal sniffed suspiciously and would have turned his head towards the danger after the manner of horned creatures. But George’s hand had gripped him by the hind-leg and laid him with a turn of the wrist on the hillside before he had fully realized that an enemy was upon him, and he was struggling half suffocated by the heavy cloak which Walters flung round his head. The two strong men held him down with all their might till his efforts had grown less violent and Williams had unwound the rope from his body and tied his legs. Then he took up the hammer and, with all his force, dealt him one tremendous blow between the horns. The sheep quivered and lay still.

“Thank God, that’s done,” he said, getting up from his knees.

They hoisted their prize on to George’s back and went stealthily down the hill to the stream. Here they laid it on a rock, and while Rhys held its head over the water, his companion severed the large artery in the throat. The lantern which they had turned on their work showed the crimson stain, as it mixed itself with the torrent, to be borne whirling down between the boulders and out of sight.

When the blood had ceased flowing, Williams took a wisp of hay and stopped the wound, binding it round with a strand of rope; he washed the red marks from his hands and sleeves and from the stones on which they had been kneeling, making Rhys search each foot of ground with the lantern for the least traces of their deed. Then he got the dead beast upon his back again covered by the cloak, and they set their faces towards the cottage.

Since they had started that night, the sheep-stealer had taken rather a different place in his companion’s mind. Accustomed to regard him as a clod and no more, the calm skill he displayed in his occupation and his great personal strength impressed Rhys, and, for the first time in their acquaintance, he spoke an appreciative word.

“That was a wonderful fine bit of work,” he remarked as they left the mountain behind them, “few could match you at that, Williams!”

“’Tis a cursed business,” said George between his teeth. “God’s truth! but I do hate it!”

“Then what makes you do it, man?” exclaimed Rhys.

“Ah, that’s just it. I’ve sold myself to the devil, that’s why.”

Rhys laughed. “Where did you meet with him?” he asked lightly.

“At Abergavenny,” replied George gravely. “And his name is James Bumpett.”

[CHAPTER XIII
THE SEVEN SNOW-MEN]

MARY’S child opened its eyes prematurely on this world, only to wail itself out of it again in a couple of weeks. It was a miserable, feeble little creature, but the mother clung to it, though it was the son of her father’s murderer, of the lover whose baseness towards herself seemed to her nothing compared with his baseness in lifting his hand against the grey head now lying by the wall in Crishowell churchyard. This she told herself again and again as she lay tossing in the weary days succeeding its birth. Though her love for the father was dead, struck down by that foul blow, she had still some to give the child; it was hers, she felt, hers alone. He had never seen it, never would see it, and never would his face shadow its little life.

During her illness the Vicar had been to visit her, and had tried, very gently, to bring home to her the greatness of her fault. She listened to his words meekly and with respect, but he left the house feeling that he had not made much impression. When he was gone she thought over all he had said; to have explained to him what was in her heart would have been impossible, for she could hardly explain it to herself, but she knew that, though she recoiled from the man who had once been everything to her, she could not go back upon the love. It was a gift she had made fully, freely, rejoicing in the giving, and she would not repent it. If the sun had gone down on her and left her to grope through the black night, she would accept it as the price of her short happiness; she felt this instinctively, dumbly. She was proud, and, knowing that all the world would think itself at liberty to cast stones at her, she was not going to invite it to do so, much less to shrink from its uplifted hand. The thing was her affair, her loss, and no one else’s. Life would be hard, but she would meet it for the child’s sake; she would make him an honest man, and, perchance, if she did her duty by him, he might one day stand between her and the loneliness of existence. That was what one might call the middle stratum of her soul; down below—far, far down—there was a tideless sea of grief. Then the poor little infant died.

In a small place like Crishowell it is scant news that can remain hidden; what is known to one is the property of the whole community, and Mary’s history was soon in every mouth. Horror and mystery were sweet to the rural taste, which was beginning to feel dulled after such a surfeit of events as the riot, the arrests, Vaughan’s death, and Rhys’ disappearance. The tale of her double wrong gave it something to think about again, and the talk reached the ears of George Williams at last, though he mixed rarely with his fellow-men, and consequently knew little of the topics of the village.

He had thought a great deal about the toll-keeper’s daughter since the day he had found her sitting in the churchyard, for, in that moment, he seemed to have looked into her very heart. He knew now that he had only seen half of it. He was anything but a vindictive man, but as he walked out of the village one evening with his newly-gotten knowledge, if he could have done what he liked, he would have gone straight home and killed Rhys Walters, then and there, with his two hands. Seeing the story laid out before his mind’s eye, he wondered how he should manage to exist under the same roof with him. His view was not altogether a just one, for he could hardly have felt more strongly had Walters deliberately murdered the father in order to ruin the daughter unopposed, but he did not stop to think of that. He saw things in the rough, and in the rough he dealt with them. He knew that Bumpett would never consent to his turning him out, for the Pig-driver had got Rhys into his power and meant to keep him there, as he had done with himself. It was hard enough to find suitable men for his work—and men who were dependent on him could tell no tales. The old man was exaggerating every difficulty in the way of getting the fugitive out of the country, so that he might retain him where he was and have him at his service; Rhys also was becoming enamoured of the business, which suited him exactly, and growing almost reconciled to his life, now that he could spend his nights outside. Whether there was work on foot or not, he left the cottage with the dark—often with the dusk—remaining out until dawn, and spending most of his day in sleep. Where he went George neither knew nor cared, but the day would come, he thought, when Walters would get over-venturesome, and let himself be seen. Though it would probably involve his own ruin, he prayed that it might be soon. All he longed for was the end of his bondage to his taskmaster, and of the hated company he was enduring.

The Pig-driver ran his trade on bold lines. It had to be largely done to make it pay him, and he had taken two relations into partnership who had butchers’ shops in other towns. The farmers who grazed their herds on the mountain-lands of Breconshire, and who suffered from this organized system of marauding, had no idea, in these days of slow communication and inefficient police, how to protect their interests. On the side of the Black Mountain with which we are familiar, they employed watchers for the flocks on dark winter nights, but hitherto George’s skill and luck had been greater than theirs, and he left no traces of his deeds behind him. Once the dead animal had disappeared beneath his floor, it emerged again in pieces, for all the cutting up was done below, the skins dried before the fire, and each head with the tell-tale mark on the skull buried in the garden. Only after a fall of snow, when footmarks were ineffaceable, sheep-stealing was an impossibility.

It had been coming down thickly, and after the fall the wind blew billows of white into all the hedgerows, which were broken in great gaps by the weight; everywhere they were being mended, and George was employed at a place on the further side of the Wye to repair about half-a-mile of damage.

He had finished early, and, after crossing the river, the fancy took him to return along the shore and strike homewards into Crishowell Lane by the toll-house, where Mary was still living with the new toll-keeper’s wife. The woman was a good soul, and had nursed her through her trouble, and the girl was to remain with her father’s successors until it was settled where she should live, and how she might support herself, and increase the small sum subscribed for her by the public in memory of the dead man.

