Part 23

Wilson bowed down his head and half turned towards the window. He laid his pipe upon the sill, thrust his hands into his breeches-pockets, and stood with sloped shoulders, the attitude of a man bowed down by thought. He appeared almost afraid of facing Jeffray. There was so much grimness in the dénouement that he flinched for the moment from hazarding an opinion.

“A grave step, sir,” he said at last.

“Grave for us both, Dick.”

“How much does the girl know?”

“She knows everything.”

“Is she ready to be advised by you?”

“We have taken a night to search our hearts.”

Wilson was not one of those creatures who carry their prejudices and opinions about with them like samples of snuff and insist on presenting them to friends and acquaintances. He was not a moral person in the ecclesiastical sense. A man of the world, he knew the thousand entanglements that are cast about those who dare to depart from the paths of propriety.

“Have you thought the matter over, sir?” he said at last, laying his hand with a look of affection on Jeffray’s shoulder.

“I am ready to face it, Dick,” he answered.

“It is a great lottery, sir—a great lottery.”

Jeffray’s lips twitched, but his face never lost its determination.

“I love this woman, Dick,” he said, simply; “I would risk my immortal soul for her. How can I send her back to this brute of a husband? What have I to lose in Sussex? If poor Lot dies, I cannot rest here with his blood upon my hands. The girl’s life, too, is in danger. They meant to shoot her, Dick—shoot her—by Heaven, that they shall not! How can I turn her away at such an hour?”

Wilson shook his head and stared sadly through the open window.

“It is a great lottery, lad,” he said—“a great lottery.”

Jeffray drew close to him and held out his hand.

“Then, Dick,” he said, “I can take my destiny like a brave man. Better to stand for the truth—than shirk it for a lie. May I call you still my friend?”

Wilson turned with something between a snort and a sigh.

“Egad, sir, I will remain your friend despite all the women in Christendom.”

And the two men shook hands.

Jeffray, remembering what had happened at the parsonage, and realizing that the Grimshaws of Pevensel were desperate men, determined to remain on the watch all night with pistols and a drawn sword on the table before him. Bess was alone in the great bedroom, sleeping in the very bed, with its carved pillars and red silk canopy, in which Jeffray had been born. Wilson stumped off to his room about midnight, after talking over with Jeffray the events of the day, and listening for the twelfth time to Richard’s passionate assertion that Bess had not come of a peasant stock.

When Wilson had taken his candle and gone to bed, Jeffray settled himself in the library, unlocked the bureau, and prepared for the composing of several letters. He wrote to the Lady Letitia at The Wells, informing her of the result of his quarrel with the Hardacres. He wrote also to Jilian a single letter, expressing his sorrow that he should have spilled her brother’s blood.

Feverish with the ever-flowing current of his thoughts, he went and seated himself before the open window of the library. The night was calm and windless, blessed by the faces of a thousand stars. The trees slumbered about the house; the scent of roses and of honeysuckle hung heavy on the air.

Jeffray turned and looked round the shadowy room. The candles on the table where the pistols lay were burning steadily towards their silver sockets. The books ranged close along the walls seemed to recall unnumbered memories of the past. There were the books he had loved and leaned over as a boy—Mandeville’s travels, old Froissart, Chaucer’s tales, Shakespeare, Milton, and _The Book of Martyrs_. There on the bureau lay the brown-covered Thomas à Kempis that had been daily in his dead father’s hands. Jeffray seemed to see the old man’s figure moving dimly in the dusk, with Roger, his black spaniel, at his heels. Poor Roger lay in the rose garden under a red rose-tree. The bent but stately figure in its black coat, white ruffles, and cravat, with the heavy peruke falling on either side of the pale and courtly face, had vanished hardly a year ago from the old house. Jeffray wondered like a child whether his father could see him still, whether he was grieved by his son’s madness.

As Jeffray watched on the dawn began to creep up into the eastern sky. The trees about the house, still wrapped in the mystery of the night, stood outlined against a broadening sheet of gold. The chanting of birds flooded up from the thickets; wild life began to wake; the stars sank back behind the deepening blue of day. Rabbits scurried over the dew-drenched grass-land of the park and came and went amid the bracken. Blackbirds bustled and chattered in the garden. The woods flashed and kindled. Vapors of rose flushed the opalescent bosoms of the clouds.

Jeffray leaned his elbows on the window-sill and watched the deepening of the dawn. It was mysteriously strange to him, instinct with a new and prophetic beauty. How still the whole world seemed save for the singing of the birds! The garden, with its many colors of gold and scarlet, azure, purple, and white, spread itself like some rich tapestry for the coming of the daughters of the dawn. The great cedars still seemed asleep. The cypresses and yews were webbed with gold.

Jeffray started suddenly, and half turned in his chair. Some one was stirring in the silent house; he heard a door open, swift footsteps upon the stairs. They came down and down into the half darkness of the hall like light descending into some ancient tower. Jeffray sprang up and went towards the door. A flood of light streamed down through one of the traceried windows of the hall. It fell upon the stairway and the polished woodwork of the floor, making the black timber seem like glistening water.

