It was not the chaise of timorous-hearted Mr. Tew, but of hot-tempered Sir Humphrey Button, which the young highwayman had so valorously bidden to halt.
At the last moment Mr. Tew had been accosted by an old friend whom he had not seen for a number of years, and had been easily persuaded to put off his departure for another hour in order to talk over bygone days, and discuss a jorum or two of punch with him.
Our young friend was not long in coming to himself, and mightily surprised and discomposed he was at finding his waist firmly encircled by a sinewy arm, and to dimly discern a pair of eyes gazing intently into his own--his head was reclining on the stranger's shoulder--through the orifices of a crape mask. He was bareheaded, and his own mask had come unfastened and had fallen off. For a moment or two he felt dazed, and could not make out what had happened to him. Then in a flash he recalled everything. With a quick, resentful movement he drew himself away from the stranger's clasp, and set his back as stiff as a ramrod. For all that, his cheek was aflame with blushes, but the kindly night hid them.
"Thank you very much," he said in freezing accents, "but I am all right now. I was never taken like it before, and trust I never shall be again. It was too ridiculous."
"Let us hope that you were more startled than hurt," said the other. "For all that, it was a close shave."
With that he swung himself off his horse, and, going a yard or two down the road, he picked up the youngster's hat and mask.
"There's a bullet-hole through the brim," he remarked, as he handed him his property. "Yes, a very close shave indeed." Then, as he proceeded to remount his horse, he added with a mellow laugh, "If an old professor may venture an opinion, you are a prentice hand at this sort of business."
"Yes, indeed. This is my first adventure of the kind, and I am quite sure it will be my last. If you are under the impression," he continued, with a touch of hauteur which seemed to become him naturally, "that the object of my adventure to-night was merely the replenishing of my pockets by the emptying of those of somebody else, you were never more mistaken. My intent was not money or jewels, but to obtain possession of a will--of a most iniquitous will--the destruction of which would have the effect of righting a great wrong. Unhappily, my attempt has failed, and the wrong will never be righted. I mistook my man. The traveller in the chaise was not the person I was expecting.Hehas doubtless made up his mind to stay the night at Appleford."
"A very wise resolve on his part, considering how unsafe the King's highway is for honest folk after dark," retorted the elder man, with his careless laugh. "But tell me this, young sir. Even if you had succeeded in getting possession of the will and destroying it, what would there have been to hinder the testator from having a fresh one drawn up in precisely similar terms?"
"Merely the fact that he is given up by the doctors, and that, in the event of the first will having been destroyed, he would not have lived to have a second one drawn up and signed. At any moment he may breathe his last. Possibly he is dead already."
"Your heroic attempt to right a great wrong is of a nature to appeal to every generous heart. Such being the case, it will not, perhaps, be deemed presumptuous on my part to suggest that where you have failed it is just possible that I might succeed. Should you, therefore, be pleased to accept of my services, I beg to assure you that they are yours to command." Here he removed his hat and swept the youngster a low bow.
The other hesitated for a few moments, as hardly knowing in what terms to reply, but when he did speak it was with no lack of decision. "From the bottom of my heart I thank you, sir, for your offer, which I assure you I appreciate at its full value; but, for certain reasons which I am not at liberty to explain, it is quite out of the question that I should avail myself of it."
"In that case, there is nothing more to be said. Will it be deemed an impertinence on my part if I ask in what direction you are now bound?"
Neither of them had noticed a huge black cloud which had been gradually creeping up the sky, and which at this moment burst in a deluge of rain. As by mutual consent, the two men who had so strangely come together pricked up their horses and sought such shelter as the plantation afforded from the downpour.
Then said the younger man in reply to the other's question: "What I am anxious to do is to find my way into the Whinbarrow road, after which I shall manage well enough."
"Do you know the way to it from here?"
"No more than a dead man."
"It's an awkward road to hit on after dark, and you might flounder about till daybreak without finding it. In five minutes from now what little moonlight there's left will be swallowed up by this confounded rain-cloud, after which it will be as dark as the nethermost pit. On such a night for you, a stranger, to attempt to find the Whinbarrow road would be the sheerest madness."
"What, then, do you recommend me to do?"
"I will tell you. Not more than three miles from here stands a lonely house among the moors, Rockmount by name. Its owner, a solitary, is a man well advanced in years--a scholar and a bookworm. But although leading such a secluded life, his door is open day and night to any one who--like yourself--has lost his way, or who craves the shelter of his roof on any account whatever. To Rockmount you must now hie you and put Mr. Ellerslie's hospitality to the proof: that you will not do so in vain I am well assured. I know the way and will gladly guide you there. Come, let us lose no more time. This cursed rain shows no signs of leaving off."
"But if this part of the country is so well known to you," urged the other, "why not direct me the way I want to go, instead of pressing me--and at this hour of the night--to intrude on the hospitality of a stranger?"