He went down towards the water and kept along the high bank beside it. It was easy walking, for the wind had blown off the river where it could gather no snow, and the path was almost dry; below him the dark, swirling pools lay like blackened glass under the willows, whose knotted stems overhung them. The fields on his right were three inches deep in their dazzling cover. As his eye roamed over the expanse, some objects in a hollow a short way ahead caught his attention, detaching themselves as he drew near, and he saw that the boys of the neighbouring cottages had been at work. Seven gigantic snow-men were grouped together and stood round in a sort of burlesque Stonehenge, their imbecile faces staring on the monotonous winter landscape. There had been a slight fall since their erection, and though the grass round had been scraped clean by their creators, it was covered with a white powdering, few marks of their work being left. They seemed to have risen from the ground of themselves, seven solitary, self-contained, witless creatures. Not one of them boasted any headgear, all the round bullet heads standing uncovered on the pillar-like bodies; rough attempts at arms had been made, but these had not been a success, for the fragments lay around their feet. Their mouths grinned uniformly, indicated by long bits of stick embedded in the lower part of their jaws, and black stones above did duty for eyes. George contemplated the vacant crew with a smile. He was in no special hurry, so he stood for some time looking at them.

Silence lay over everything, heavier than the sky, deeper than the snow.

He turned his head towards the Wye, for from somewhere by the bank came the sound of heavy breathing, as of a creature wrestling with a load, pausing occasionally, but recommencing again after a moment’s rest. There was a movement among the small branches of an immense willow whose arm stretched over a bit of deep water. The twigs were thick, and the bank shelved out like a roof over the trunk, so, though he could not see the man or beast, he gathered that whichever was struggling there must be down below on a ledge running a few feet above the river. He went cautiously towards the spot and looked over the edge. A woman whom he recognized as Mary Vaughan was scrambling along towards the limb of the great tree. Was he always to be an unwilling spy upon her? he asked himself as he saw her.

He drew back and turned to go, when it struck him that he had better not leave her alone, as her foothold on the rotten bank seemed rather insecure, and he knew the pool below to be one of the deepest in the Wye, so he split the difference by getting behind a holly-bush whose evergreen boughs formed a thick screen in front of him, and through an opening in which he could observe her movements. He could not imagine what she was doing, and, until he saw her reach a place of safety, he determined to stay near. Afterwards he would steal away unperceived.

Mary made her way towards the willow-branch, and, putting her foot upon an excrescence of the bark, she climbed up and seated herself upon it. George could see that her face was drawn and haggard, as the face of one who has not slept for many nights; it was thin too, and the fire of her beautiful eyes seemed drowned in unshed tears. She drew herself along the thickness of the bough until she was two or three yards from the shore and sat staring before her. A great pang of pity shot through the heart of the man watching her, as it occurred to him that her troubles might have turned her brain. He dared not stir while she sat there so still, for fear of making himself heard, and he held his breath in dread lest she might lose her balance, if startled, and slip from her seat into the pool underneath. Presently she began to fumble with something lying on the bough which he saw to be a piece of rope.

He pressed a little nearer, peering under his hand through the holly-leaves into the gloom of the willow. A large stone was resting just where the branches divided into a fork beyond her, and one end of the rope was tied tightly round it; her efforts to get it into its present position had certainly caused the heavy breathing which had attracted him as he stood by the snow-men. It seemed a miracle that such a slight creature should have found strength to get the unwieldy thing up from the water-side, along the slippery bank and out on to the branch. George stood dumbly gazing at the unconscious woman, his steady-going mind in a turmoil. That she was mad he did not doubt, and that he must do something to get her away from her dangerous seat was certain. While he was debating how he should manage it, she took the slip-knot at the loose end of the rope, and, holding out her feet, began to work it round her ankles. Then he understood that it was not madness he was watching, but the last scene of a tragedy, which, if he did not act at once, would be played before his eyes.

To shout out, forbidding her to do this thing, would, he knew, be useless, for the rope was already round her feet, and she would merely spring off into the water, before he could reach her. With such a weight to drag her down, rescue would be almost impossible from the depths which she had chosen for her grave, and might mean the loss of two lives instead of one. He was not particularly afraid of death, but he liked doing things thoroughly, and, as drowning himself would not save her, he did not intend to take the risk if he could do without it.

Instinct told him that, apart from all fear of prevention, people do not take their lives in presence of the casual passer-by, and he knew that in assuming that character lay his best chance. Mary had covered her face with her hands as though she were praying, and he seized the moment to get himself on to the path. Then he coughed as unconcernedly as he could, and strolled by the tree swinging his bill-hook. She kept as quiet as a bird sitting on a nest, looking at him with startled eyes.

“Good-day to ye,” he began, as he stopped on the bank above her.

Mary murmured something inaudible, and drew her feet as far as she could under her skirt that he might not see the rope.

“That’s a rotten bough you be settin’ on,” he continued; “come off, or belike it’ll break down.”

“No, ’tis not,” she replied, trembling in every limb; “you needn’t mind me. I’m safe enough.”

For reply he laid hold of a projecting root, and swung himself down upon the ledge.

“Look,” said he, drawing her attention to a hollow in the limb, and coming a little nearer at each word, “it’s all sodden, I tell ye.”

For fear of betraying her feet, she did not stir as he advanced; she remembered him as the man in the churchyard, and she knew his name, but his determined face awed her, and the shining bill-hook in his hand made him look almost as if he were going to attack her.

When he had reached the bough he suddenly sprang upon it, and laid his hand upon her arm. His grip was like iron. Mary screamed aloud; she had not feared death, but she was terrified of George Williams.

He held her firmly as they sat; her strained nerves were beginning to give way, and her determination to flutter to the ground like a piece of paper hurled into the air. She looked round despairingly.

“Put your feet up on the bough, girl,” he said sternly.

“I can’t,” she faltered.

They were sitting upon it side by side, more like a pair of children on a gate, than a man and woman with the shadow of death between them. He was holding her fast with his left hand, but he loosened his grip, and put his arm firmly about her.

“Do as I bid ye,” he said, very quietly. “Turn sideways with your back to me and lean against me.”

She obeyed.

“Now put your feet up on the bough. Gently, mind.”

She drew them up with some difficulty till they rested upon it before her; a piece of the rope lay across the wood near the fork.

“Sit still!” he cried, holding her in a vice.

The bill-hook whirled above them and came down in a clean cut upon the branch; the two ends of the rope fell away, one on either side. George gave the great stone a push with the point of the blade and it fell from its place, splashing into the blackness below and sending up a shower of icy drops. The circles widened and widened underneath till they fell out of shape against the sides of the pool.

“Do ye see that?” he exclaimed, releasing her and looking at her with stern eyes. “Mary Vaughan, that’s where you would be now, but that I had been set to take this way an’ not the high-road.”

She made no reply.

“Will you repent it?” he asked, “or be I to tell on you? They at the toll-house are like enough to shut you up if I do—and ’twill be no more nor their duty too.”

Her overwrought mind was beginning to feel the influence of his quiet strength of purpose and she resented it. A sullen expression crossed her face.

“Do as you will,” she answered. “What do I care? You’ve done me an ill trick an’ I hate you for it. Go, I tell you!”

She turned her head away. He sat quietly beside her, pity and wrath in his heart.

“Will you let me be?” she said, after a pause, turning on him and gathering excitement in her voice.

“I won’t.”

Then her lips shook and her breast heaved, and she burst into a torrent of helpless tears.

“Poor lass, poor lass,” exclaimed the young man; and, with an impulse that had in it no shadow of his sex, he put his arm round her. She clung to him, weeping violently. She would have done the same had he been a stock or a stone. He tossed the bill-hook up on to the bank, and stroked her hair clumsily with his large rough hand.

“Come away from here,” he said, when the rush of her grief had subsided, “this is a bad, lonesome place to be in, Mary. I’ll lift you down and we’ll go up on the bank. If there’s aught you want to say to me, say it up there.”

He helped her off the bough, and from the ledge up to the path. They stood facing each other.

“And now what can I do?” he asked. “How am I to leave you alone? I can’t bide by you all day to see that you come to no harm.”

