To my dismay, he halted but five paces from me.
"Is that you, Leicester?" he whispered.
"Sergeant Letcher, if you please," answered a quiet voice close by; "unless you wish to be called Pickthall."
"Not so loud—the windows are open. How on earth did you come here? You're not with the van to-night?"
"I came on a horse, and a lame one: one of your tub-carriers. The captain saw me mount him, down at the cove, and sent me off to scour the country for evidence. I guessed pretty well in what direction he'd take me. But you're a careless lot, I will say. Look at this bit of rope."
"For God's sake don't talk so loud! Rope? What rope?"
"Oh, you needn't be afraid! It's notyoursort! Here—if you can't see, take hold and feel it. Left-handed, you'll notice—French sling-stuff. And that Belcher woman has no more sense of caution than to tie up her roses with it! Now see here, my son"—and his voice became a snarl—"it may do for her to play tricks. All the country knows her, the magistrates included. But for the likes of you this dancing on the edge of the law is risky, and I can't afford it. Understand? Why the devil you haunt the house as you do is more than I can fathom, unless maybe you're making up to marry the old fool." He paused and added contemplatively, "'Twould be something in your line to be sure. Women were always your game."
"You didn't whistle me out to tell me this," said Mr. Whitmore stiffly. "No, I did not. I want ten pounds."
Mr. Whitmore groaned. "Look here, Leicst—"
"Be careful!"
"But this makes twice in ten days. It's pushing a man too hard altogether!"
"Not a bit of it," Letcher assured him cheerfully. "You're too devilish fond of your own neck, my lad; and I know it too devilish well to be come over by that talk." He chuckled to himself. "How's the beauty down at the cottage?"
"I don't know," Mr. Whitmore answered sulkily. "Is Plinlimmon there?"
"No, he's not; and you ought to know he's not. Where have you been, all day?"
The curate was silent.
"He'll be down again on Saturday, though. Leave of absence is going cheap, just now. I've an idea that our marching orders must be about due. Maybe I'll be able to run down myself, though my father hadn't the luck to be a friend of the Colonel's. If I don't, you're to keep your eye lifting, and report."
"Is there really a chance of the order coming?" asked Mr. Whitmore, with a shake in his low voice.
"Dissemble your joy, my friend! When it comes, I shall call on you for fifty. Meanwhile I tell you to keep your eye lifting. The battalion's raw, yet. About the order, it's only my guesswork, and before we sail you may yet do the christening."
"It's damnable!"
"Hush, you fool! Gad, if somebody hasn't heard you! Who'sthat?"
They held their breath; and I held mine, pressing my body into the mock-orange bush until the twigs cracked. Mr. Jack Rogers stepped out upon the verandah, and stood by one of the pillars, not a dozen yards from me, contemplating the sky where the dawn was now beginning to break over the dark shrubberies. I heard the two men tip-toeing away through the laurels.
He, too, seemed to catch the sound, for he turned his head sharply. But at that moment Miss Belcher's voice called him back into the room.
A minute later he reappeared with a loaf of bread in either hand, and walked moodily past my bush without turning his head or observing me.
I faced about cautiously and looked after him. From the end of the verandah the ground, sheltered on the right by a belt of evergreen trees, fell away steeply to a valley where, under the paling sky, a sheet of water glimmered. Towards this, down the grassy slope, Mr. Rogers went with long strides. I broke cover, and ran after him.
I ran as fast as my hurt hip and the trailing folds of the rug allowed. The grass underfoot was grey with dew, and overhead the birds were singing. An old horse that had been sleeping in his pasture heaved himself up and gazed at me as I went by, and either his snort of contempt or the sound of my footsteps must have struck on Mr. Rogers's ear. He turned and allowed me to catch up with him.
"It's you, eh?" He eyed me between pity and distrust. "Here, catch hold, if you're feeling peckish."
He thrust a loaf into my hands and I fell on it ravenously, plucking off a crust and gnawing it while I trotted beside him.
"Got to feed her blessed swans now!" he muttered. "The deuce is in her for perversity to-night."
He kept growling to himself, knitting his brow and pausing once or twice for a moody stare. He was not drunk, and his high complexion showed no trace of his all-night sitting; and yet something had changed him utterly from the cheerful gentleman of a few hours back.
The water in the valley bottom proved to be an artificial lake, very cunningly contrived to resemble a wild one. At the head of it, where we trod on asphodels and sweet-smelling mints and brushed the young stalks of the loose-strife, stood a rustic bridge partly screened by alders. Here Mr. Rogers halted, and a couple of fine swans came steering towards him out of the shadows.
He broke his loaf into two pieces. "That's for you," he exclaimed, hurling the first chunk viciously at the male bird. The pair turned in alarm at the splash and paddled away, hissing. "And that's for you!" The second chunk caught the female full astern, and Mr. Rogers leaned on the rail and laughed grimly. He thrust his hand into his breeches pocket and drew forth a guinea. The young daylight touched its edge as it lay in his palm.
"I'm a Justice of the Peace; or I'd toss that after the bread."
"What's the matter with it, sir?"