"There are two, if not more, very sufficient reasons why I am unable to oblige you in this matter," responded the other dryly. "In the first place, I could not direct you, as you call it, into the Whinbarrow road. On such a night as this no directions would avail you; I should have to lead you there, and plant the nose of your mare straight up the road before leaving you. In the second place, my way lies in an opposite direction. Matters of moment need my presence elsewhere, and before the first cock begins to crow I must be a score miles from here."
As if to bar any further discussion in the matter, he took hold of the bridle of the other's horse and, leading the way out of the plantation, started off at an easy canter up the road in the direction taken by the chaise. The younger man offered no opposition to the proceeding.
He seemed little more than a boy, and the night's adventures had fluttered his nerves. To go wandering about in the pitch-dark, hunting for a road that was wholly strange to him--not one of the great highways, which he could hardly have missed, but a narrow cross-country turnpike which had nothing to distinguish it from half-a-dozen other roads--was more than he was prepared to do. He felt like one in a half-dream; all that had happened during the last hour had an air of unreality; he was himself, and yet not himself. To-night's business seemed to separate him by a huge gap both from yesterday and to-morrow. His will was in a state of partial suspension; he allowed himself to be led blindly forward, he neither knew nor greatly cared whither.
Before long they turned sharply to the left up a rutted and stony cart-track, which apparently led right into the heart of the moors. Here they could only go slowly, trusting in a great measure to the instinct and surefootedness of their horses. The highwayman still kept hold of the other's bridle. The rain had in some measure abated, and a rift in the clouds low down in the east was slowly broadening.
Not a word had passed between them since they left the plantation. But now, as if the silence had become irksome to him, the man with the crape mask burst into song. His voice was a full, clear baritone:
"Oh, kiss me, Childe Lovel," she breathes in his ear;"Night's shadows flee fast, the moon's drown'd in the mere."He turns his head slowly. "Christ! what is't I see?A demon rides with me!" shrieks Ellen O'Lee.
When he had come to the end of the verse, he drew forth his snuff-box, tapped it, opened it, and with a little bow proffered it to his companion.
The moon had come out again, dim and watery, by this time, and they were now enabled to see each other so far as outlines and movements were concerned, although the more minute points of each other's appearance were still to some extent conjectural.
"Bien oblige, monsieur," replied the younger man, "but snuff-taking is an acquirement--I ought, perhaps, to say an accomplishment--to which as yet I cannot lay claim, and, in so far, my education may be said to be incomplete."
"'Tis a necessary part of a gentleman's curriculum--a pinch of Rappee or good Kendal Brown serves at once to soothe the nerves, disperse the vapors, and enliven the brain. But you are young yet, my dear sir--oh, les beaux jours de la jeunesse!--and, with luck, have many years before you for the cultivation of a habit which, unlike other habits I could name, the older you grow the more quiet satisfaction you derive from the practice of it. Amid the straits and disappointments of life, when his fortunes are at their lowest, and his fair-weather friends have fallen one by one away, many a man draws his truest consolation from his snuff-box."
"You speak like one grown old both in years and experience," said the other laughingly. He was recovering hissang-froid, and, the failure of his enterprise notwithstanding, was beginning to enjoy the adventure for the adventure's sake.
The highwayman gave vent to an audible sigh. "Experience keeps a dear school," he said, "and 'tis only fools who fail to learn at it."
And so for a time they rode on in silence. Then said the younger man, "You seem to know your way hereabouts pretty well."
"The home of my youth was no great distance away, and, as a lad, I wandered over these moors and fells till I grew to know them, as one might say, by heart."
"Have we much farther to go, may I ask?"
"Another ten minutes will bring us to our destination." With that he proceeded to remove his mask and stuff it into one of his pockets.
For a little while they jogged along side by side without speaking. The tract of country they were traversing was wild and desolate in the extreme. On every side stretched the bare swelling moorland--bare save for the short sparse grass and the many-hued mosses which grew in its hollows and more sheltered places, but left naked its huge ribs and bosses of granite, which showed through the surface in every direction, and seemed to crave the decent burial which only some great cataclysm of nature could give them. Here and there at wide intervals a narrow track-way unwound itself like a dusky ribbon till it was lost in the distance. These rude by-roads had been in use for more centuries than history or tradition knew of, and served to connect one outlying hamlet with another. Over them from time to time paced great droves of cattle and sheep on their way to one or other of the frequent fairs which in those days, far more than now, brought the country-side together and formed one of the most distinctive features of English rural life.
"Here we are at last," said the highwayman, as an indefinite mass of black buildings loomed vaguely before them--for the rain was over and gone, and the moon was again shining in a clear sky--which presently, as they drew nearer, took on the shape of a long, low, two-storied house, with a high-pitched roof and twisted chimneys, and having a group of detached outbuildings in the rear.
As they reined in their horses a few yards from the low wall, which enclosed a space of rank and untended shrubbery, the younger horseman saw, not without a sense of misgiving, that the whole front of the house was in darkness. Not the faintest glimmer of light was anywhere visible.
