CHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIThe Woman
CHAPTER VII
BY the time Gamaliel had recovered a little of his amaze, the man and the woman had gone past him; and when at last he reached his feet to follow them, they were already lost to sight in the descent. Judging them to be upon the path that led back to his inn, and that thither doubtless was their destination, the landlord stumbled downas speedily as he could towards it. As he had supposed, the woman and his serving-man had reached it too, and were steering a straight course to the inn. The landlord crouched after them as stealthily as ever. It was his desire to see without disturbing them. He must observe every detail of their behaviour, and afterwards construe it at his leisure. To his mind there never was so deep a mystery as the wild business of that night.
When they came to the inn they stayed a minute underneath the sign, and resumed their eager converse. Again was the landlord too far off to hear the purport of it, but there was still the same passion and excitement on the woman’s side as formerly; and when they parted—the lady through the open kitchen door, and the serving-man to a temporary bed of straw that had been found for him in the stable at the back—there was again that astounding incident of her lips being pressed upon the fellow’s hand.
The landlord waited until Will Jackson had retired, and then hastily came up just as thewoman had entered the kitchen and was about to close the door. Without saying a word, he put his shoulder to it and forced an entry. He paid no heed to the woman until the door was bolted, so that no one might intrude, and he had got the candles lit. Then he turned upon his victim.
That the winterly cold had struck her he could see. Her pale face was mottled with blue patches where its claws had pinched her; the belated hair that had wriggled from her hood hung on her temples limp and wet; and the fingers of one starved hand were stiffened to the burnt-out lantern that they bore. She had a crying need for warmth and kindness, but those were luxuries that Master Gamaliel administered only to himself. Thus he poured some brandy forth and drank it briskly, and warmed his frozen hands at the candle-blaze. He then felt strong enough to turn his attention to the lady.
“Madam,” he said, “this is a very serious thing. I await your explanation of it, madam.”
Saying this, he craftily assumed a place between her and the stairs leading to the bedfast traveller’s chamber. Her retreat was intercepted.
She looked at him dumbly, and did not answer. But she lifted her pleading eyes up to his face of stone, as one who knew the great powers residing in them, and who was accustomed to employ them as weapons of defence. The landlord laughed a little insolently.
“I am very weary,” said the woman. “Can we not choose a better season to discuss this matter?”
“Madam,” said the landlord harshly, “I choose to discuss it now. But first, before I do so, I must have your name. Your companion and yourself have been two days immured in my best taffety chamber fronting the sea, yet up to this very hour have I been denied what is the first essential to us innkeepers. But, madam, I must have it now.”
The woman looked at his cold face falteringly. Then she withdrew her eyes and took a further refuge in her silence.
“Madam, I demand it,” said Gamaliel, sternly. “The times are greatly perilous, and what assurances have I that you are not a pair of malignants, a pair of proscribed Royalists, a pair of Charles Stuart’s friends and my Lord Cromwell’s enemies?”
The woman trembled. When the hunted doe takes to the water, it has the look and manner that the pale woman had then. The landlord wrote every inflection of her demeanour down in his heart. His two little eyes, now contracted with their cunning so that they looked like two glass beads in his head, pierced her like steel. In spite of herself she shuddered. She closed her own eyes that she might not see them.
“Madam, I swear I will not be put off,” said the landlord. “I demand your name and the name of your companion.”
The woman’s lips were frozen. Twice she struggled to speak, and twice no words issued from them. The landlord had chosen his moment craftily. The unexpectedness of his appearance at that hour, and the shaken state shewas in already, thanks to her adventures in the night, left her at a hopeless disadvantage. She might have the desire to dissemble, but she certainly had not the power. She was bound hand and foot at his mercy.
“I would prefer to withhold our names for the present,” she said at last, in a hoarse whisper.
“That you shall not do, madam,” said the landlord. “I must have your names here, now, this instant.”
“I cannot give them,” said the woman, simply.
Again the landlord enclosed her with his cold eyes. They fascinated her, they pinned her helpless, they changed her blood into stone; they were the eyes with which the snake holds the fragile bird. The same bale and venom crept into them as he gazed upon the frightened creature, and as she cowered and shrank away, a smile and a sneer crept together round his mouth slowly. The moment to strike the victim was at hand.