He turned it over gingerly with his forefinger. "See?" he said. "I put that mark on it myself, for sport, three weeks ago, and this very night I won it back."
"Was it one you sold to Mr. Rodriguez?"
"Hey?" I thought he would have taken me by the collar. "So youarethe boy! What do you know of Rodriguez, boy?"
"I—I was listening in the verandah, sir. And oh, but I've something to tell you! I'm the boy, sir, that Mr. Whitmore spoke about—the boy that's being searched for—"
"Look here," Mr. Rogers interrupted, "I'm a Justice of the Peace, you know."
"I can't help it, sir—begging your pardon. But I was in the house, and I saw things: and if they catch me, I must tell."
"Tell the truth and shame the devil," said Mr. Rogers.
"But the more truth I told, sir, the worse it would look for someone who's innocent."
"Whitmore?"
"You changed a note with Mr. Whitmore, didn't you, sir?"
This confused him. "You've been using your ears to some purpose," he growled.
"I don't know how Mr. Whitmore comes to be mixed up in it. But here's another thing, sir—You remember that he walked out after the game—for fresh air, he said?"
"Well?"
"And he didn't come back?"
"Well?"
"He stepped out because he was whistled out. There was a man waiting for him."
"What man?"
"His name's Letcher—at least—"
"I don't know the name."
"He was one of the soldiers on the beach this evening."
"The devil!"
"But he hadn't come aboutthatbusiness."
"About what, then?"
"Well now, sir, I must ask you a question. They were talking about 'the beauty down at the cottage.' Who would that be?"
"That," said he slowly, "would be Isabel Brooks, for a certainty."
"And the cottage?"
"Remember the one we passed on the road?—the one with a light downstairs? That's it. She lives there with her father—an old soldier and three-parts blind. There's no mischief brewing againsther, I hope?"
"I don't know sir," I went on breathlessly. "But if you please, go on answering me. Do you know a young man called Plinlimmon— Archibald Plinlimmon?"
"Plinlimmon? Ay, to be sure I do. Met him there once—another soldier, youngish and good-looking—in the ranks, but seemed a gentleman—didn't catch his Christian name. The Major introduced him as the son of an old friend—comrade-in-arms, he said, if I remember. He was there with a black-faced fellow, whose name I didn't catch either."
"That was Letcher!"
"What? The man Whitmore was talking with? What were they saying?"
"They said something about a christening. And Letcher asked for money."
"A christening? What in thunder has a christening to do with it?"
"That's what I don't know, sir."
Mr. Rogers looked at me and rubbed his chin. "I meant to take you to Lydia," he said; "but now that Whitmore's mixed up in this, I'll be shot if I do. That fellow has bewitched her somehow, and where he's concerned—" He glanced up the slope and clutched me suddenly by the shoulder: for Whitmore himself was there, walking alone, and coming straight towards us. "Talk of the devil—here, hide, boy—duck down, I tell you, there behind the bushes! No! Through the hedge, then—"
I burst across the hedge and dropped through a mat of brambles, dragging my rug after me. The fall landed me on all-fours upon the sunken high road, along which I ran as one demented—stark naked, too—a small Jack of Bedlam under the broadening eye of day; ran past Miss Belcher's entrance gate with its sentinel masses of tall laurels, and had reached the bend of the road opening the low cottage into view, when a sudden jingling of bells and tramp of horses drove me aside through a gate on the left, to cower behind a hedge there while they passed.
Two wagons came rumbling by, each drawn by six horses and covered by a huge white tilt bearing in great letters the words "Russell and Co., Falmouth to London." On the front of each a lantern shone pale against the daylight. At the head of each team rode a wagoner, mounted on a separate horse and carrying a long whip. Beside the wagons tramped four soldiers with fixed bayonets, and two followed behind: they wore the uniform of the North Wilts Regiment.
I knew them well enough by repute—these famous wagons conveying untold treasure between London and the Falmouth Packets. They passed, and I crept out into the road again, to stare after them.
With that, turning my head, I was aware of a girl in the roadway outside the cottage door. But if she had come out to gaze after the wagons, she was gazing now at me. It was too late to hide, and moreover I had come almost to the end of my powers. With a cry for pity I ran towards her.
Stark naked though I was, she did not flinch as I came; only her eyes seemed to widen upon me in wonder. And for all my desperate hurry I had time to see, first, that they were graver than other girls' eyes, and next that they were exceedingly beautiful.
In those days I had small learning (I have little enough, even now), or I might have fancied her some goddess awaiting me between the night and the dawn. She stood, tall and erect, in a loose white wrapper, the collar of which had fallen open and revealed the bodice-folds of her nightgown—a cloud at the base of her firm throat. Her feet were thrust into loose slippers: and her hair hung low on her neck in dark masses as she had knotted them for the night.
"Where do you come from, boy?" she asked; but an instant later she put that question aside as an idle one. "Someone has been ill-treating you! Come indoors!"
She held out a hand and, as I clung to it, led me to the door; but turned with her other hand on the latch. "Is anyone following?"
I shook my head. She was attempting now, but gently, to draw back the hand to which I clung; and, in resisting, my fingers met and pulled against a ring—a single ring of plain gold.
