CHAPTER XVICHAPTER XVIThe departing Guests
CHAPTER XVI
THE Sergeant unloosed the landlord’s coat and ordered one of his men to procure water and dash it in his face. But Gamaliel had gone too far to be brought round easily, and the time spent in restoring him to his senses was the King’s deliverance.
Presently the landlord opened his eyes and looked about him. The reactionbrought with it a full measure of consciousness, and with it a command of his faculties. He could think; and, now it was too late, the power of speech was again vouchsafed to him.
“The King went out at that door!” he cried. “The King is escaped! That was the King you conducted to the door.”
“What do you mean?” demanded the astonished Sergeant. “Speak, clown and fool that you are! I tell you the King is upstairs.”
The landlord had now the power to unbosom his soul; and there was such a singular fervour of conviction in his words, that the soldier, vividly impressed by them, and bewildered by them too, made all haste up the stairs to Captain Culpeper, who, as he supposed, was still attending on the King.
The thoroughly alarmed and uneasy Sergeant came to him at the side of the bed, and recited the landlord’s story.
“What is this you say, Sergeant Williams?” said the Captain.
His heart sank with an overmastering foreboding that the landlord had spoken the truth.He had not known the King when he entered the chamber, never having set eyes upon his Majesty before; and none of his men knew him either—they had only hearsay to guide them. Could it be that he was the victim of a trick. He turned furiously upon the man in the bed and the woman beside him.
“My God!” he said, “you have duped me; you have deceived me. The King’s servitor was the King. You have been playing a part.”
The man and the woman looked at him defiantly. Every instant they could maintain their rôles was of the utmost advantage to the fugitive; and in any case their own lives were forfeit.
“What do you mean?” said young Lord Farnham, striving to enact the comedy to the bitter end.
“We have been tricked!” cried the Captain.
The truth had burst upon Captain Culpeper with stunning force. He saw it all. He became as one beside himself. He stamped, heraved, he swore. They had allowed the prize actually to slip away when their hands were upon it.
The King must be pursued. They must pursue him hot-foot. Up hill and down dale, over the rocks, into the very jaws of the sea they must hunt the royal fugitive. He had but ten minutes start of them, and he was on foot.
No, he was not on foot. It seemed that he had taken a horse from the stable and had ridden away. Those who saw him do so believed that he had the Captain’s permission, as he was said to be on some errand of his Majesty lying upstairs.
The Captain gnashed his teeth. He drove his men out of the room before him like a flock of sheep. There was not a precious instant to lose. They must get to horse. Dark as it was, they must scour every yard of the surrounding country. There never was such a noise and a rattle as, with that, these soldiers fled down the stairs and forth of the kitchen door.
“To horse, to horse; the King is escaped!”was the cry that rang out to the rocks by the side of the sea. Horses stamped under the signboard of the “Sea Rover”; boots, spurs, and stirrups struck one against the other; bridles shook; hoarse commands were given; the cavalcade moved fiercely and swiftly away.
Now that the crisis was past, the landlord was sufficiently master of himself to watch them go from his door. After this fiasco it was highly necessary, he argued, that he should do all he could to win their favour and their confidence. Captain Culpeper, despite the rage and excitement under which he was labouring, called out as he sprang to the saddle:
“Landlord, I charge you to detain the man and the woman upstairs against my return, on the peril of your life. I hold you already responsible for the King’s escape. Do you watch over these two persons, therefore, yet more jealously. I cannot spare any of my men to look after them, but you have your son and that strapping servant-girl. We will fetch them as soon as maybe, and lodge them in greater security.”
While the last of these words were being uttered, Captain Culpeper and his troops were riding away. Stunned by their import, the landlord went within and closed the door. It was as though he had heard the sentence of his own death, for he knew it was wholly out of his power to detain the man and the woman upstairs should Diggory Fargus only prove true to his appointment. The sailor had promised to come, in the company of three of his friends, at half-past nine, to bear away the lady and her stricken husband.
If they came, what an irony it was to suppose that he, his son Joseph, and Cicely, the serving-maid, could possibly prevail against the redoubtable mariner and three of his pirates or his smugglers!
As a preliminary measure, the landlord locked the door. Not only did he lock it, but he bolted it at the top and at the bottom, and ran the chain across. Then he looked at the clock. Ten minutes to ten. Diggory Fargus had promised to come at half-past nine. Probably he had purposely held off when he sawthat the soldiers were at the inn. He even might have had so tender a regard for his own skin as to go back again. God grant that that were so! He even might not have meant to come at all. The landlord prayed with all his soul that Diggory Fargus and his men might not appear. The loss of the King was effaced for the time being from his mind by this new matter.
The security of his own person was involved in it, and the immunity of that sacred thing was of even greater moment to Gamaliel than the loss of a King’s ransom. All his life he had had a holy dread of violence. God in heaven be merciful to him a sinner, and keep away that ruthless sailor!