“So you cannot give them, madam,” he said,with a suave mockery. “So you cannot give them. I do not know, madam, that I am surprised. I should have been more surprised had you been able to do so. In the very hour of your coming, I formed my own opinion of you. I am not altogether a blind man, madam,—I am not. And when in that first hour of your coming, madam, in a most unholy and exceptional season that is not very usual for simple honest travellers to employ, you had recourse to a lie——”
For an instant the woman’s chin went up imperiously, and a spark kindled in her eyes.
“I repeat, madam,” said the suave landlord, “in the very first hour of your coming you had recourse to a lie. You said your husband suffered from an incurable disease. More correctly, you should have said a bullet wound obtained a few weeks ago at the battle of Worcester.”
It was a shot in the dark, but it found its mark. The woman fell back against the stairs with a face the colour of snow.
“No, madam,” the landlord went on, “I canconfess to no surprise at the course you have taken. It is hardly to be supposed that the wife of a proscribed cavalier, who hath come a fugitive to a lonely inn on the seacoast, in the hope of slipping over to France on a dark night, should be willing to publish his name to all and sundry. But it is a fortunate circumstance that old Gamaliel Hooker hath a few wits in his head, otherwise a notable traitor to his country might have escaped his deserts, and there would be one malignant more than there should be in the world.”
The landlord had trimmed his cruel words, and, uttered them slowly. Each one sank like a sharp-pointed knife into the very flesh of the woman. She shrank away from him, torn, bleeding, trembling.
“Happily,” said the landlord in the same clear-cut, long-drawn, formal tone, “Gamaliel Hooker is not a man to shirk his plain and manifest duty. A few hours prior to your appearance a band of soldiers called here, and told me where I might find them should any malignants appear. I will send an informationto them the first thing in the morning. And now I give you good-night, madam; I think after our nocturnal wanderings we shall both welcome a return to bed.”
The landlord made to go upstairs. He would reserve the question of what she was doing in the dead of night, and her highly singular conduct towards his serving-man, until the morrow. He must not exhaust all his weapons at once; he would save a few with which to amuse himself at his leisure. But he had enjoyed using these vastly. He would teach her to take him trapesing in the dead of the night through the winter gale!
However, as the landlord made to retire the woman sprang forward with an appeal. She clung to his coat with her frozen hands.
“Have mercy, I beseech you!” was her cry.
The landlord laughed in her face.
“It is a matter for the Lord Protector,” he said. “But I have yet to hear that he is a merciful man.”
“You will not deliver up my poor husband,” she cried,—“you will not be so cruel!”
“Mother of God!” said the landlord. “I will do my duty.”
For the second time that night the woman fell upon her knees. She flung herself at the landlord’s feet. There never was grosser clay in the world than his. He neither pitied nor spared her. Nay, he prolonged the agony of her self-abasement to the last bitter moment. He drew out the frenzy of her abandonment to its last wild prayer. He derived an intimate pleasure from the picture of the creature at his feet, casting herself upon his mercy. It was the rarest nectar to his self-esteem; he sipped it to the dregs and smacked his lips upon it. He waited as one melting in spite of himself, and then dashed her hopes to the earth by adopting the same precise, formal voice he had used before:
“Madam, I am determined to do my duty.”
“I beseech you; I implore you!” cried the unhappy woman. “Will you have no mercy for the sufferings of a wife?”
The landlord turned from her coldly.
“Will you have no pity for the agonies of amother?” she cried. “Will you not spare the father of the babe I bear?”
In the mad frenzy of her fear she suddenly rose to her feet, with all the blood quivering and sparkling now in her cheeks. The landlord admitted to himself, even as he tortured her, that there never was so perfectly noble, so perfectly magnificent a creature as this wretched lady. But when she flung back her cloak to lend the prayer of her motherhood an additional emphasis, he laughed in her face.
It was more than the woman could endure; the last appeal of her sex had been despised. The shame and the agony overcame her; she sank senseless to the kitchen floor.
The landlord, by a deft use of cordials and cold water, brought her to her senses very soon.