Seeing that I had observed it, she made no further effort, but let her hand lie, her eyes at the same moment meeting mine and searching them gravely and curiously.
"Come upstairs," she said; "but tread softly. My father is a light sleeper."
She took me to a room in the corner of which stood a white bed with the sheets neatly turned down, prepared and ready for a guest. The room was filled with the scent of flowers—fragrant scent of roses and clean aromatic scent of carnations. There were fainter scents, too, of jasmine and lavender; the first wafted in from a great bush beyond the open lattice, the second (as I afterwards discovered) exhaled by the white linen of the bed. But flowers were everywhere, in bowls and jars and glasses; and as though other receptacles for them had failed, one long spray of small roses climbed the dressing-table from a brown pitcher at its foot.
She motioned me to a chair beside the bed, and, almost before I knew what was intended, she had fetched a basin of water and was kneeling to wash my feet.
"No—please!" I protested.
"But I love children," she whispered; "and you are but a child."
So I sat in a kind of dream while she washed away the dust and blood, changing the water twice, and afterwards dried each foot in a towel, pressing firmly but never once hurting me.
When this was done, she rose and stood musing, contemplating me seriously and yet with a touch of mirth in her eyes.
"You are such a little one!" she said. "Father's would never fit." And having poured out fresh water and bidden me wash my body, she stole out.
She returned with a white garment in her hand and real mirth now in her eyes. My toilet done, she slipped the garment over me. It fell to my feet in long folds, yet so lightly that I scarcely felt I was clothed: and she clapped her hands in dumb-show. It was one of her own night-gowns.
I glanced uneasily towards the bed. Its daintiness frightened me, used as I was to the housekeeping—coarse if clean—of Mrs. Trapp.
"Your prayers first," she whispered. "Don't you know any?" She eyed me anxiously again. "But you are a good boy? Surely you are a good boy? Don't boys say their prayers? They ought to."
Since passing out of Miss Plinlimmon's tutelage, I had sadly neglected the habit: but I knelt down obediently and in silence.
She stepped close behind me. "But you're not speaking," she murmured. "Father always says his aloud, and so do I. You mustn't pretend, if you don't really know any. I can teach you."
She knelt down beside me, and began to say the Lord's Prayer softly. I repeated it after her, sentence by sentence: and this was really shamming, for of course I knew it perfectly. At the time I felt only that she—this beautiful creature beside me—was in a strange state of exaltation which I could not in the least understand. I know now something of the springs I had touched and loosened within her—I, a naked waif coming to her out of the night and catching her hand for protection. It was not I she taught, nor over me that she yearned. She was reaching through me to a child unknown, using me to press against a strange love tearing at the roots of her body, and to break the pain of it—the roots of her body, I say; for he who can separate a woman's soul from her body is a wiser man than I.
She rose from her knees; threw back the sheets and tucked them about me as I snuggled down.
"What is your name?"
"Harry Revel. Are you Miss Isabel Brooks?"
"I am Isabel."
"Why were you crying, out in the road?"
"Was I crying?"
"Well, not crying exactly: but you looked as if you wanted to."
She smiled. "We both have our secrets it seems; and you shall tell me yours to-morrow. Will yours let you sleep?"
"I think so, Miss Isabel. I am so tired—and so clean—and this bed is so soft—" I stretched out my arms luxuriously, and almost before I knew it she was bending to kiss me, and they were about her neck. Her hair fell over me in a shower and in the shade of it she laughed happily, kissing me by the ear and whispering, "I have my happy secret, too!"
She straightened herself up, tossed back the dark locks with curved sweep of arm and wrist, and moved to the door.
"Good night, Harry Revel!"
A bird was cheeping in the jasmine bush when I dropped asleep, and when I awoke he was cheeping there still. Of my dreams I only remember that they ended in a vague sense of discomfort, somehow arising from a vision of Mr. Rogers in the act of throwing bread at the swans, and of the hen bird's flurry as she paddled away. But the sound which I took for the splashing of water came in fact from the rings of the window curtain, which Miss Isabel was drawing to shut out the high morning sun.
She heard me stir and faced about, with her hand yet on the curtain. "Awake?" she cried, and laughed. "You shall have a basin of bread-and-milk presently: and after that you may get up and put on these." She held out a suit of clothes which lay across her arm. "I have borrowed them from Miss Belcher, who distributes all sorts of garments at Christmas among the youngsters hereabouts, and has rummaged this out of her stock. And after that my father will be glad to make your acquaintance. We shall find him in the garden. Now I must go and see to preparing dinner: for it is past noon, though you may not know it."