She opened her lips to speak, but no sound came.

“Look,” he went on, “will you hearken to one thing I’ve got to say and not take it ill o’ me?”

She raised her eyes to his.

“If you was gone—drowned and gone—who would mind that little one you’ve brought into the world? Would you leave it alone, poor little babe, to them as might misuse it?”

“But he’s dead,” she said simply, and the agony in her face made him turn away his own. He met the placid gaze of the snow-men, whose foolish eyes seemed intent upon them both.

“Was that why you was—why I found you there?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve nothing now, you see. There’s none to care.”

For some time neither spoke.

“Mary,” said Williams at last, his face still turned to the white images in the hollow, “will ye take me for a friend? God knows I bean’t no manner o’ use.”

[CHAPTER XIV
THE USES OF A CAST SHOE]

MISS ISOLINE RIDGEWAY was standing before an object which usually took up a good deal of her time and attention, namely, the looking-glass. As it was placed at right angles to her bedroom window, there could be seen beyond her left shoulder as she arranged her hair, the great yew in the churchyard and a piece of the church-path framed in by the sash. Behind it was a background of sky turning into a frosty gold.

Crishowell Vicarage was a small, old, whitewashed house which had once been a farm-house, with gabled windows looking westward; between it and the lane dividing it from the churchyard was a duck-pond that, in wet seasons, overflowed into the Digedi brook, which ran round the Vicar’s orchard at the back.

Isoline had just come in, and her hat and walking-things lay upon the bed where she had thrown them. As the room was low, and the early winter sunset hardly penetrated into the house by reason of the rising ground opposite on which the church stood, she had lit a candle, whose spot of feeble light only served to accentuate the dark around her; a rat was scraping in the wainscot, and she shuddered as she looked towards the place from which the noise came. She yawned, and wondered what she could do to amuse herself until supper-time, for it was only half-past four, and the Vicar kept old-fashioned hours—breakfast at nine, a substantial dinner at three, supper at eight, prayers at eight-thirty, and bed at ten o’clock. Since she had arrived at Crishowell the days seemed to have lengthened into weeks and the weeks into months. The old man was all kindness, but there was no one of her own age with whom she could associate, and the few visits she had made at his suggestion to the poor folks living round them had resulted in boredom to herself and constraint to them. She had a true, though rather thin voice, and she would gladly have practised her singing had there been some instrument on which to accompany herself, but unfortunately there was nothing of the sort in the house. Time hung heavy on her hands, for Mr. Lewis’s library was mainly theological, and contained nothing which could amuse a girl. It was dull indeed.

A knock at the door drew her attention from the glass. “Who is there?” she called, as she laid down the comb.

“Oi,” was the reply, which came from suspiciously near the keyhole.

“What do you want?” she asked impatiently, opening the door on Howlie Seaborne.

“Yew’re to come down,” he announced baldly.

“I am not ready,” said she, with a haughty look. “Who sent you up here, I should like to know?”

“Parson says yew be to come down,” he repeated.

“Howell!” she exclaimed sharply, using the name by which he was known to his superiors, “how often have I told you that that is not the way to speak of Mr. Lewis; I never heard of such impertinence!”

“An’ if a bain’t a parson, wot be he? Ye moight call ’im even worse nor that too, oi suppose,” replied Howlie with a snort.

Mr. Lewis’s requirements were modest, so he kept only one indoor servant, who cooked for him and waited on his simple necessities, but since his niece had arrived at the Vicarage and there was consequently more work, Howlie had been brought in to help domestic matters forward. He carried coals, pumped water, cleaned knives, and, had it been possible to teach him the rudiments of good manners, would have been a really valuable member of the household.

But those who associated with him had either to take him as they found him or to leave him altogether. Isoline would have preferred to do the latter, for there was in her an antagonism to the boy which had begun the moment she climbed into her uncle’s crazy vehicle on the Brecon road. She detested boys of every sort, and this one was decidedly the most horrible specimen of that generation of vipers she had ever come across.

Howlie Seaborne had never before been at close quarters with a young lady, the nearest approach to the species having been those little village girls whose hair he had pulled, and upon whom he had sprung out from dark corners by way of showing his lofty contempt, ever since he could remember. Miss Ridgeway interested him a great deal, and after the few days of close observation which it had taken him to find her a place in his experience, he persisted in regarding her with the indulgence due to a purely comic character.

“There be a gentleman down below,” he remarked, when he had finished snorting.

“A gentleman? What gentleman?”

“Moy! Just about as smart as a lord. Oi know ’im too. ’Im as was general o’ the soldjers the noight they was foightin’ Rebecca. Oi moind ’im, for ’e shook me crewel ’ard by the shoulder.” He rubbed the ill-used part.

Isoline shut the door in his face with a bang. The sudden draught put out the candle, and she was obliged to light it again to make the additional survey of her face which the situation below-stairs demanded. She took a hand-glass from the drawer, and assured herself that every view of it was satisfactory; then she hurried down the wooden staircase which creaked under her foot, and stood a moment with beating heart to collect herself at the door of her uncle’s study.

Mr. Lewis was standing by the round table in the middle of the room, and before him, with his hand on the mantelpiece, was Harry Fenton. The younger man had one foot on the fender, and from his boots went up a lively steam which showed that he had ridden over some heavy bits of ground; his spurs, too, were coated with mud, and he seemed to be appreciating the blaze that leaped gallantly in the chimney. He wore a long cloth coat, which made him look about twice his natural size.

“Mr. Fenton has come over from Waterchurch on business,” said Mr. Lewis, turning to her as she entered, “and I am sorry to say that his horse has cast a shoe on the way, and it has delayed his arrival till now. But I have persuaded him to stay here for the night, which is very pleasant.”

“It is most kind of you, sir,” interrupted Harry.

“My dear boy,” exclaimed the Vicar, “it is impossible to think of taking the road again at such an hour, and with such a distance before you as Waterchurch. I am sorry,” he went on, taking up a knitted comforter and beginning to put it round his neck, “that I have just been urgently sent for by a parishioner, and shall have to leave you for an hour, but my niece will see that all is made ready for you. Isoline, my dear, I will trust to you to look after Mr. Fenton till I come back.”

Harry had started from his home that morning with a couple of instruments in his pockets not generally carried about by riders. They bulged rather inside his coat, and he took great care, as he mounted, that Llewellyn, who was leaning against the stable-wall watching him depart, should not see them; they were a smith’s buffer and a small-sized pair of pincers for drawing nails out of horses’ shoes.

His father, with some other county men, was bestirring himself about the putting-up of a stone at Crishowell to the toll-keeper, and had remarked at breakfast that he wanted to consult Mr. Lewis about the inscription. Harry pricked up his ears.

“I suppose I shall have to write another couple of sheets,” growled the Squire. “Really, with all the writing I have had to do of late, I am beginning to curse the inventor of the alphabet.”

“Can’t I help you, sir?” inquired Llewellyn. “I have nothing particular to do this morning.”

“Nothing particular to do! What is the use of my keeping an agent, I should like to know, who has ‘nothing particular to do’? Eh, sir?”

Llewellyn held his peace.

“I can go to Crishowell, and give your message; I was thinking of riding out that way in any case,” said Harry boldly.

The Squire had forgotten the existence of Isoline Ridgeway a couple of days after the ball, and he really wanted to get the business of the gravestone settled. “Very well,” he assented, rather mollified, most of his wrath having evaporated upon his youngest son, “but you will have to start soon if you mean to get home again before dark. The roads are pretty bad in this thaw.”