"And do you mean to tell me," he asked in a low voice, for a sense of night and darkness was upon him, "that this desolate and out-of-the-world spot is any one's home?"
"It is the home of Mr. Cope-Ellerslie, as I have already remarked."
"How far away is Mr. Ellerslie's nearest neighbor?"
"Four good miles, as the crow flies. But he is a recluse and a student, and the loneliness of Rockmount was probably his main inducement for becoming its tenant."
"In any case, we are too late to-night to claim his hospitality. There is not a light anywhere visible."
"You mean that there's none to be seen from where we are standing," retorted the highwayman dryly. "But that's no proof Mr. Ellerslie's abed. He's a genuine nightbird, and often does not go to roost before daybreak, so busy is he over his studies of one kind or another."
At another time the younger man might have wondered how his law-breaking companion had acquired such an intimate knowledge of the habits of the recluse of Rockmount, but just then he had other things to think about.
"Follow me," said the highwayman, and with that he walked his horse round a corner of the house, to where a large bow window, invisible before, bulged out from the main building.
"That is the window of Mr. Ellerslie's study," he resumed. "You can see by the light shining through the circular openings at the top of the shutters that he is still at work."
"That may be," rejoined the other, "but doubtless all his household are asleep long ago, and rather than disturb Mr. Ellerslie himself at such an hour I would----"
"What a fastidious young cock-o'-wax you are!" broke in the elder man. "Do you think I would have brought you here if there had been nobody but Mr. E. to the fore? As I happen to know, his old manservant never on any account goes to bed before his master. Him we shall find as wide awake as an owl at midnight. Follow me."
He led the way back to where a ramshackle, loosely-hung gate, merely on latch, gave admittance to a gravelled path which led up to a small carriage-sweep in front of the house, on reaching which, at the instance of the highwayman, they both dismounted. Then going up to the door, he lifted the massive knocker and struck three resounding blows with it slowly one after the other; after which, going back to his companion, he said, "Here, young sir, we must part."
"But not, I trust, before you have told me to whom I am indebted for the very great service you have rendered me to-night."
A bitter laugh broke from the other. "My real name," he said, "is that of a broken and ruined man, whom the world already has well-nigh forgotten. That by which I am customarily known nowadays is--Captain Nightshade, at your service."
The younger man showed no trace of surprise. "I suspected as much from the first," he said. "In this part of the country only onegentlemanof the road does us the honor of taking toll of us. The rest are scum--mere vulgar ruffians, ripe for the gallows-tree."
"Sir, you flatter me"--with a grave inclination of the head. "May I, in my turn, if it be not deemed an impertinence, ask to whom I am indebted for an hour of the pleasantest companionship it has been my good fortune to enjoy for many a long day?"
"Myname? Hum! I must consider. By the way, you remarked a little while ago, and very truly, that, as far as your profession was concerned, I was a prentice hand. Suppose, then, that you call me Jack Prentice. 'Twill serve as well as another."
"Mr. Jack Prentice let it be, with all my heart. 'Tis a name I shall not forget. Ah! here comes somebody in answer to my summons." And, indeed, there was a noise as of the undoing of the bolts and bars of the massive door, which, a few seconds later, was opened wide, disclosing a gray-haired serving-man in a faded livery, who stood there staring into the darkness, shielding with one hand a lighted candle which he carried in the other.
Captain Nightshade strode up to the door, and in his easy, off-hand way said, "You are one of Mr. Ellerslie's servants, I presume?"
"I be," answered the old man laconically.
"Then be good enough to present my compliments to your master, the compliments of a neighbor--hem!--and tell him there's a young gentleman at the door who has been belated on the moors and craves the hospitality of Rockmount for the remainder of the night."
Mr. Jack Prentice had followed close on the captain's heels, and, as the candlelight shone full on the latter's face, he had now, for the first time, an opportunity of seeing what the noted highwayman was like. What he saw was a long, lean, brown face, the face of an ascetic it might almost have been termed, had it not been contradicted by a pair of black, penetrating eyes of extraordinary brilliancy, and by a mobile, changeable mouth which rarely wore the same expression for three minutes at a time. His rounded, massive chin seemed a little out of keeping with the rest of his features, as though it belonged of right to another type of face. His high nose, thin and curved, with its fine nostrils, lent him an air of breeding and distinction. In figure he was tall and sinewy. His black hair, tied into a queue not more than half the size of his companion's, showed no trace of powder. His prevailing expression might be said to be one of almost defiant recklessness mingled with a sort of cynical good-humor. It was as though into an originally noble nature a drop of subtle poison had been distilled, which had served to muddy and discolor it, so that it no longer reflected things in their true proportions, without having been able to more than partially corrupt it.
The old man-servant's lips worked as though he were mumbling over the message with which he had been charged, then with a curt nod he turned away, and, putting down his candlestick on a side table, was presently lost to view in the gloom of the corridor beyond the entrance-hall.