Behold me, half an hour later, clad in a blue jacket very tight at the elbows and corduroy breeches very tight at the knees and warm for the time of year, as I descended with Isabel into the walled garden at the back of the cottage. Its whole area cannot have been an acre, and even so the half of it was taken up by a plot of turf, smooth as a bowling green: but beyond this stretched a miniature orchard, and along the walls ran two deep borders crowded with midsummer flowers— tall white lilies and Canterbury bells; stocks, sweet williams, mignonette, candytuft and larkspurs; bushes of lemon verbena, myrtle, and the white everlasting pea. Near the house all was kept in nicest order, with trim ranks of standard roses marching level with the turfed verges, and tall carnations staked and bending towards them across the alley: but around the orchard all grew riotous. The orchard ended in a maze of currant bushes, through which the path seemed to wander after the sound of running water till it emerged upon another clearing of turf, with a tall filbert tree, and a summer-house beneath it, and a row of beehives set beside a stream. The stream, I afterwards learned, came down from Miss Belcher's park, and was the real boundary of the garden: but Miss Belcher had allowed the Major to build a wall for privacy, on the far side of it, yet not so high as to shut off the sun from his bee-skeps; and had granted him a private entrance through it to the park—a narrow wooden door approached by a miniature bridge across the stream.
"Papa!" called Isabel.
I heard a movement in the summer-house, and her father appeared in the doorway. He was old, but held himself so erect that his head almost touched the lintel of the summer-house door, the posts of which he gripped and so stood framed—a giant of close upon six and a half feet in stature. He wore a brown holland suit, with grey stockings and square-toed shoes; and at first I mistook him for a Quaker. His snow-white hair was gathered back from his temples, giving salience to a face of ineffable simplicity and goodness—the face of a man at peace with God and all the world, yet touched with the scars of bygone passions.
"Papa, this is Harry Revel."
He bowed with ceremony, a little wide of me. I saw then that his eyes were sightless.
"I am happy to make your acquaintance, young sir. My daughter informs me that you are in trouble."
"He has promised to tell me all about it," Isabel put in. "We need not bother him with questions just now."
"Assuredly not," he agreed. "Well, if you will, my lad, tell it to Isabel. What is your age? Barely fourteen? Troubles at that age are not often incurable. Only whatever you do—and you will pardon an old man for suggesting it—tell the whole truth. When a man, though he be much older than you and his case more serious than yours can possibly be—when a man once brings himself to make a clean breast of it, the odds are on his salvation. Take my word for that, and a wiser man's—By the way, do you understand Latin?"
"No, sir."
"I am sorry to hear it. But perhaps you play the drum?"
"I—I have never tried, sir."
"Dear, dear, this is unfortunate: but at least you can serve me by leading me round the garden and telling me where the several flowers grow, and how they come on. That will be something."
"I will try, sir: but indeed I can hardly tell one flower from another."
At this his face fell again. "Do you, by chance, know a bee when you see one?" "A bee? Oh yes, sir."
"Come, we have touched bottom at length! Do you understand bees? Can you handle them?"
Here Isabel, seeing my chapfallen face, interposed.
"And if he does not, papa, you will have the pleasure of teaching him."
"Very true, my dear. You must excuse me"—here Major Brooks turned as if seeing me with his sightless eyes. "But understand that I like you far better for owning up. There are men—there is a clergyman in our neighbourhood for one—capable of pretending a knowledge of Latin which they don't possess."
"Doesn't Mr. Whitmore know Latin?" I asked.
"Hey? Who told you I was speaking of Whitmore?"
I glanced at Isabel, for her eyes drew me. They were fixed on me almost in terror.
"I have heard him talk it, sir."
"Excuse me: you may have heard him pretending."
"But, papa—" Isabel put forth a hand as if in protest, and I noted that it trembled and that the ring was missing which she had worn overnight. "You never told me that he—that Mr. Whitmore—"
"Was an impostor? My dear, had you any occasion to seek my opinion of him, or had I any occasion to give it? None, I think: and but for Master Revel's incomprehensible guess you had not discovered it now. I have been betrayed into gossip."
He turned abruptly and, feeling with his hand over the surface of the summer-house table, picked up a small volume lying there. It struck me that his temper for the moment was not under perfect control.
Isabel cast at me a look which I could not interpret, and went slowly back to the house.
"The meaning of my catechism just now," said her father, addressing me after listening for awhile to her retreating footsteps, "may be the plainer when I tell you that I am translating the works of the Roman poet Virgil, line for line, into English verse, and have just reached the beginning of the Fourth Georgic. He is, I may tell you, a poet, and the most marvellous that ever lived; so marvellous, that the middle ages mistook him for a magician. That any age is likely to mistake me—his translator—for a conjuror I think improbable. Nevertheless I do my best. And while translating I hold this book in my hand, not that I can see to read a line of it, but because the mere touch of it, my companion on many campaigns, seems to unloose my memory. Except in handling this small volume, I have none of the delicate gift of touch with which blind men are usually credited. But this is page 106, is it not?" He held out the open book towards me, and added, with sudden apprehension, "You can read, I trust?"
I assured him that I could.
"And write? Good again! Come in—you will find pen, ink, and paper on the side-drum in the corner. Bring them over to the table and seat yourself. Ready? Now begin, and let me know when you cannot spell a word."
I seated myself, silently wondering what might be the use of the side-drum in the corner.
"Let me see—let me see—" He thumbed the book for a while, murmuring words which I could not catch; then thrust it behind his back with a finger between its pages, straightened himself up, and declaimed:
"Next of aerial honey, gift divine,I sing. Maecenas, be once more benign!"