So Harry had departed, nothing loth, and Llewellyn again held his peace, though he thought a good deal. He had not forgotten Isoline, but he had sense enough to know how useless speech can be.

The roads were no better than the old Squire had supposed, nevertheless Harry did not seem inclined to get over them very quickly, for he did not once let his horse go out of a sober walk. He had delayed his start till after mid-day in spite of his father’s advice, so by the time he reached a secluded bit of lane about half-a-mile from Crishowell village, the afternoon light was wearing itself out beyond the fields and coppices lying westward. Here he dismounted, and leading the animal into a clump of bushes, he took the buffer out of his pocket and began to cut the clinches out of the shoe on the near fore. Then he wrenched it gradually off with the pincers. When this was done, he drew the reins over his arm and tramped sturdily through the mud, carrying it in his hand. In this plight he arrived at the Vicar of Crishowell’s door.

When the sound of her uncle’s steps had died away down the flagged path that led through the garden, and Isoline had ordered the spare room to be made ready for the guest, she and Harry drew their chairs up to the hearth.

“You see, I have come as I said I should,” he remarked, contemplating the pattern of the hearthrug; “are you glad to see me, Miss Ridgeway?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied truthfully.

“Shall I tell you a secret?” said the young man, wearing an expression of great guile. “When the shoe came off I was rather pleased, for I ventured to hope that Mr. Lewis might let me stay to supper while it was being put on. I never expected such luck as being asked to stay the night.”

“It would be dreadfully lonely to ride back to Waterchurch Court in the dark. I should not like it, I know; I suppose gentlemen do not mind these things.”

“I prefer sitting here with you, certainly,” answered Harry, looking into the coals.

“What do you see in the fire?” she asked presently. “Are you looking for pictures in it? I often do.”

“I think I see—you.”

“That is not very flattering,” said Isoline, seeing a compliment floating on the horizon, a little compliment, no bigger than a man’s thought, but capable of being worked up into something. “Coals are ugly things, I think, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t, or I should not have looked for you among them.”

She sat quite still in her chair, hoping there was more to follow, but she was disappointed.

“How do you amuse yourself here?” Harry inquired, after a pause.

“There is nothing to amuse me,” she replied in her most sophisticated manner. “This is a dull little place for any one who has seen anything of society. It is dreadful never to be able to speak to a lady or gentleman.”

“But there’s your uncle; my mother always says that Mr. Lewis is the finest gentleman she knows.”

This was a new idea, and the girl opened her eyes. “Oh, but he is only an old man,” she rejoined.

“What an age it seems since the ball,” he said, sighing. “I wish there was another coming.”

“So do I.”

“When you had gone I found something of yours—something that I shall not give you back unless you insist upon it.”

“Something of mine? I do not remember losing anything.”

He took a small pocket-book from his coat, and turned over the leaves until he came to a little crushed blue object lying between them.

“Do you know this?” he asked, holding out the book.

She took it with all the pleasure a woman feels in handling the possessions of a man in whom she is interested.

“Ah, yes, that is mine,” she exclaimed, flushing as she recognized the flower.

“It was,” said Harry, “but it is mine now.”

“Well, really!”

“But may I keep it?”

She turned away her head. “You are very foolish, Mr. Fenton.”

“I do not mind that.”

Isoline took the forget-me-not up between her finger and thumb and twirled it round; then she leaned forward, holding it out above the flame, and looking over her shoulder at her companion.

“Shall I drop it into the fire?” she asked, with a half-smile.

The young man sprang up. “No! no!” he cried, “surely you won’t do that! Oh! how very unkind of you!”

She laughed outright. “Well, take it then,” she said, tossing it to him.

He replaced it hastily, and put the book back in the pocket of his coat.

“You are afraid I shall change my mind,” said Isoline.

“Yes, I am.”

She looked at him very softly. “But I shall not,” she said.

At this moment the door opened, and Howlie Seaborne came in carrying an armful of wood which he cast unceremoniously into a corner; when he had done this he addressed Harry. “Shall oi give yew one o’ Parson’s noightshirts?” he inquired, stopping a few paces from him and shouting as though a precipice lay between them.

“What?” said Harry, unable to assimilate his thoughts to the suddenness of the question.

“Be oi to give yew one o’ Parson’s noightshirts? The cook do say yew’re to sleep here, an’ yew haven’t got one roidin’ along o’ yew, have yew?”

“Oh, yes, do,” replied the young man, smiling, “if Mr. Lewis does not mind.”

“Howell,” said Isoline with a face of horror, “go away at once, and do not come back unless you are sent for. He is a dreadful creature,” she said, as the door closed behind him. “I cannot think how my uncle can employ such an odious boy.”

“But he is very amusing.”

“Oh, I do not think so.”

“Surely I know him,” continued Harry. “Isn’t he the boy who ran to Llangarth on the night of the riot and brought us the news at the Bull Inn? Of course! He must have something in him or he would not have done that. I must talk to him after.”

“You had better not,” said she. “He is sure to say something rude.”

“I suppose no one has ever heard anything more about Walters,” said he; “I hear they have almost given up searching for him. What does your uncle think about it, I wonder?”

“He says he must be half-way to Australia by this time.”

“I am afraid he is right,” said Harry, the wound Rhys had dealt his vanity smarting, as it always did, at the sound of his name.

“I do believe, if you had three wishes given you, like the people in story-books, one of them would be to catch that man.”

“Certainly it would.”

“Oh, but there is no use in wishing,” said Isoline, shaking her head and feeling quite original.

“Sometimes there is,” said Harry, looking at her. “I wished at the ball to be introduced to you, and I was, you see.”

“Yes, but if you had wished and done nothing else, it would not have happened,” she observed, feeling more original still.

“That is quite true, but, in your case, I was able to do something; I did everything I could in this one, and it was no use. Heavens! how I galloped up those lanes—just a few fields off behind this house too.”

The dark had closed in by this time and the dull flash of the Vicar’s lantern could be seen as he passed the window; he came into the study and stood warming his cold hands at the blaze. Harry rose deferentially.

“Do not move,” said the old man, pushing him back into his seat. “In a few minutes we will go into the other room and you shall explain your father’s business to me. It will not interest you, my dear, so you will excuse us,” he added, with a courtesy which was enhanced by his grey hair.

When they had left her, Isoline remained with her toes upon the fender in a brown study. She also was looking at pictures in the fire, but, whereas Fenton saw people, she only saw things.

Harry never enjoyed a meal much more than the supper he partook of that evening, though Isoline suffered many pangs as she cast her eyes over the plain fare before them; it must look so mean, she reflected, after the superior glories of the establishment presided over by Lady Harriet Fenton. She saw with satisfaction, however, that the guest ate heartily, and, with slight surprise, that he seemed to like her uncle’s company.

That the refinement of atmosphere surrounding one elderly person might blind the eyes to a darned tablecloth was one of those things the society to which she was fond of alluding had not taught her. That the glamour of a lovely face might turn the attention away from it, she had allowed herself to hope.

When the table was cleared and the large Prayer-book placed where the mince and poached eggs had stood, the cook and Howlie Seaborne, who was kept on till bed-time to look after Harry, came in and took their seats in the background. Isoline glanced flippantly across the room at the young man to see whether the homely ceremony would bring a smile to his lips. He caught her look, but the grave simplicity on his face made her avert her eyes and pretend that she had been examining the clock which stood behind him.