If Captain Nightshade had any consciousness of the brief but keen scrutiny to which he had been subjected, he failed to betray it. While they were awaiting the man's return, he slowly paced the gravelled sweep, singing in a low voice a snatch of a ditty the last line of which had something to do with "ruby wine and laughing eyes."
Then the serving-man came back.
"The master bids yo welcome," he said. "There's supper, bed, and breakfast at yore sarvice. He's busy just now, but mayhap he'll find time to see yo for a few minutes by an' by."
"I felt assured you would not claim the hospitality of Rockmount in vain," said Captain Nightshade. "And now, my dear Mr. Prentice, I must wish you a very goodnight, coupled with the hope that sound sleep and pleasant dreams will be yours. I have a presentiment that we have not seen the last of each other, and my presentiments generally come true."
He would have turned away, but the other held out his hand. "I am your debtor for much this night," he said. "You say you have a presentiment that we shall meet again. When that time comes I may, perhaps, be able to repay you. At present 'tis out of my power to do so."
Their hands met for a moment and parted, and each bowed ceremoniously to the other. Then Captain Nightshade climbed lightly into his saddle, waved his hand, gave rein to his horse and disappeared in the darkness. The same instant a second servant appeared from somewhere, and, taking charge of Mr. Prentice's horse, led it away towards the rear of the house.
Then, with such a throb of the heart as one experiences on stepping across the threshold of the unknown, doubtful of what one may find on the other side, our young gentleman stepped across the threshold of Rockmount and heard the bolts and bars of the great door shot one by one behind him.
Having resumed possession of his candlestick, the old serving-man, whose face wore a sour and suspicious look, beckoned Mr. Jack, and, leading the way, presently threw open a door at the end of a corridor, and ushered him into a spacious panelled room, in the grate of which a cosy fire was burning.
"Supper's bein' got ready, sir, and will be served in the course of a few minutes," said the man, and with that he lighted a couple of wax candles on the centre table and two more over the chimney-piece. Then he stirred up the fire to a blaze and hobbled out of the room without a word more.
Mr. Jack's first action was to relieve himself of his sodden cloak, which he laid over the back of a chair. That done, he spread his chilled fingers to the blaze, and proceeded to take stock of his surroundings.
This was soon done, for the room held nothing calculated to arrest his attention or excite his curiosity. It was sparsely furnished, and its few chairs and tables, together with the bureau in one corner, although of choice workmanship, were all venerable with age. Carpet and hearthrug alike were faded and in places worn threadbare. Of pictures or ornaments of any kind, except for a small malachite vase on the chimney-piece, the room was wholly destitute. Judging from appearances, it seemed clear that the master of Rockmount was not a wealthy man.
Scarcely had Mr. Jack concluded his survey before the door was opened, and in came a middle-aged woman, carrying a supper-tray, which she proceeded to deposit on a centre table, and then wheeled the latter nearer the fire. The tray proved to contain a cold fowl, some slices of ham, butter, cheese, bread, and a bottle of claret. To our young friend, ravenously hungry and chilled to the marrow, it seemed a supper fit for the gods.
"Will you please to ring, sir, when you are ready for your coffee?" said the woman. And then he was left alone.
Not till half an hour had gone by did he ring the bell, by which time his spirits had gone up several degrees. Intensely chagrined though he was by his failure to secure that for which he had risked so much, there was a relish about his adventure which he appreciated to the full, which appealed at once to his imagination and to the unconventional side of a character which had often vainly beat itself against the restrictions and restraints by which it was environed. He felt that to-night was a night to have lived for. It would dwell freshly in his memory to the last day of his life. For the space of one hour and a half he had been hand-and-glove with Captain Nightshade, the most redoubtable highwayman in all the North Country; and if some people might think that was nothing to be proud of, it was at any rate something to remember. Whether he was proud of it or no, he was conscious of a secret sense of elation, into the origin of which he had no wish to inquire. He only knew that he would not have foregone the night's experiences for a great deal.
But the night was not yet over, although there seemed to be some danger of his forgetting that fact, so busy were his thoughts with the events of the last couple of hours. However, the bringing in of his coffee served to break up his reverie, and he began to wonder whether he was destined to see his unknown host. He was not left long in doubt.
"Mr. Ellerslie, sir, will do himself the pleasure of waiting upon you in the course of a few minutes," said the woman.
Together with the coffee she had brought in a case of spirits, with the needful concomitants for the manufacture of grog, without a tumbler or two of which, by way of nightcap, our great-grandfathers rarely thought of wending their way bedward.