"Next of aerial honey, gift divine,I sing. Maecenas, be once more benign!"
"Next of aerial honey, gift divine,I sing. Maecenas, be once more benign!"
He paused and instructed me how to spell "aerial" and "Maecenas." The orthography of these having been settled, I asked his advice upon "benign," which, as written down by me (I forget how) did not seem convincing.
"You are indisputably an honest boy," said he; "but I have yet to acquire that degree of patience which, by all accounts, consorts with my affliction. Continue, pray:
"Prepare the pomp of trifles to behold:Proud peers—a nation's polity unrolled—Customs, pursuits—its clans, and how they fight,Slight things I labour; not for glory slight,If Heaven attend and Phoebus hearken me.First, then, for site. Seek and instal your Bee—"
"Prepare the pomp of trifles to behold:Proud peers—a nation's polity unrolled—Customs, pursuits—its clans, and how they fight,Slight things I labour; not for glory slight,If Heaven attend and Phoebus hearken me.First, then, for site. Seek and instal your Bee—"
"Prepare the pomp of trifles to behold:Proud peers—a nation's polity unrolled—Customs, pursuits—its clans, and how they fight,Slight things I labour; not for glory slight,If Heaven attend and Phoebus hearken me.First, then, for site. Seek and instal your Bee—"
—"With a capital B, if you please. The poet says 'bees': but the singular, especially if written with a capital, adds in my opinion that mock-heroic touch which, as the translator must frequently miss it for all his pains, he had better insert where he can. By the way, how have you spelt 'Phoebus'?"
"F.e.b.u.s," I answered.
"I feared so," he sighed. "And 'site'?"
"S.i.g.h.t." I felt pretty sure about this. He smote his forehead.
"That is how Miss Plinlimmon taught me," I urged almost defiantly.
"I beg your pardon—'Plinlimmon,' did you say? An unusual name. Do you indeed know a Miss Plinlimmon?"
"It is the name of my dearest friend, sir."
"Most singular! You cannot tell me, I dare say, if she happens to be related to my old friend Arthur Plinlimmon?"
"She is his sister."
"This is most interesting. I remember her, then, as a girl. You must know that Arthur Plinlimmon and I were comrades in the old Fourth Regiment, and dear friends—are dear friends yet, I trust, although time and circumstances have separated us. His sister used to keep house for him before his marriage. A most estimable person! And pray where did you make her acquaintance?"
"In the hospital, sir."
"The hospital? Not an eleemosynary institution for the diseased, I hope?"
I did not know what this meant. "It's a place for foundlings, sir," I answered.
"But—excuse me—Miss Plinlimmon—Agatha? Arabella? I forget for the moment her Christian name—"
"Amelia, sir."
"To be sure; Amelia. Well, she could not be a foundling, nor—as I remember her—did she in the least resemble one."
"Oh no, sir: she is the matron there."
"I see. And where is this hospital?"
"At Plymouth Dock."
"Hey?"
"At Plymouth Dock. A Mr. Scougall keeps it—a sort of clergyman."
"This is most strange. My friend Arthur's son, young Archibald Plinlimmon, is quartered with his regiment there, and often pays us a visit, poor lad."
"Indeed, sir?"
"His circumstances are not prosperous. Family troubles—money losses, you understand: and then his father made an imprudent marriage. Not that anything can be said against the Leicesters— there are few better families. But the lady, I imagine, did not take kindly to poverty: never learnt to cut her coat according to the cloth. Her uncle might have helped her—Sir Charles, that is—the head of the family—a childless man with plenty of money. For some reason, however, he had opposed her match with Arthur. A sad story! And now, when their lad is grown and the time come for him to be a soldier, he must start in the ranks. But why in the world, if she lives at Plymouth Dock, has Archibald never mentioned his aunt to us?"
This was more than I could tell him. And you may be sure that the name Leicester made me want to ask questions, not to answer them. But just now Isabel came across the lawn, bearing a tray with a plateful of biscuits, a decanter of claret, and a glass.
"My dear," asked her father, "has our friend Archibald ever spoken to you of an aunt of his—a Miss Plinlimmon—residing at Plymouth Dock?"
"No, papa." She turned on me, again with that fear and appeal in her eyes, as if in some way I was persecuting her; and the decanter shook and tinkled on the rim of the glass as she poured out the claret.
The old man lifted the wine and held it between his sightless eyes and the sunshine.
"A sad story," he mused: "but, after all, the lad is young and the world young for him! Rejoice in your youth, Mr. Revel, and honour your Creator in the days of it. For me, I enjoyed it by God's grace, and it has not forsaken me: no, not when darkness overtook and shut me out of the profession I loved. I cannot see the colour of this wine, nor the face of this my daughter, nor my garden, yonder, full of flowers."