As she lay in bed that night thinking over the unlooked-for event of the afternoon, she admitted to herself that he was a much more puzzling person than she had supposed. When he left next morning two pairs of eyes followed him as he disappeared behind the church; one pair belonged to Miss Ridgeway, who was smiling at him from a window, and one to Howlie, who had, for the first time in his life, received a real shock. The shock was a pleasant one, for it had been occasioned by the silver half-crown which lay in his palm.

Llewellyn was the only person in the Waterchurch household who did not accept the episode of the cast shoe without misgiving, for Harry’s non-appearance had produced no surprise, the roads being bad and the Vicar of Crishowell hospitable. His vague dislike to Isoline Ridgeway had lately grown more positive, for a little rift had sprung between the two brothers since she had brought her disturbing presence across their way, and the fact that it was there proved to the younger one how great an influence he had over Harry’s thoughts. She was the first person who had ever thrust herself through the strong web of friendship which had held them for so many years. They had not exchanged a word about her since they had parted from her at the toll, which was in itself significant, but they knew each other too well to need words. There is no friend so close as the friend to whom one does not tell everything.

Llewellyn had a cooler head than Harry and a finer insight into people, and the want of breeding in Miss Ridgeway was as plain to him as possible. If she had been vulgarly pretty, with a strident voice and loud manner, he might even have disliked her less, but, as it was, he knew that her soul was vulgar, not her exterior; unlike most people, he could distinguish between the two. It was no jealousy of a possible wife who would take the first place in his brother’s mind which possessed him, for he had always foreseen the day when Harry would marry, and he himself have to take a modest place in the background, and he meant to do it gracefully. But not for Isoline, nor for one like her; that was beyond him. He cut savagely with the stick he carried at the things in the hedge.

The two young men had avoided each other all day, talking with almost boisterous cheerfulness when a third person was present, and finding urgent occupation in different directions the moment they were left alone. And now, as Llewellyn rounded a corner of the gardener’s cottage, they came face to face. An insane desire for action took him.

“For God’s sake don’t avoid me, Harry,” he exclaimed, running his arm through his brother’s. Harry turned red.

“I’m not avoiding you, Loo, but I don’t know what is the matter with you to-day. Is there anything wrong?”

Llewellyn hated fencing.

“I wish you wouldn’t go to Crishowell, Harry.”

The elder flared up like a match held over a lamp-chimney.

“Why shouldn’t I go, if I choose? What the devil has it got to do with you? Am I to get permission before I take my father’s messages?—‘Yes, sir, I will go if I can, but I must ask Llewellyn first.’—That would be splendid, wouldn’t it? Because I always forgot you were my younger brother, you’ve forgotten it too. It’s my fault, I know!”

Llewellyn dropped his arm as though the words had made it red-hot. His pride in Harry’s affection had always been so great that they were like a blow, and he had not the faintest consciousness of superiority to his brother to dull their effect.

“That’s true,” he said, with a quietness so false that it sobered Harry, “but it need never trouble you again—it can’t, for nothing will ever be the same now.”

And he opened the door of the kitchen-garden, and was through it and was hurrying along between the box-borders before the other had realized what had happened.

He stood for a moment looking after his brother, and then rushed to the door, knowing that every instant that kept them apart would widen the gulf that had opened between them. But it had slammed to, and, as there was something wrong with the latch, it had the habit of sticking tight and refusing to move when roughly handled. His pull had no more effect upon it than if it had been locked, and he tore and shook at the stubborn thing, feeling like a person in a nightmare whom inanimate objects conspire together to undo. Seeing that his fight with the latch was useless, he set off running round the garden wall to the entrance at its opposite end; it was open when he reached it, for Llewellyn had come through and was standing by a bed of Christmas roses whose draggled petals had evidently not recovered from the recent thaw.

“Loo! Loo! don’t go!” he cried as he saw him turn away. “Oh, Llewellyn! I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean it!”

The younger brother’s face was white, and he looked dumbly at the other.

“What a cur I am!” cried Harry, seizing his hand. “Don’t stare at me, Llewellyn—say something, for Heaven’s sake!”

“I should not have spoken,” said Llewellyn hoarsely.

“Say anything you like—anything, only forgive me! forgive me!” cried generous Harry.

Llewellyn’s hand, which had lain passive in his brother’s, began to tighten. “Don’t, Harry,” he said. “It’s all right. I will never say anything about it again. I had no right to interfere.”

“But that’s worse. It is terrible to think we can’t talk to each other. Just say out what you think, Loo, and I’ll listen; I haven’t been able to speak a word to you of late, but I wish we could have it out now.”

They were walking down the laurel shrubbery leading from the garden to the home farm, Llewellyn’s chief anxiety and the Squire’s dearest toy. The old wall which ran outside it smelt damp, a background of sodden red to the rank, shining leaves. A cock robin, whose figure had filled out considerably since the thaw, was sending forth his shrill, cold voice in recognition of this crowning mercy. The breath of rotting chrysanthemums came from the beds by the tool-house.

“How much do you really care for her?” asked Llewellyn after a pause.

“A lot!”

“But how much? More than Laura? More than Kitty Foster?”

“Oh, Laura! that was nothing. And Kitty Foster, that was different too.”

“But you were half mad about her once. Don’t you remember when she went away, what a state you were in and how you raged?”

“Ah, I was younger then,” replied Harry, with all the wisdom of his twenty-five years strong upon him.

“Is it because she is so pretty that you like Miss Ridgeway?” asked Llewellyn.

“That and heaps of other things.”

“Do you think she likes you?”

“Yes, I am nearly sure of it.”

“Well, then, I’m not,” said his brother shortly.

“But, my good man, how can you tell?” exclaimed Harry, rather nettled.

“She does not care for anything—at least, for nothing but herself.”

Harry was on the verge of flying out again, but he remembered the latch of the garden-door, and refrained.

“I know you are mistaken,” he said, “you can’t think how glad she was to see me yesterday.”

“I don’t doubt that,” replied the other dryly.

“But why do you doubt her liking me? I am not such a brute that no girl could look at me; I dare say I am no beauty, but, after all, I am neither lame nor a fright, nor hump-backed, nor crooked, nor squint-eyed, am I?”

Llewellyn laughed outright. “Hardly. But she’s a nobody, and you’re somebody, d’you see, Harry.”

“I did not know you cared about those sort of things,” remarked his brother scornfully.

“I’m not sure that I should if she were the right kind of girl. But I’m sure she isn’t. She thinks it would be a fine thing to be Mrs. Fenton, and I have no doubt she fancies you have lots of money, because you look smart and all that—she doesn’t understand how hard-up we are. I could guess that she was thinking about it that day on the coach.”

Harry was rather impressed.

“Of course it’s a grand thing for her having you dangling about; girls like that sort of thing, I know. But I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“One can’t look at any one else when she’s there,” sighed the other.

“Then don’t go there. I wish you could keep away from that place for a little bit, then you might forget her. And if you couldn’t,” added the astute Llewellyn, “after all, she will be there for ever so long and you will have plenty of chances of going to Hereford when she returns to her aunt. Try, Harry.”

The younger brother’s influence had always been so strong that the elder was never entirely free from it; he had looked at things for so many years of boyhood through Llewellyn’s eyes, that he had never quite lost the habit, though the separation which manhood brought them had weakened it a little.

“Well, I shan’t have any pretext for going to Crishowell for some time,” he said slowly. “You’ve made me rather miserable.”

Llewellyn said no more, but he felt that he had gained something.

[CHAPTER XV
THE BEGINNING]

GEORGE WILLIAMS’ education had been a very elementary and spasmodic thing. In days of comparative prosperity, when he was a small boy, he had learned to read and write and add up a little, but his mother’s widowhood had sent him out to field-work at an age when the village urchins of the present day are still wrestling with the fourth “standard.”