Down the stairs came Bess. Her black hair was gathered up in masses about her pale and wistful face. Her eyes, that looked like the eyes of one who had been long awake, were turned yearningly towards him.

“Bess.”

She came more slowly down the last few steps, the sunlight falling on her face, her lips apart, her eyes shining.

“I could not sleep.”

She stood before him, breathing deeply, and gazing in his face.

“I could not sleep, and I felt that I must come to you. You told me that you would watch till the morning.”

Jeffray’s face was in the shadow, but there was no mistaking the expression thereon.

“I have made up my mind, Bess,” he said.

She looked at him, gave a low cry, and stretched out her hands.

“You will not send me back to him!”

“No.”

“Let me be your servant—anything; do not send me away. I will go with you anywhere. I will go with you to the end of the world.”

So the dawn came for them, while in Pevensel Dan and old Isaac had been toiling through the night. They had taken the treasure-chest from the Monk’s Grave and buried it deep in the woods towards Holy Cross. They knew that Bess had fled to Rodenham, for Solomon had followed her through the woods, and had met a carter on the road who had passed the girl on the heath. A laborer had seen a woman climb the palings of the park, and Solomon had tramped home to his brother with the news. Isaac had sworn that Dan’s wife should be recovered, but first they had buried the treasure in a place unknown to Bess.

XL

For an hour Jeffray walked alone in the garden that morning, thinking over the future and his duty to Bess. He had sworn to his own heart that she should not fall again into her husband’s hands, and yet in the making of this vow he had taken a grave step on the path of life. Jeffray was in no temper to be scared by calumny or slander. He had fought his fight and proved his power to act according to his conscience. His thoughts were not for himself that morning, but for the woman whose life was pledged to him for love.

About ten o’clock he left the garden for the library, and, opening his bureau, wrote a long letter to his attorney at Lincoln’s Inn. Then he unlocked an old dower-chest that stood beside the fireplace, and lifted out the strong-box where he kept what money he required. Wilson, who was smoking at the window, watched him counting out the gold pieces and the notes upon the table. The lad was so serious and intent on it that the painter realized how grimly he was in earnest.

“Three hundred guineas, Dick—three hundred guineas. Enough powder and shot to serve for the time being.”

Wilson took his pipe-stem from between his teeth.

“Plenty of hard cash, sir,” he said. “What are you going to do with it? Hire some sly fox of a lawyer?”

Jeffray looked up with a frown.

“No, not that, Dick. I am preparing for what I hold to be my duty.”

“Well, sir, well?”

“I am going to save this woman from the past, and act with honor for her, even though our love may come to nothing.”

Wilson sat up and looked hard at Jeffray, profoundly interested in the problem-play before him.

“You can trust me, sir; what do you mean to do?”

“Make her a new life, Dick.”

“Yes.”

“Money is nothing to me. I can give her all of it she needs in this world, a home, and safety from all sordid care and dread.”

“Well, what then?”

Jeffray leaned back against the wall, and looked out gravely through the open window.

“I have not found the end yet,” he said.

Wilson nodded.

“She has trusted me; God help me to deserve her trust.”

As the morning wore on, Wilson noticed that an increasing restlessness was taking possession of the rebel. He grew moody, distraught, and silent, called for wine, and wandered hesitatingly about the room. The painter began to wonder whether Jeffray’s enthusiasm was abating, and whether he was tempted to regard the adventure in a more cold and calculating light. The affair reminded the painter of love as it was pictured in the old ballads. The beggar’s daughter of Bethnal Green could have had no more monstrously impossible romance than this peasant girl in a Sussex forest.

Mr. Wilson’s surmises, however, were utterly at fault, though logic upheld them with an obvious display of probabilities. It was his ignorance of Lot Hardacre’s fate that was troubling Jeffray at the eleventh hour. No news had come from Rookhurst, and his cousin might have bled to death in the coach for all Jeffray knew to the contrary. Bess’s surrender, the bustle of preparation, had carried Richard above the wreckage of the past for the morning. The memory of Lot’s gray face and bloody body haunted him as the hours passed by.

The restless stirrings of compunction were not to be refused a hearing. Jeffray met his fears with the answer of action. He would ride to Rookhurst, go to Stott’s house, and hear the truth from the surgeon’s own lips.

“I cannot rest, Dick,” he said, “until I have heard the truth about poor Lot.”

Wilson suggested that he might send a servant.

“Dick,” quoth the younger man, sadly, “that would be ungenerous of me. It was my sword that did the deed.”

“True, sir, true.”

“You will remain on guard this afternoon? Bess is in the blue parlor beyond the dining-room. You will find my pistols in the library.”

Wilson smiled as though amused at the responsibility that was thrust upon him.

“I will play the Cerberus, sir,” he said. “Go to Rookhurst, and may you find Mr. Hardacre alive.”