"Seasons return, but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of even or morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine—"
"Seasons return, but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of even or morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine—"
"Seasons return, but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of even or morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine—"
"Yet memory returns and consoles my blindness. The colour of the wine is there, the flowers are about me, and Isabel—I am told— resembles her mother. Yes, and away on the edge of Spain, the army I served is planting fresh laurels—my old regiment too, the King's Own, though James Brooks is by this time scarcely a name to it. Here I sit, hale in wind and limb, and old age creeps on me kindly, telling me that no man is necessary. And yet, if God should come and lay a command on me—some task that a blind man might undertake—I am at God's service. I sit with my loins girt and my soul, I hope, shriven. That is my sermon to you, young sir: a clean breast and no baggage. I bid you welcome to Minden Cottage!" He drank to me.
"Is it named from the battle of Minden, sir?" I asked.
"It is, my lad."
"Were you there?"
He laughed. "My father won his captaincy there, in a regiment that mistook orders, charged three lines of cavalry, and broke them one after another. It also broke a sound maxim of war by charging between flanking batteries. The British Army has made half its reputation by mistaking orders—you will understand why, if ever you have the honour to belong to it. Isabel, get me my drum!"
She fetched it from its corner, with the drumsticks; hitched the sling over her beautiful neck; tightened the straps carefully; and began to play a soft tattoo.
The old man leaned back in his chair; felt in his pocket; and having found a silk bandanna handkerchief, unfolded it deliberately, cast it over his head and composed himself to slumber.
The tattoo ran on, peaceful as a brook. Isabel's arms hung lax and motionless: only her hands stirred, from the wrists, and so slightly, or else so rapidly without effort, that they too scarcely seemed to move. Her eyes were averted.
My ear could not separate the short taps. They ran on and on in a murmur as of bees or of leaves rustling together in a wood; grew imperceptibly gentler; and almost imperceptibly ceased. Isabel glanced at her father, and set the drum back in its corner. We stole out of the summer-house together, and across to the orchard.
But under the shade of the apple-boughs she turned and faced me.
"Boy, what do you know?"
"I know," said I, meeting her gaze sturdily, "that you are in danger."
"How should I be in danger?"
"That I cannot tell you, Miss Isabel, unless you first tell me something."
She waited, her eyes searching mine.
"Last night," I went on, "in the road—you were expecting someone."
Her chin went up proudly; but a tide of red rose with it, flushing her throat and so creeping up and colouring her face.
"Was it Archibald Plinlimmon?"
She put up a hand as if to push me aside: but on a sudden turned and hastened from me, with bowed head, towards the cottage.
"Miss Isabel!" I cried, following her close. "I meant no harm—how could I mean you harm? Miss Isabel!"
I would not let her go, but followed her to the door, entreating; even pushed after her into the small kitchen, where at last she faced on me.
"Why cannot you let me alone, boy? Into what have you come here to pry? You are odious—yes, odious!" She stamped her foot. "And I thought last night, that you were in trouble. Was I not kind to you for that, and that only?" She broke off pitifully. "Oh, Harry, I am dreadfully unhappy!"
She sank into a chair beside the table, across which she flung an arm and so leaned her brow and let the sobs shake her.
"And I am here to help you, Miss Isabel: only so much is puzzling me! Last night you said you had a secret, and that it was a happy one. To-day you are crying, and it is miserable to see."
"And why should I not be happy?" She lifted a hand to the bosom of her bodice, and slipped over her third finger the ring she had worn over-night.
"Why should I not be expecting him?" she murmured.
For the moment I was slow in understanding. But I suppose that at length she saw that in my eyes which satisfied her: for she drew down my head to her lap, and sat laughing and weeping softly.
A kettle hanging from a crook in the chimney-place boiled over, hissing down upon the hot wood-ashes. She sprang up and lifted it down to the hearth.
"Oh, and I forgot!" Her hand went back to her bodice again. "Mr. Jack Rogers was here this morning inquiring for you. He drove up in his tilbury, and said he was on his way to Plymouth. But he left this note."
I took it and deciphered these words, scrawled in an abominable hand:
"Meet me to-night, nine o'clock, at the place where we parted. J. R."
"Was Mr. Rogers going to Plymouth?" I asked.
"Yes, and in a hurry, by the pace he was driving."
As you may guess, this news discomposed me. Could Mr. Rogers be preparing a trap? No: certainly not for me. Whitmore, if anyone, was his quarry. But I mistrusted that, if he once started this game, it would lead him on to another scent. That Archibald Plinlimmon was innocent of the Jew's murder I felt sure. Still—what had he been seeking on the roofs by the Jew's house? It would be an ugly question, if Mr. Rogers blundered on it; and in the way of honest blundering I felt Mr. Rogers to be infinitely capable. Would that, trusting in his good nature, I had made a clean breast to him!
A clean breast? Isabel too, poor girl, was aching to make confession to her father. For weeks her secret had been a sword within her, wearing the flesh, and it eased her somewhat (as I saw) even to have made confession to me. But she would not speak to her father without first consulting Archibald. It was he, I gathered, who had enjoined silence. Major Brooks (and small blame to him) would assuredly have imposed a probation: old men with lovely daughters do not surrender them at call to penniless youths, even when the penniless youth happens to be the son of an old friend. I wished Master Archibald to perdition for a selfish fool.