That most irksome of all tools, the pen, was lying before him on the box which served as a table, and he stared sorrowfully at it and the cheap ink-pot beside it; now and then he took himself sternly by the front hair as though to compel his brain to come to the assistance of his hand.

The cottage was very quiet, and the door stood open to let in what remained of the afternoon light. Below Rhys, who had spent the whole of the preceding night out of doors, was making up for lost sleep upon his pile of sheepskins, for, since his recovery, Williams’ bedding had been restored to its rightful place. The brook gurgled outside. He shoved the paper away impatiently and sat back in his chair. All his efforts had only resulted in two words which faced him on the otherwise blank sheet. He laid his unlighted pipe down on them, for he heard Rhys’ footsteps upon the ladder below the flooring, and he did not want him to see what he had written. The two words were “Dere Mary.”

The composition of this letter had hung over him for some days, for, besides his poor scholarship, he was one of those people whose powers of expression are quite inadequate to their need of expressing. He knew this very well, and it depressed him a good deal. He had made up his mind to ask Mary Vaughan to be his wife.

It is doubtful whether five people out of every ten who contemplate marrying do so from devotion pure and absolute, so in this George was no worse than many of his neighbours. He certainly was not in love with Mary, for he could hardly tell whether he would be glad or sorry if she refused him, but he was inclined to think, sorry. His main reason, which swallowed up any other, was pity—pity and the longing to protect a stricken creature. The type of theorist perfect in all points except discrimination in human nature would have smiled deprecatingly and assured him that he was a fool, that what had happened once must inevitably happen twice, and that he would be like the man in Æsop’s fable who had warmed a frozen viper on his hearth and been bitten for his pains. But he knew better. That Mary was not a light woman he could see easily—so easily indeed that he had never given the matter the consideration of a moment. He merely knew it. Also there lurked in him an odd feeling which one might almost call an economical one; they had both made a terrible muddle of their lives and gone the wrong ways to their own undoing, and if they could but convert their two mistakes into one success, it would be a distinct gain. He was a lonely man too, and the presence of a young and comely woman in his home would be very pleasant to him. He wondered whether she liked him much—he did not for an instant fancy that she loved him, for he knew that her heart was dead inside her, and he was quite unconscious that one thing that drew him to her was his complete understanding of her. It is a kindness we do when we really understand another human being—given a not ignoble one—and the doing of a kindness produces affection more surely than the receiving of one. The chief drawback to his plan was his bondage to the Pig-driver, for until that was over he could not marry; but he was putting by little sums earned with his hedging and ditching and other journeyman work, and on these he hoped they might start their married life when he had served his time with Bumpett. Could he make money enough to pay his debts to his taskmaster he would break with him at once, knowing that the old man in exposing his thefts would have to expose his own also. But his earnings were so small that all these were only forlorn hopes.

Rhys came up through the trap-door under the sacks. As he appeared in the doorway of the partition George saw that he had a stick in his hand.

“You’re not thinking to go out, surely?” he remarked.

“I am,” was the short reply.

“But the light’s not gone yet; you’ll be collared one of these days,” said Williams, more as a sop to his own conscience than from any interest.

“If I don’t care, you needn’t.”

“I don’t—not a damn,” replied Williams; “you can get clapped into prison any day you like.”

Walters left the house in so reckless a humour that he scarce bestowed a precautionary glance on his surroundings when he crossed the plank, and as the old cart-road led only to the most carefully avoided place within, possibly, a hundred miles, he was the less inclined to thwart his mood. Though the dusk had barely begun to confuse distant outlines, he strolled carelessly up the hillside, his mind full of irritated contempt for George. It was hard to him that a man of his intelligence and standing should have to tolerate the society of a clown, one whose sole merit of brute strength was unillumined by any ray of good feeling or geniality. When he arrived at the bit of scrubby ground by the Pedlar’s Stone, he turned and looked down the track he had ascended towards the valley.

On either side lay the slope, unbroken except by ragged bushes and briers; out of one of these which clothed a bank stuck the Pedlar’s Stone. It looked sinister enough thrusting its black form through the thorns. A little way beyond was the rock under which the Pig-driver had made so snug a larder, and two or three slabs not unlike it were scattered round. He sat down upon one of them; there were limits to his imprudence, and he did not mean to venture farther away until the light had completely gone. Night outside had of late become as familiar to him as day, the sleeping world as important as the waking one; he felt almost like a man endued with an extra sense, for that half of life which for the healthy sleepers of the earth is simply cut out, was a living reality to him. The gulf of oblivion which divides one day from another for most people was ceasing to exist, and in its place was a time with its own aspects and divisions, its own set of active living creatures whose spheres of work belonged properly to the darkness and stillness. He had a feeling of double life. Eastern ascetics whose existences are spent in lonely places, in vigils, in silence, in the fastnesses of strange hills, know this. To the Western mind, so curiously incapable of understanding anything which does not assail it through its body, and which has such a strange pride in its own limitations, such things are folly. But the double life is there, the pulsations of knowledge which can be dimly heard through that receptiveness of mind born of long silence, and though Rhys knew it as little as do most of his nation, he had a dim consciousness of change. That the quietness of night soothed him was all he understood or ever would understand; he longed for it to come as he sat looking over the fading landscape. And it was coming—coming as surely as that other influence of which he did not dream, but which even then stood behind him.

A sound aroused him; he turned with dismay and saw that he was not alone. He sprang up and found himself face to face with a woman. A glance showed him that she was a stranger, and though he was dismayed at the consequences of his rashness, it was reassuring to see from her manner that she was entirely occupied with her own affairs.

“I beg your pardon,” she began, “I am sorry to interrupt you, but I am in trouble. I have wandered about for I cannot tell how long—hours, I think—and I have lost myself. I am so tired.” There was almost a sob in her voice as she sank upon the stone on which Rhys had been sitting. “I beg of you, sir, to show me the way back to Crishowell.”

She was stooping down and holding her ankle in her hand as though it hurt her; her boots were thin and cut in places, and the mud had almost turned them from their original black to brown. She was evidently young, though her thick veil hid her features, and her clothes were absurdly unsuited to her surroundings.

“Oh, my foot!” she exclaimed, “I have hurt my foot. Something ran into it as I came through those bushes.”

Rhys looked down.

“It is bleeding,” he said, noticing a reddish spot which was soaking through the mud. “Your boots are not strong enough for such places.”

“I did not mean to come up here. I went for a walk from my uncle’s house in Crishowell. I only intended to go a little distance up the hill, but I could not find my way back, and there was no one to direct me after I had passed the village. Does nobody live about here?”

“Not near here, certainly,” he replied.

“And how far do you think I am from Crishowell?”

“About three miles.”

“Three miles!” exclaimed the girl, hardly restraining her tears. “How can I ever get home? And with this foot, too.”

“Perhaps a thorn has gone into it,” he suggested. “If you will take off your boot I’ll look and see what is wrong.”

She bent down and began to unfasten it. Rhys looked anxiously about them and saw with satisfaction that the dusk had increased and would soon have fallen completely. He knelt down in front of her, and she straightened herself wearily, glad for her gloved fingers to escape the mud. When he pulled off the boot she gave a little cry of pain, and he looked up at her. She had put back her veil, and for the first time he saw her face. A look of admiration came into his own. She read the expression behind his eyes as she might have read the story in a picture, and it affected her like a draught of wine. Her fatigue was almost forgotten; she only felt that she was confronted by one of the most attractive and uncommon-looking of men, and that he admired her.