While the woman cleared the table Mr. Jack went back to his chair near the fire. The blaze, as he bent towards it in musing mood, resting an elbow on either knee, lighted up a face that was very pleasant to look upon. In shape it was a rather long oval, the cheeks as smooth and rounded as those of a girl of twenty, with that pure healthy tint in them which nothing but plenty of exposure to sun and wind can impart; indeed, if you had looked closely, you would have seen that here and there they were slightly freckled. Add to this a nose of the Grecian type, long and straight, and a short upper lip with a marked cleft in it. His hair, which was brushed straight back from his forehead, so as to help in the formation of his queue, was of the color of filberts when at their ripest, with here and there a gleam of dead gold in it. His large eyes were of the deepest shade of hazel, heavily lashed, and with a wonderful velvety softness in them, which, when he was at all excited, would glow and kindle with a sort of inner flame, or, if his temper were roused--which it easily was--would flash with scornful lightnings, while the line between his brows deepened to a veritable furrow. For, truth to tell, Mr. Jack Prentice was of a quick and somewhat fiery disposition; a little too ready, perhaps, to take offence; with an intense hatred for every kind of injustice, and a fine scorn, for the little meannesses and subterfuges of everyday life, the practice of which with many of us is so habitual and matter-of-course that we no longer recognize them for what they really are.
But if Master Jack was a little too ready, so to speak, to clap his hand on the hilt of his rapier, he never bore any after-malice. His temper would flare out and be done with it with the suddenness of a summer storm, which has come and gone and given you a taste of its quality almost before you know what has happened.
But we shall know more of "Jack," generous, loyal, and true-hearted, before we have done with him.
The door opened and Mr. Cope-Ellerslie came in. His guest stood up and turned to receive him.
The master of Rockmount was a tall, thin, elderly man, apparently about sixty years old, with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders. His outer garment was a dark, heavy robe or gaberdine, which wrapped him from throat to ankle. His long, grizzled hair, parted down the middle, fell on either side over his ears, and rested on the collar of his robe; the crown of his head was covered with a small velvet skull cap. He wore a short Vandyck beard and moustache, which, like his prominent eyebrows, were thickly flecked with gray. For the rest, his face, when seen from a little distance, looked like nothing so much as a mask carved out of ivory with the yellow tint of age upon it; but when, a little later, Jack was enabled to view it close at hand, it was seen to be marked and lined with thousands of extremely fine and minute creases and wrinkles, as it might be the face of a man centuries old. But there was nothing old about the eyes, which were very bright and of a singularly penetrative quality.
Jack started involuntarily when his own traversed them. Of whose eyes did they remind him? When and where had he seen that look before? Was it in some dream which he had forgotten till they supplied the missing link? If so, all else had escaped him.
Hardly, however, had he time to ask himself these questions before his host, advancing with a grave inclination of the head, said: "Welcome to Rockmount, young gentleman. I am happy to be in a position to extend to you the hospitality of my humble roof. You are neither the first nor the second who, having lost his bearings in this remote district, has found shelter here. You were fortunate in there being no fog to-night; at such times to be lost on the moors is not merely unpleasant, but dangerous. I am sorry my people were not prepared to put before you fare of a morerecherchékind, but we are very isolated here, as you may imagine, and so few are my visitors that it would be folly to prepare for people who might never come. For my own part, I may add that I am no Sybarite."
There was a peculiarly hollow ring about Mr. Ellerslie's voice, as though it reached one from out of the depths of a cavern; and yet it seemed to his guest as if there was a note of half-familiarity in it, as if he had heard it somewhere before--it might be long ago. But that, of course, was absurd.
While speaking, Mr. Ellerslie had advanced to the fire, and, motioning his guest to resume his seat, had himself taken possession of a chair on the opposite side of the hearth.
Then Master Jack made haste to express his gratitude for the hospitality so generously extended to him.
"Very prettily turned, young gentleman," said Mr. Ellerslie, with a nod of approval when he had come to an end. "You have good choice of words, and express yourself without any trace of that affectation which nowadays mars the speech of so many of our so-called bucks and young men ofton."
The blush of ingenuous youth mantled in Jack's cheeks for a moment or two. He could not help noticing--and in after-days it was a point which often recurred to him--that his host never smiled, that no flitting shade of expression ever changed the mask-like, bloodless features. They remained wholly unmoved in their set, waxen pallor.
"And now," resumed Mr. Ellerslie, "will there be any impropriety in my asking my guest to favor me with his name? But if, for any reason whatever, he would prefer to remain incognito, he has merely to intimate as much and his reticence will be duly respected."
Mr. Jack was prepared for the question, and he answered it without hesitation. "If, Mr. Ellerslie, we should ever meet in after-days, as I sincerely trust we may, and you should accost me by the name of Frank Nevill, you will find me answer to it."
"It is a name I promise not to forget. You seem to have gotmyname quite pat, Mr. Nevill."
Mr. Nevill, or Mr. Prentice, or whatever his real name was, laughed a little uneasily. "It was from the--er--gentleman who acted as my guide and brought me here that I learnt it."
"How you learnt it, my dear sir, is a matter of no moment, so long as you know it. But I am forgetting that the grog is waiting to be mixed. You will join me over a tumbler, of course?"