“Mercy, mercy!” she moaned as her eyes came open.
The landlord, deeming that the comedy had gone far enough for that night at least, thought it time he appeared in his true character. He exchanged the formal tone he hadused when he spoke of doing his duty, for one more natural to him.
“You shall purchase a day’s respite, madam,” he said, in a brisk voice of business, “on one condition.”
The woman’s heart leapt in her side.
“Take that ring of sapphires off your finger, madam, and place it in my hand. On that condition, I will undertake not to lodge an information against your husband during the next twenty-four hours.”
The woman plucked off the ring eagerly, and, giving it to the landlord, thanked him with eyes that shone far more bravely than the jewels that she gave away. In the security of the short respite she had purchased, she went upstairs to the chamber of her stricken lord. It was almost less than nothing; yet, after all, there was one day more left to her in which she might struggle wildly for her husband’s safety.
The landlord had no desire to return to his couch. He was too excited by the strange events of the night, and too eager to meditate upon what manner they affected him, and thenature of the mystery he had been confronted with, to have any hope of going to sleep. Therefore he rekindled the fire, brewed himself a posset, charged his long pipe with tobacco, and sat down to reflection. He was hugely pleased with his own conduct of the last half-hour. The woman was entirely at his mercy. He would be able to wring her jewels and money from her with ridiculous ease; whilst at the eleventh hour, when all their portable possessions had become his own, he would still be able to save his reputation by giving them over to Cromwell’s men. He gazed tenderly on the bright jewel in his hand. He amused himself by computing the value of the stones within it, and figuring out in his mind what he stood to gain. These were brave times indeed! Why, he had already earned more during that last half-hour than in a year of quiet, jog-trot trading. And this was, doubtless, nothing to the wealth they had upstairs. He only hoped the soldiers would not return and discover their owners, ere he could take them for himself. But Master Gamaliel wasnot without a certain confidence in his own acquisitiveness; he shrewdly suspected that in any case they were doomed to lodge in his custody. Oh, if the King would only come his way as well!
He then turned his attention to the strange events of the night. He was morally sure that the woman had gone forth to discover Diggory Fargus’s boat or that of some other mariner, and that her meeting with Will Jackson, the serving-man, was, as far as she was concerned, an accidental one. But what could account for her extraordinary behaviour on his appearance? Why had she adopted so wrought and passionate an attitude towards him? Most probably for the same reason that she had adopted it a little later towards himself: she feared him. Him, too, she had been beseeching. Of course she had been begging him not to betray her; but why should she be at such pains to implore a fellow like that not to do so? The landlord recalled the incident of Will Jackson going up the ladder. It was then he first knew that she and her husband were at theinn. Gamaliel recalled how his serving-man had rushed pellmell to the ground as though he had seen a ghost, whilst the woman above pierced the night with her wild cry. What could be the significance of that recognition?
The landlord built a theory. This Will Jackson had probably been lately in their employment; and the woman knowing him to be so well acquainted with their circumstances, and that he was doubtless a rogue to boot, she felt her husband to be undone. Again, the serving-man’s surprise would not be unnatural. It would be a rather dramatic thing to go up that ladder, and for him to discover his former patrons thus. Assuming that to be the case, it was not unlikely that the woman, utterly desperate as she was, ventured into the night to find Will Jackson and to propitiate him with her prayers. Yet, after all, she was not likely to find him by the side of the sea.
The landlord was unable to settle this last point definitely in his mind; but the remainder of the theory he thought very excellent. However, be that as it may, he would take the firstopportunity of having Will Jackson’s version of the affair. Here a new thought assailed the landlord. Last night, when the fellow fled down the ladder, had he not positively asserted and reiterated that he had never seen the persons upstairs before? He had lied—he had lied foully. Not only had he seen them, but he was intimately acquainted with the woman at least. But he would have the truth out of the fellow. Could it be that some more guilty secret than he suspected lay between them? Was some deep mystery involved? The landlord nestled nearer to the embers, and went over all the ground again. Why should a serving-man and a woman of condition be so intimate and familiar one with the other? She was a lady—a woman of quality, he was sure—yet with his own eyes he had seen her on her knees to the fellow; and she had kissed his hands.