“Can you see anything in my foot?” she inquired, lowering her eyes.

He examined it carefully.

“There’s a very long thick thorn; it has run in nearly half-an-inch. I’m likely to hurt you pulling it out, but out it must come.”

“Very well,” she said.

He took out his knife.

“Oh, what are you going to do?” she cried in alarm.

“There’s a small pair of pincers in it. It will be best to use that.”

Isoline shut her eyes and drew her breath quickly; as the thorn came out she shuddered and put out her hand.

“I am afraid you must think me a great coward,” she faltered. “You would not behave like that, I am sure.”

“I am not so delicate as you. You ought never to trust yourself in these rough places alone.”

“And now I have all these three miles to go alone in the dark, and I am so afraid. I may meet cows or animals of some kind. Look how dark it has become.”

“If you will rest a little I will go with you part of the way. I can’t come as far as Crishowell, but I’ll take you till we can see a farm-house where they’ll give you a lantern and a man to carry it before you to the village.”

“Oh, thank you. How very kind you are.”

He laughed. “Am I?” he said. “’Tis a mighty disagreeable piece of business for me, isn’t it?”

There are many ways of conveying admiration, and Rhys’ voice was expressive.

Isoline was engaged with her boot, and he sat down beside her on the rock. It was almost dark.

Like all who saw Rhys Walters for the first time she was considerably puzzled to know who and what he might be, and his surroundings gave no clue to his position. His clothes were good, being his own, for though Bumpett had counselled him to borrow from George, he would never condescend to wear anything belonging to him. He spoke well when he gave himself the trouble, and Isoline, who was not as discriminating as she might have been, admired his assurance.

Since the young man had been in hiding he had heard little of what was going on in the neighbourhood, George being uncommunicative, and it was only occasionally that he saw the Pig-driver. His beautiful companion puzzled him as much as he puzzled her, for he knew that, had he seen her face before, he could never have forgotten it.

His safety now lay in the possibility of her not describing him to any one, and he would have to secure her promise of silence, a precarious barrier indeed between him and detection. It had been the thousand chances to one against his meeting any one at that hour and place, but the one chance had turned up and confounded him. He was running perilously near the rocks.

“I think I ought to be starting for home,” said Isoline’s voice at his side after some time. “I am rested, and my foot is hardly painful since you have taken the thorn out. You have been very kind to me,” she added softly.

“Well, be grateful to me.”

“Oh, I am indeed.”

“Then stay a little longer to show it,” he said boldly, “it’s such a treat to look at a face like yours.”

“Why, you cannot see me in this darkness,” replied Isoline, tossing her head, but apparently regarding his remark as perfectly natural.

“But I know you are there, and when you are gone, who can tell when I shall see you again? You don’t know how terribly I’d like to.”

There was real feeling in his voice.

She was rather taken aback. “Who are you?” she said suddenly.

“If you will tell me your name I will tell you mine.”

“I am Miss Isoline Ridge way, and my uncle is Mr. Lewis, the Vicar of Crishowell.”

“I don’t know him,” said Rhys. “I am a stranger.”

“You have not told me who you are,” said the girl, after a silence in which he was preparing his answer.

“I’m called Kent—Robert Kent,” he replied, giving the name of a boy who had been at school with him.

“That sounds very romantic,” observed Isoline; “like an outlaw or a murderer in a tale.”

Rhys winced in the darkness.

“I must go now,” she said, rising. “You will come with me?”

“That I will—as far as I can. Tell me, am I never to see you any more?”

“I am sure I don’t know,” she replied, turning away.

“Would you ever care to set eyes on me again?” He took her hand, and she did not draw it away from him.

“Yes, I think I should.”

“Then promise never to tell any one I met you here.”

“Oh, I will not say anything.”

“It’s a promise, then. Give me your two hands on it.”

She held out the other, and he kissed them both.

“Will you come back here some day soon?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

“Oh, I couldn’t. And I should never find my way.”

“You could if I told you how to. You could ask for the farm I am going to take you to, and then ’twould be only a little bit further; and none can see you these dark evenings.”

“I must go,” she said; “don’t ask me such things.”

The night was, by this time, lying on the hillsides like a black cloth, and they crossed the rough turf, Isoline tripping and knocking her unaccustomed feet against the stones. A thrill went through Rhys as she took his arm at his suggestion; she could feel his heart beating against her hand. It was very interesting, she thought, and she hardly regretted having lost herself, though she had been frightened enough at the time.

They walked along the high ground until the lighted windows of a farm were visible on a slope below them, and then began to descend; at the outer side of a wall they stopped. “I can’t come any further,” he said, “but I’ll help you over this. There’s the house, straight in front of us. Tell them you’ve missed your road, and ask them to send a man with a light.”

He took her by the waist, and lifted her on to the top of the wall, then swung himself over and stood before her on the inside of the enclosure. “If you come back,” he said, “and keep straight on above this along the hillside, you’ll get to the place where I met you to-night. Do you see?”

She made no answer. She would not slip down from her seat for fear of falling into his arms.

“I shall wait there every evening at dusk,” said Rhys, looking up at her through the blackness.

“Let me go, please let me go!”

He put up his arms and lifted her down.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“But you will think of it,” he begged, detaining her.

She shook herself free and flitted like a shadow into the night. The word “Perhaps” floated back to him through the dark.

He stood for some time looking at the twinkling light of the farm; soon a large steady one emerged from it, moving forward slowly, and he guessed that Isoline’s lantern-bearer was piloting her home. The light wound along, leaving a shine behind it, against which he could see the dark outline of some moving thing, turned, wavered at the place where he knew there was a gate, and finally disappeared. He climbed to the high ground and set his face in the direction of the Pedlar’s Stone. Though pitch dark, it was still early, which made him anxious to get back to the shelter of its ill-omened presence, for his feeling of security had been shaken.

In spite of this he went along with the tread of a man who is light of heart, his head full of the fascinating personality whose existence had been unknown to him a few hours before, but whose appearing had let loose a whole flock of new possibilities. He thought of her voice, of her little slender feet, of the brilliant face that had dawned upon him through the dusk with the turning back of her veil, of her pretty gesture of terror as she saw him draw out his knife; he went over in his mind each word she had said to him since the instant he had sprung up from the rock and found her standing behind him. Even her very name was a revelation of delicacy and ornament; Isoline—Isoline—Isoline—he said it over to himself again and again; it was to the Janes and Annes of his experience as a hothouse flower is to cottage herbs, a nightingale’s song to the homely chatter of starlings, a floating breath from the refinements which exist apart from the rough utilities of the world. He sighed impatiently as another face thrust itself between him and his new ideal. To think that he had ever supposed himself dominated by it! Mary’s eyes had once illumined him, Mary’s personality held his senses and feelings, but he laughed at himself for his blindness in having picked up a wayside pebble and imagined it a jewel.

Rhys had a certain amount of imagination, and femininity in one shape or another had been a necessity to him all his life; part of the repulsion he had often felt for his mother was due to the systematic way in which she had divested herself of every shred of feminine attraction in domestic life. This had not come to her as the result of Puritanic sympathies. Before religion had taken hold upon her the romance of all womanhood, of love, of marriage, of motherhood, had been an offence. She approved of people who led happy married lives, but it was an approval of the conventionality of the relationship; that the husband should remain the lover, the wife the mistress, was an idea to be dismissed with scorn. Marriage was a duty, and woman’s personal attraction a quality to be reduced to the level of handsome domestic furniture, a credit to the home which contained it. That a married man and woman of more than a year’s standing should be in love with each other was more than an absurdity, it was almost an indecency. Since he had been able to think at all, Rhys had dimly felt this, for it is a frame of mind of whose existence in a woman no masculine human being is ever quite unconscious. When he had grown old enough to understand it, it had given him a violent push in the opposite direction, and set his adolescent brain in a flame.