I talked long with Isabel: first in the kitchen, and again on our way back to the summer-house, where her father sat awake and expecting me, book in hand.
There she left me, and he began to dictate at once as I settled myself to write.
"First, then, for site. Seek, and instal your BeeWhere nor may winds invade (for winds forbidHis homeward load); nor sheep, nor heady kidTrample the flowers; nor blundering heifer pass,Brush off the dew and bruise the tender grass;Nor lizard foe in painted armour prowlRound the rich hives. Ban him, ban every fowl—Bee-bird with Procne of the bloodied breast:These rifle all—our Hero with the rest,Snapped on the wing and haled, a tit-bit, to the nest.—But seek a green moss'd pool, with well-spring nigh;And through the turf a streamlet fleeting by."
"First, then, for site. Seek, and instal your BeeWhere nor may winds invade (for winds forbidHis homeward load); nor sheep, nor heady kidTrample the flowers; nor blundering heifer pass,Brush off the dew and bruise the tender grass;Nor lizard foe in painted armour prowlRound the rich hives. Ban him, ban every fowl—Bee-bird with Procne of the bloodied breast:These rifle all—our Hero with the rest,Snapped on the wing and haled, a tit-bit, to the nest.—But seek a green moss'd pool, with well-spring nigh;And through the turf a streamlet fleeting by."
"First, then, for site. Seek, and instal your BeeWhere nor may winds invade (for winds forbidHis homeward load); nor sheep, nor heady kidTrample the flowers; nor blundering heifer pass,Brush off the dew and bruise the tender grass;Nor lizard foe in painted armour prowlRound the rich hives. Ban him, ban every fowl—Bee-bird with Procne of the bloodied breast:These rifle all—our Hero with the rest,Snapped on the wing and haled, a tit-bit, to the nest.—But seek a green moss'd pool, with well-spring nigh;And through the turf a streamlet fleeting by."
So much, with interminably slow pauses, we accomplished before the light waned in the summer-house and Isabel called us in to supper, which we ate together in a low-ceiled parlour overlooking the garden. At a quarter to nine, on pretence that I had still to make up arrears of sleep, she signed to me to wish her father good-night and escorted me out into the passage. A slip of the bolt, and I was free of the night.
I found the spot where I had dropped into the road, and cautiously mounted the hedge, putting the brambles aside and peering through them into the fast falling twilight. A low whistle sounded, and Mr. Rogers stepped into view on the footbridge. But he left a companion behind him in the shadow of the alders, and who this might be I could neither see nor guess.
"Is that you, Master Revel?"
There was no help for it now; so over the hedge I climbed and met him.
"How did you find out—"
—"Your name? Miss Brooks told me, this morning. But, for that matter, it's placarded all over Plymouth and at every public and forge and signpost along the road. You're a notorious character, my son."
I began to quake.
"Parson," he went on, turning and addressing the figure in the shadow, "here's the boy. Better make haste, if you have any questions to ask him before we get to business."
There stepped forward, not Mr. Whitmore (as I was fearfully expecting), but a figure unknown to me; an old shovel-hatted man leaning on a stick and buttoned to the chin in a black Inverness cape. I felt his eyes peering at me through the dusk.
"He seems very young to be a trustworthy witness," croaked this old gentleman in a voice which seemed to be affected by the night air.
"He's right enough," Mr. Rogers answered cheerfully.
"He shall tell his tale, then, in Mr. Whitmore's presence. I will not yet believe that a minister of Christ's religion, whose papers— as I have proved to you—are in order, whose testimonials are unexceptionable, who has the Bishop's licence—"
"The Bishop's fiddlestick! The Bishop didn't license him to carry marked guineas in his pocket, and I don't wait for a licence to carry a warrant in mine."
"You will at least afford him an opportunity of explaining before you execute it. To be plain with you, Mr. Rogers, this business is like to be scandalous, however you look at it."
"The constables shall remain outside, and the warrant I'll keep in my pocket until your reverence's doubts are at rest." Mr. Rogers gave another low whistle and two men, hitherto concealed at a little distance in the trees' shadow, stepped silently forward and joined us. "Ready, lads? Quick march, then!"
We took the path up the valley bottom, and across a grassy shoulder of the park to a small gate in the ring-fence. Beyond this gate a lane, or cart-road, dipped steeply downhill to the right; and following it, we came on a high stone wall overtopped by trees.
"Here's your post, Hodgson," whispered Mr. Rogers, after waiting for the constables to come up. "Jim will take the back of the house: and understand that no one is to enter or leave. If anyone attempts it, signal to me: one whistle from you, Hodgson, and two from Jim. Off you go, my lad! The signal's the same if I want you—one whistle or two, as the case may be."
The constable he called Jim crept away in the darkness, while Mr. Rogers found and cautiously opened a wicket-gate leading to a courtlage, across which a solitary window shone on the ground-floor of a house lifting its gables and heavy chimneys against a sky only less black than itself.