But this his guest politely but firmly declined doing. Mr. Ellerslie was careful not to press him farther than good breeding sanctioned, which, however, did not hinder him from mixing a stiff and steaming tumbler for himself. Having tasted it and apparently found it to his liking, he went back to his seat by the fire.
"You were good enough just now, Mr. Nevill, to express a hope that you and I might some day meet again. Such a meeting, although not beyond the bounds of possibility--as, indeed, in this world, what is?--hardly comes within the range of likelihood. You are just on the point of stepping into the arena--the struggle, the turmoil, the dust, the elation of victory or, it may be, the bitterness of defeat, lie still before you; while for me it is all over. I have come out of the fight with reversed arms, I have left the sweating crowd and its plaudits--plaudits never showered upon me!--behind me forever. Here, in this rude hermitage--somewhat bleak, of a truth, in winter time--I hope to pass the remainder of my days, as Mr. Pope so aptly expresses, it, 'the world forgetting, by the world forgot.' Therefore, my dear Mr. Nevill, the chances are that after to-night you and I are hardly likely to meet again. To you belong the golden possibilities of the future, to me nothing but memories."
He stirred his grog, took a good pull at it, and then went on with his monologue:--
"Rockmount has now been my home for a couple of years, and I have no desire to leave it. Here I live in the utmost seclusion with my books and a few scientific instruments. An act of the blackest treachery drove me from the world, a ruined man, bankrupt in hope, in friendship, in means, with not one illusion left of all those with which----but I weary you with my egotistic maunderings. Besides, the hour is late--I cannot expect you to be such a night-owl as I am--and doubtless you are hungering for your bed."
Nevill protested, a little mendaciously, that he was not at all tired. Tired he was, but not sleepy. He would willingly have sat out the rest of the night with his singular host.
Presently Mr. Ellerslie, having finished the remainder of his grog, said, "By the way, towards which point of the compass are you desirous of bending your steps in the morning?"
"If I could only find my way to the Whinbarrow road, I should know where I was."
"One of my fellows shall go with you and not leave you till he has put you into it. You have but to name your own hour for breakfast, and Mrs. Dobson will have it ready for you."
He rose, as intimating that the moment for retiring had come. A light was burning in the entrance-hall, and two bed-candles had been placed in readiness, one of which Mr. Ellerslie proceeded to light.
At the foot of the stairs he held out his hand. It was a long, lean, sinewy hand, Nevill could not help noticing, and not at all like that of a man on whom age had in other respects set its unmistakable seal.
"I am one of those mortals who have an uncomfortable habit of turning night into day," remarked the elder man as he clasped his guest's fingers. "I usually sit up till dawn is in the sky, and, as a consequence, I sleep till late in the forenoon. As you tell me that you want to be on your way at an early hour, I had better, perhaps, say both good-night and good-bye here and now----Ah, a mouse!"
Frank Nevill gave a backward spring, and a little frightened cry escaped his lips. Next moment the blood rushed to his face, and he felt as if he could have bitten his tongue out for betraying him as it had.
But Mr. Ellerslie seemed to have noticed nothing. "We have not many such vermin, I am happy to say," he resumed after a momentary pause. "But these old country houses are seldom altogether free of them."
And so presently they parted.
Mrs. Dobson was awaiting Nevill at the head of the stairs. "Your room, sir, is the third door on the left down the corridor," she said. "At what hour would you be pleased to like breakfast?"
"Will eight o'clock be too early?"
"No hour you may name will be either too early or too late, sir."
"Then eight o'clock let it be."
Thereupon the woman curtsied, wished him a respectful good-night, and left him.
As soon as he found himself in the room indicated, and with the door not merely shut but locked, he sat down with an air of weariness, almost of despondency. Body and brain were alike tired out, yet never had he felt more wakeful than at that moment. Even had he been in the habit of trying to analyze his emotions, which he certainly was not, the effort to do so would have puzzled him just then. The bitter consciousness that he had failed in the endeavor for which he had risked so much was always with him, lurking, as it were, in the background of his brain. He felt it like a dull, persistent ache which never quite let go its hold of him, whatever other subject might be occupying the forefront of his thoughts. And then, there were all the other events of the day just ended, which----
He started to his feet. "I shall have to-morrow and a hundred to-morrows in which I shall have nothing to do but think, and think, and think. If I begin the process to-night I shall not sleep a wink."
As yet he had given neither a thought nor a glance to the room, but he now began to look about him with a little natural curiosity.
It was a somewhat gloomy chamber, the walls having been originally painted a dull chocolate color, which had not improved with the passage of time. In one corner was a large four-poster bed, with furniture of dark moreen. The dressing-table of black oak was crowded with an assortment of toilet requirements and appurtenances, silver-mounted and of most elegant workmanship.