It was so dark when he reached the Pedlar’s Stone that he had to grope about among the bushes to find it, and he traced his way from it with difficulty to the rock on which he and Isoline had sat. He would come there the next evening and the evening after—every day until the early rising moon should make it impossible. He began to reckon up the calendar on his fingers, trying to make out how many light nights there would be in the following month; February had begun, and the days were lengthening slowly, but by the middle of March there would be no more chances of meeting. Though she had only said “Perhaps,” his hopes were rampant, for he had not been accustomed to neglect where women were concerned. He did not undervalue the risk he was running by putting himself in the power of a girl’s idle tongue, yet he never hesitated; he was like the miner who will not be deterred from lighting his pipe in the danger-laden atmosphere of the mine. He was a cautious man in ordinary things; it had taken him some time to make up his mind to join Rebecca, and, when he had done so, he had arranged an elaborate scheme for his own security instead of trusting to luck with his companions. But the life of successful hiding which he now lived was making him reckless, and where a woman was in the question he had always been ready to throw common-sense to the winds. He did not trouble himself to think what the end of this unexpected interest might be; in any case it would put a zest into the constrained life he led just as sheep-stealing had done. Would she forget him or refuse to return to the Pedlar’s Stone? That was the only anxiety he had, but it was a very half-hearted one, for he felt sure she would not. A future of pleasant dallying lay indefinitely before him, he hoped, with the prospect of a voyage, when the Pig-driver should assure him that all was quiet, and a new life begun in a new country.

His regret for Mary had vanished utterly. As he had been to Crishowell church once or twice, he knew Mr. Lewis perfectly by sight, and the irony of things made him smile as he realized that, in his own former respectable personality of Mr. Walters of Great Masterhouse, he could never have hoped to speak to the Vicar’s lovely niece. He was a farmer, he reflected, she a lady, not knowing that no circumstances in this world could have made Isoline Ridgeway a gentlewoman. It pleased him to find that, as he had slipped from his original and obvious surroundings, she had evidently taken him for a man of her own class. His feeling of exhilaration made him wish for some one to whom he might pour out the praises of Isoline; in presence of a companion the thought of her would have loosened his tongue like wine mounting to his brain. He longed to shout, to cry her beauty aloud, to flaunt it and her condescension to him in the faces of other men, but there was no one he could speak to except a dull yokel, to whom the very name of love would convey nothing but the most ordinary instincts. It was hard; but he felt that, in spite of all his misfortunes, he was in the better case of the two. He could at least appreciate the high pleasures open to humanity, for his soul was not bounded by the petty fence of commonplace which enclosed George and shut out his view of life’s loftier things.

He comforted himself with that; yet, as he sat on the rock, his mind filled with the radiance left by Isoline, the picture of the sheep-stealer’s unemotional face, set in the ugly framing of the cottage walls, seemed to him like the shadow of some sordid implement of labour against a moonlit landscape.

One must pay for everything in this world; even high-mindedness costs its owner something.

[CHAPTER XVI
IN WHICH GEORGE PROVES TO BE BUT HUMAN]

THE letter which had presented such difficulties to George was finished at last, and while Rhys was sitting with Isoline upon the rock, he was trudging down to Crishowell with it in his pocket. At the village he captured a stray urchin to whom he confided it, promising him a penny, which was to be paid on the following day at twelve o’clock; the boy was to go to the blacksmith’s shop, where his patron would await the expected answer. He did not tell him to bring it to the cottage, as, since Rhys’ arrival, he had strongly discouraged all visitors.

“Dere Mary,” he had written, “I write these few lines hopeing you wil not take it il ’tis trewly ment. Dere Mary, wil you have me? What is dun is dun and can’t be undun so take hart. I wil be a good husband and love you well never doute it.

“Yours trewly,

“GEORGE WILLIAMS.”

When the letter reached its destination, Mary was looking out of the diamond-paned window of the toll-house, and as she opened the door to the boy’s knock, he thrust it into her hand, telling her he would come for the answer in the morning. She took it in, and went up with it to the little room where she slept, for there was no light in the kitchen. Lighting a tallow dip which stood in a tin candlestick, she sat down, spreading the paper out in front of her; a letter was such an unusual thing in her experience that she opened it with a sort of misgiving. She read it to the end hurriedly, as hurriedly as her inefficiency and the cramped handwriting would permit, but it was so exceedingly surprising that she could hardly take it in; it lay on the table in the circle of yellow light, a dumb, yet disturbing thing, knocking like an unbidden guest at the closed door of her heart. It brought the strong face of the man with the bill-hook before her, an intruder, almost a vision of fear.

She felt that it was incumbent upon her to feel something, but what she could not tell, and she laughed as she folded the letter and pushed it underneath the candlestick. When she went down again to the kitchen where the new toll-keeper and his wife were sitting, they looked at her with solemn curiosity, such as was due to the recipient of a letter, but she made no allusion to it, and went up early to bed after supper, leaving the two by the fire.

Before putting out the light, she read George’s proposal over again, and repeated it to herself as she lay in her attic with her eyes on the patch of starlit sky which filled the window high up in the roof. How often she had lain there, with her little child in her arms, and watched the handle of the Plough describing its quarter-circle on the heavens. She remembered that and buried her face in the pillow. She wondered whether there was any one in the world so entirely alone as herself, and though she thought with gratitude of the couple sleeping peacefully in the room off the kitchen below, she knew very well that she had no place in their lives. The world—that void peopled with strangers—confronted her, and she had no more spirit left with which to meet it, for her arms were empty of the burden that alone had given her courage.

The excitement which comes upon nervous people at night in the presence of difficulties took hold of her; one bugbear after another pressed upon her brain, and though the attic was cold, she sat up as the hours went by, feverish with contending thoughts, and saw the whiteness of the letter lying on a chair under the window.

It would be a solution to many anxieties, though hardly the one she would have chosen; but beggars cannot be choosers, and she allowed herself to dwell upon the idea, with the result that as it grew more familiar, it also grew less formidable. She did not want to marry—why could he not give her his friendship only, with no thought of any other relationship? She needed that, and since it had been offered, the knowledge of it had been a greater support than she could have supposed. On first reading the letter she had lost the sense of this, but now it came back, and George’s calm personality was a soothing thing to think about. She shut her eyes, and brought back to her mind that terrible hour by the river, and all he had done for her. He had gone with her to the toll-house door that day, and left her taking with him a promise that she would never attempt her own life again.

The restraint of the letter gave her confidence. She felt that, had he made a declaration of love as well as an offer of marriage, she could not have listened to it for a moment; she had had enough of love, were it false love or true. If he married her he would be marrying her out of pity, and she almost thought that she liked and trusted him enough to accept the fact. Had he asked for love she could not have pretended to give it him. But he had asked for nothing. It was like a business proposal, so dispassionate was it. He had said, “I wil love you well never doute it,” but that gave promise of the loyal affection of a tried companion, not the passion of a lover for the woman loved, and it demanded nothing in return, not even gratitude, though she felt that she could and would give him plenty of that. She would have a home, and she did not doubt that it would be a better one than many a woman got whose domestic relations were considered fortunate. The quiet of the thought calmed her, and she fell asleep while she turned over the restful possibility in her mind.