"Gad!" said Mr. Rogers softly, "I wonder what Whitmore's doing? The fun would be, now, to find one of these windows unfastened, and slip in upon him without announcing ourselves. 'Twouldn't be the thing, though, for a Justice of the Peace, let alone Mr. Doidge here. No: we'll have to do it in order and knock. The maid knows me. Only you two must keep back in the shadow here while she opens the door."
He stepped forward and knocked boldly.
To the astonishment of us all the door opened almost at once, and without any noise of unlocking or drawing of bolts.
"For Heaven's sake, my dear—unless you want to wake the village—" began a voice testily. It was Mr. Whitmore's, and almost on the instant, by the light of a candle which he held, he recognised the man on the doorstep.
"Mr. Rogers? To what do I owe—"
"Good evening, Whitmore! May I come in? Won't detain you long— especially since you seem to be expecting company."
"It's the maid," answered Mr. Whitmore coldly, though he seemed confused. "She has stepped down to the village for an hour, to her mother's cottage, and I am alone."
"So you call her 'my dear'? That's a bit pastoral, eh?"
"Look here, Rogers: if you're drunk, I beg you to call at some other time. To tell the truth, I'm busy."
"Writing your sermon? I thought Saturday was the night for that. 'Pon my honour now I wouldn't intrude, only the business is urgent." He waited while Mr. Whitmore somewhat grudgingly set the door wide to admit him. "By the way I've brought a couple of friends with me."
"Confound it all, Rogers—"
"Oh, you know them." Mr. Rogers, with his foot planted over the threshold, airily waved us forward out of the darkness. "Mr. Doidge, your Rector," he announced; "also Mr. Revel—a recent acquaintance of yours, as I understand."
"Good evening, Whitmore," said the Rector stepping forward. "I owe you an apology (I sincerely hope) for the circumstances of this visit, as I certainly discommend Mr. Rogers's method of introducing us."
Now, as we two stepped forward, Mr. Whitmore had instantly shot out his right hand to the door—against which Mr. Rogers, however, had planted his foot—with a gesture as if to slam it in our faces. But the sombre apparition of the Rector seemed to freeze him where he stood—or all of him but his left hand which, grasping the candlestick, slowly and as if involuntarily lifted it above the level of his eyes. Then, before the Rector had concluded, he lowered it, turned, and walked hastily before us down the passage.
Still without speaking he passed through a door on his right, and we followed him into a sparely furnished room lined with empty book-shelves. A few books lay scattered on the centre table where also, within the shaded light of a reading lamp, stood a tray with a decanter and a couple of glasses. Beside this lamp he set down the candle and faced us. In those few paces down the passage I had observed that he wore riding-boots and spurs, and that they were spotlessly bright and clean. But from this moment I had eyes only for his face, which was ashen white and the more horrible because he was essaying a painful smile.
"My dear Rector," he began, "this is indeed a—a surprise. You said nothing of any such intention when I had the honour to call on you in Plymouth, two days ago."
"Good reason for why," interrupted Mr. Rogers. "Look here, Whitmore—with the Rector's leave we'll get this over. Do you know this coin?"
He held forward a guinea under the lamp.
I could see the unhappy man pick up his courage to fix his gaze on the coin and hold it fixed.
"I don't understand you, Rogers," he answered. "I have, of course, no knowledge of that coin or what it means. To me it looks like an ordinary guinea."
"I had it from you last night, Whitmore: and it is not an ordinary guinea, but a marked one. What's more, I marked it myself—see, with this small cross behind the king's head. What's more I sold it, so marked, to Rodriguez, the Jew."
—"Who, I suppose, promptly put it into circulation in Plymouth, where by chance it was handed to me amid the change when I paid my hotel-bill—if indeed you are absolutely sure you were given this coin by me." "Come, Rogers, that's an explanation I myself suggested," put in the Rector.
"The folks at the Royal Hotel," answered Mr. Rogers curtly, "tell me that you paid your bill in silver."
It seemed to me that Mr. Rogers was pressing Whitmore harshly, almost with a note of private vindictiveness in his voice. But while I wondered at this my eyes fell on the curate's hand as it played nervously with the base of the brass candlestick. There was a ring on the little finger: and in an instant I knew—though I could not have sworn to it in court—yet knew more certainly than many things to which I could have testified on oath—that this was the hand I had seen closing the door in the Jew's House.
Through a buzzing of the brain I heard him addressing the Rector and protesting against the absurdity, the monstrosity, of the charge—yet still with that recurring agonised glance at me. But my eyes now were on Mr. Rogers; and the buzzing ceased and my brain cleared when he swung round, inviting me to speak. I cannot tell what question he put to me, but what I said was:
"If you please, sirs, the runners are after me; and it isn't fair to make me tell yet what happened in the Jew's house, or what I saw there: for what I told might be twisted and turned against me."
"Nonsense!" interrupted Mr. Rogers. But the Rector nodded his head. "The boy's right. He's under suspicion himself, and should have a lawyer to advise him before he speaks. That's only fair play."
"But," I went on "there's another thing, if you'll be pleased to ask Mr. Whitmore about it. Why is he paying money to a soldier—a man who calls himself Letcher, but his real name is Leicester? And what have they been plotting against Miss Isabel down at the Cottage?"