Then his wandering glances were arrested by something--a garment of snowy whiteness--which had been laid over the back of a chair. Mr. Nevill, crossing to it, took it up gingerly and opened it. It proved to be a fine lawnchemise de nuit, frilled and trimmed with beautiful lace--a garment such as a duchess might have worn, but certainly never intended to be worn by one of the opposite sex.
Our young friend dropped it as if it were a red-hot cinder, and, sinking into the nearest chair, covered his face with his hands. From head to foot he felt as if he were one huge blush.
Before proceeding to narrate the sequel of the strange adventure of thesoi-disantMr. Frank Nevill, it may be as well that the reader should be made acquainted with the circumstances to which was owing his appearance on the King's highway in the character of an amateur Claude Duval.
At the time with which our narrative has to do, Mr. Ambrose Cortelyon, commonly known as Squire Cortelyon, of Stanbrook, an old family seat in one of the most northern counties of England, was well over his seventieth birthday. Thrown by his horse more than twenty years before, he had not only broken his leg, but three or four of his ribs into the bargain.
Surgical science in those days, especially in country places, was not what it is now. His leg was badly set, with the result that from that time he had been a partial cripple, who when he walked any distance alone, had to do so with the help of a couple of stout sticks, but who usually preferred the arm of his factotum, Andry Luce, and one stick.
Andry--of whom we shall hear more later--was a man of forty, with a big, shaggy head and the torso of an athlete set on the short, bowed legs of a dwarf. Further, he was dumb (the result of a fright when a child), a deficiency which only caused his employer to value him the more. He was clever with his pen and at figures, and kept the Squire's accounts and wrote most of his letters, for Mr. Cortelyon hated pen work, and besides suffered occasionally from gout in his fingers.
Finally, Andry filled up his spare time by dabbling in chemistry in an amateurish fashion, being quite content to experiment on the discoveries of others, and having no ambition to adventure on any of his own.
A full-length oil painting of Squire Cortelyon, taken a short time before his accident, and still in existence, represents him as a thin, wiry-looking man of medium height, close shaven, with a long, narrow face--a handsome face, with its regular, clear-cut features, most people would call it; cold, unsympathetic light-blue eyes, and a dry, caustic smile. His dark, unpowdered hair, cut short in front, is doubtless gathered into a queue, only, as he stands facing the spectator, the picture fails to show it. He is dressed in a high-collared, swallow-tailed, chocolate-colored coat with gilt buttons. His waistcoat is of white satin, elaborately embroidered with sprays of flowers. His small-clothes, tight-fitting and of some dark woven material, reach to the ankle, where they are tied with a knot of ribbon and are supplemented by white silk stockings and buckled shoes. Round his throat is wound a soft cravat of many folds; his shirt is frilled, and he wears lace ruffles at his wrists. He stands in an easy and not ungraceful posture, looking right into the spectator's eyes. In one hand he clasps his snuffbox, deprived of which life for him would have lost half its value.
Although Squire Cortelyon courted and loved a cheap popularity, at heart he was a man of a hard and griping disposition, whose chief object in life, more especially of late years, had been the accumulation of wealth in the shape of landed property. Even in early life he had never either hunted or shot, but, for all that, he subscribed liberally to the nearest pack of hounds, as also--but less liberally--to the usual local charities. Although he employed a couple of keepers, he did not preserve too strictly, a fact which tended to his popularity among his poorer neighbors, while having an opposite effect among those of his own standing in the county. In point of fact, three-fourths of the game on his estates was shot by his keepers and sent, under his direction, for sale to the nearest large town.
When Ambrose Cortelyon, at the age of thirty-five, came into his patrimony, it was not only grievously burdened with debt, but, as far as mere acreage was concerned, owing to extravagant living on the part of his two immediate progenitors, had dwindled to little more than a third of what it had been sixty years before. From the first the new Squire made up his mind that the follies of his father and grandfather should not be repeated in his case. From the first he set two objects definitely before him, and never allowed himself to lose sight of them. Object number one was to wipe off the burden of debt he had inherited from his father. This, by the practice of rigid economy, he was enabled to do in the course of eight or ten years, after which he began to save. Object number two was to become, in the course of time, a large landowner, even as his great-grandfather and his more remote ancestors right away back to the sixteenth century had been.
Thus, in the course of time it came to pass that Ambrose Cortelyon had become the owner of sundry considerable properties (not all of them situated in his own county, but none of them farther off than a day's ride) which, owing to one cause or another, had come into the market. Every season--and what was true then seems equally true to-day--brought its own little crop of landed proprietors who, owing to improvidence or misfortune or both, had fallen upon evil days, and whenever there was a likely property in the neighborhood to be had a bargain, the Squire, or his agent Mr. Piljoy, was always to the fore.
With the former it was an article of faith that, for one reason or other, landed property would rise greatly in value in the course of the next generation or two, and so constitute a stable inheritance for those to come after him. In so believing the prescience with which he credited himself was undoubtedly at fault. Many things were to happen during the next half-century of which not even the most far-seeing of the statesmen of those days had the slightest prevision.