The landlord looked at the clock again. Five minutes to ten. Diggory Fargus was already twenty-five minutes behind his time. But there was hardly any comfort in the thought. Hours must elapse ere Captain Culpeper could come to his aid, unless by a miracle the King were retaken immediately. A little bitterly the landlord reflected that miracles didnot happen to him. Was not his life stern, terrible, inexorable matter of fact? At least, it seemed so then.
The landlord fell once again to his principal occupation of that tragic day. He began to hobble up and down the kitchen, with ever and anon an anxious eye for the clock.
There might be hours of this form of torture. If there were, Gamaliel felt that surely he must go out of his mind. It was a suspense to which there would be no end. There was no limit to the hour at which Captain Culpeper might return to claim the two persons left in his custody. It might be an hour, or it might be twelve; it might be a day, a week, or a month. But be that as it may, his instructions were perfectly clear. He must detain those two guilty persons at his inn, by force, if necessary, or he would forfeit his life.
The first stroke of ten had barely struck, when the landlord caught a sound that froze the blood in his veins. The noise of persons on foot coming down the bridle-path rose above the distant roar of the sea. He heard roughvoices. The kitchen door was tried; a lusty smack was delivered upon it.
“Open the door, mate!” cried the great voice of Diggory Fargus.
The landlord did not stir. He leant against the wall for support; he had not the strength of a mouse.
“Open the door, mate, d’ye hear me?” demanded Diggory Fargus.
A terrific blow shook the lusty oak. Still the landlord leant sickly against the wall.
The lady appeared at the head of the stairs, cloaked, masked, and gloved for a journey. Hearing that her deliverers were at hand, she ran down the stairs, and, not heeding the helpless landlord, thrust back the bolts, the chain, and the lock of the kitchen door.
The mariner and three companions as rude and ill-favoured as himself stepped out of the night.
“We’re behind our time, ma’am,” said Diggory Fargus; “but, d’ye see, at half-past nine we had to tack and go about, for the place was full of soldiers. We supposed they had cometo take ye, but we thought it our dooty to return and satisfy ourselves.”
“God requite you, sailor,” said the woman, fervently. “My husband is still upstairs. But let us make all haste, for at any moment his enemies may return upon him.”
Even as the woman spoke, the pale figure of a man tottered down the stairs. Clinging tightly to the rail, he put one weak limb before the other and reached the kitchen before they had observed him. He too was fully accomplished for the journey.
“Oh, mine own,” said the woman, tenderly, “what a foolish valour! ’Tis ever the same headstrong, wilful, heedless fellow. Did I not order you to stay upstairs until we fetched you? Thou art much too weak to use thine own legs as yet, lad.”
“Peace, Patsy woman,” said the young man. “If I can walk into this accursed place, I can walk out of it. I am hale and strong by comparison with what I was when I came here with the bullet in my side. Landlord, give me a cup of wine, and I shall be fit to encounterthe perils of the sea. Deuce take me! what hath happened to the landlord?”
As pale as linen, his eyes staring and his knees knocking, the landlord still clung in silence to the wall. Diggory Fargus looked at him grimly. Lying in concealment close at hand when the soldiers rode away, he had overheard the injunctions of Captain Culpeper.
“The Cap’n left particular orders,” said the mariner to the lady, “that this ’ere son of a rum puncheon was to hold you and your mate, ma’am, against his return, by force, if necessary. And as it goes agen his principles to use violence o’ any sort, he’s asking of himself, d’ye see, whether ye would take it amiss if he invited you to tarry.”
The woman looked at the landlord. None had had a fairer opportunity of judging his character than she during her sojourn in that place. Her eyes shone through her mask; the stern lines fell about her mouth; and then she turned away from him with the same tremor of disgust as one turns away from a venomousreptile. Even to her compassion there was a limit.
“Come, my own,” she said. “It is folly in us to lose a precious moment. I wonder what hath happened to the poor King. God be with him, poor lad, this night!”
“He should make good his escape,” said Lord Farnham. “He hath a horse and a full ten minutes start of his foes.”
Leaning on the arm of his wife he passed slowly out of the door, into the night and his freedom. The landlord still leant against the wall: not a word did he speak; not a finger did he lift to stay the departing guests.
Diggory Fargus tarried behind an instant to speak a word in the landlord’s ear.
“Mate,” said he, thrusting his one eye into the quivering face of the landlord, “I said, if ye played me false I would twist your head off your body with these two hands. But I shall leave it to others, d’ye see. I shall kind o’ leave it to my deppities. They’ll make a cleaner job of it than me. They’ll do it more formal and more lawyerlike. Besides, I havehardly the time to do it now. But let me tell ye, mate, as one man to another, that when next I am around this coast, I shall make a call at this old grog shop, and if I find that them there soldiers has not done their dooty by you, ye can lay to it as Diggory Fargus is a christened man he’ll keep his word. A pleasant evenin’ to you, mate.”
The sailor spat vehemently upon the kitchen floor, and lurched out into the darkness in the wake of his companions.