Squire Cortelyon was turned forty before he married. He fixed his mature affections on a banker's daughter, who brought him a dowry of ten thousand pounds, with the prospect of thirty thousand to follow at her father's demise. But three years later the bank in which Mr. Lowthian was senior partner failed, and the prospective thirty thousand went in the general smash. Such a loss to such a man was undoubtedly a terrible blow. A couple of years later still his wife died, leaving him with one child,--a son. He had felt no particular affection for her while living, and he was not hypocrite enough to pretend to mourn her very deeply now she was dead.
Ambrose Cortelyon was one of those men who never feel comfortable, or at home, in the presence of children, and as soon as Master Dick was old enough he was packed off to a public school, and for the next dozen or more years, except at holiday times, it was but little he saw either of his father or his home. From school he went to college, but with his twenty-first birthday his career at Cambridge came to an end. The life his father intended him for was that of a country gentleman, with, perhaps, an M.P.-shipin future. Where, then, would have been the use of wasting more time in competing for a degree which, even if he should succeed in taking it, would be of no after-value to him? Far better that he should spend a season or two in town, perfecting himself in his French meanwhile--the country swarmed withemigrésglad to give lessons for the merest pittance--and after that devote a couple of years to the Grand Tour. Mr. Cortelyon would have his son a man of the world, and neither a milksop nor a puritan. With his own hands he put a copy of "Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son" into Dick's valise. "A book to profit by," he said. "Let me adjure you to read and re-read it."
Dick felt more respect--which till he was grown-up had not been unmixed with awe--than affection for his father. All his life Mr. Cortelyon had been a reserved and undemonstrative man, and averse from any display of feeling or sentiment. Still, that his son was far dearer to him than aught else in life, and that he looked with secret pride and hope to moulding him in accordance with his own views and wishes, can hardly be doubted. The mistake he made was in imagining that Dick was fashioned on the same lines, mental and moral, as himself; whereas the lad took after his mother in almost every particular. Easy-going, affable to all, led far more by his heart than his head, everybody's friend and nobody's enemy but his own--how was such a young man, with his handsome person, well-lined purse, and a certain element of rustic simplicity which still clung to him, to escape shipwreck in the great maelstrom of London in one form or another?
At any rate, Dick Cortelyon did not escape shipwreck in so far as the utter ruin of his worldly prospects was concerned. He had not been a year in town before he committed the unpardonable folly--unpardonable in the only son of Squire Cortelyon--of marrying a fascinating little actress of no particular ability, who at that time was playing "chambermaid" parts at one of the patent theatres for a remuneration of a guinea a week.
The marriage was kept by Dick a profound secret both from his father and his friends. But it had to be told the former when, some months later, he summoned Dick home on purpose to inform him that it was his wish--really tantamount to a command on the part of such a man--that he should "make up" to Miss Onoria Flood, the only daughter of a neighbor, and do his best to secure her before any other suitor appeared on the scene.
When the fatal news was broken to the Squire he bundled Master Dick out of doors without a moment's hesitation. There and then he took an oath that he would never forgive him, nor ever set eyes on him again, and he was a man who prided himself on keeping his word. At once he stopped Dick's allowance.
Some few years before these things came to pass, the Squire's grand-niece--granddaughter of his sister Agatha--an orphan left without means beyond a narrow pittance of eighty pounds a year, had come to live at Stanbrook, no other home being open to her. Although there was a difference of some six years in their ages, and although they had only met at intervals, they had been to each other like elder brother and younger sister. From the first Miss Baynard had conceived an almost passionate liking and admiration for her handsome, kind-hearted kinsman, and now that poor Dick was leaving home never to return, she contrived to have a stolen interview with him before he went. Although only just turned sixteen, she was in many things wise beyond her years, and before parting from Dick she obtained from him an address at which, he told her, a letter would at any time find him. Not being sure what his future movements might be, he gave her the address of his wife's uncle, who kept a tobacconist's shop in a street off Holborn. That done, Dick kissed her and went, and with his going half the sunshine seemed to vanish out of Nell's life.
At once Dick Cortelyon broke with his old life and all its associations. The fashionable world knew him no more: he disappeared, he went under. He took a couple of furnished rooms in an obscure neighborhood, and for the next few months his wife's earnings and the proceeds of the sale of his watch and trinkets kept the pair of them. But there came a time when his wife could earn no more; and then a son was born to him. In this contingency he deemed himself a fortunate man in being able to get a lot of copying to do for a law firm in Chancery Lane.
But poor Dick's trials and troubles--the fruit, as every reasonable person must admit, of his own headstrong folly--were not destined to be of long duration. When his child was about six months old he caught a fever, and died after a very short illness. One of his last requests was that when all was over his wife should write and inform Miss Baynard of his death. This Mrs. Cortelyon did not fail to do. Her letter conveyed the double news of Dick's death and the birth of his son.