Jeffray saw Bess before he left the house, and explained the nature of his purpose to her. She was a little loath for him to go, having learned to feel already a sweet and strange security in his presence. He kissed her, and smiled, not sorry in his heart that even the small leave-takings of love could bring regret into the woman’s eyes. She went with him to the terrace, and parted from him with a pressure of the hand.

Jeffray recovered much of his fervor as he swung through Rodenham and on towards Rookhurst. The west wind set the woods a-whimper, the foxgloves waving above the bracken. Dog-roses were threading the hedge-rows, delicate in coloring as pink sea-shells. Honeysuckle trailed from the oak-saplings and the hazels, and the fields were green with the rising corn. In the meadows the hay rippled, sinuous as the sea under the passing wind, and over the dense green of the summer woods sunlight and cloud shadows raced and played.

It was about four o’clock when Jeffray saw the little town of Rookhurst straggling red-roofed down the slope of a hill. A gray tower with a white-shingled spire flashed up in the sunlight above the gables, chimneys, and dormer-windows. There were orchards lying about the town, and every house seemed overrun with roses. Meadows, still golden with buttercups, and afire with sorrel and red clover, ran down to the stream that flickered on towards the sea.

Jeffray rode down King Street into the market-place, his horse’s hoofs clattering on the round cobbles, quaint casements opening through clematis and roses on either hand. An Old World quiet, a calm air of contented indolence seemed to hang over the red roofs of the little town. The good people of Rookhurst took life as though it was an endless June. The quiet shops were cursed with no surfeit of customers, and the dogs slept on the sunny side of the footway. The very clock in the church-tower smote the quarters as though Time were no demon to be obeyed.

Surgeon Stott’s house stood in one corner of the market-place, beyond the timbered pump-house, where a few old men were basking on the benches. The house was painted white, and had a flight of six red-brick steps leading up to the green front-door. Red-and-white chintz curtains were looped back from the windows, and the window-boxes were filled with flowers. Jeffray walked his horse round the pump-house, and saw that straw had been spread over the brown cobbles to deaden sound. He was on the point of dismounting when the green door opened, and Miss Jilian herself came down the steps, followed by a servant in the Hardacre livery.

Jeffray flushed up to the roots of his hair. The lady’s eyes had swept over him, flashing and scintillating with scorn. Instinctively he had raised his hat to her, but there was no flicker of recognition on her face. Strangely enough, Jeffray’s respect for Miss Hardacre deepened of a sudden. He saw her trip round the market-place in her big bonnet, the footman following her, and disappear within the doorway of the Blue Boar, Rookhurst’s most aristocratic inn.

Jeffray, sensitive to Miss Hardacre’s scorn, hesitated whether he should dismount and inquire at the house for Mr. Lancelot. In the height of his indecision, the green door opened again, and Surgeon Stott, in blue coat and buckskin breeches, appeared upon the steps. He bowed to Jeffray and lifted his hat. Richard wheeled his horse round close to the footway, and looked earnestly in the surgeon’s face.

“Can I speak with you a moment, Stott?”

The surgeon’s features relaxed into a kindly smile. He came down the six red steps, and stood on the flagged footway, his fingers playing with the gold seals that reposed upon his white waistcoat.

“How is my cousin, Stott. I have ridden over to inquire?”

The gentleman in the blue coat half closed his eyes, threw out his stomach, and cleared his throat.

“Mr. Hardacre has had a nasty mauling, sir,” he said; “but I have done the best for him.”

“Will he recover?”

Surgeon Stott glanced searchingly at Jeffray.

“The lung was touched, sir, and he was bleeding like a pig when they brought him in here yesterday. It is my opinion, however, that Mr. Hardacre’s vitality will pull him through.”

“Thank God,” said the younger man, with genuine and hearty relief.

The surgeon’s broad face beamed. He liked Jeffray, and felt that he was sincere in his spirit of regret.

“It was a narrow margin, sir,” he said, “another finger’s-breadth, and your sword would have touched the heart. Young blood, Mr. Jeffray, young blood! You gentlemen in the twenties are apt to be hot in the head, and the mischief’s sooner made than mended. I have nothing to do with the quarrel, sir, and I hope the incident will breed no ill-feeling between us.”

Jeffray held out his hand to the surgeon.

“Why should it, Stott?” he said. “I am grateful to you for saving my cousin’s life. I will not explain the nature of the quarrel; you are probably wiser than I am in some respects.”

Stott gave Jeffray a shrewd look, and grimaced expressively in the direction of the Blue Boar.

“A lady, as usual, sir,” he said, “though family differences are no business of mine. I have to mend bodies, sir, not to tinker at hearts.”

“True,” answered the younger man, thoughtfully, “and whatever you may hear said against me in the future, Stott, you may remember that I acted as my honor desired. We are not always our own masters in this world, sir; there is a thing called destiny that pushes us forward through the thorns.”

And with a last hand-shake, Jeffray clattered out of Rookhurst market-place, feeling a happier man than when he had entered it.

Clearing the streets of the little town, he saw that heavy clouds were massing in the northwestern sky. The atmosphere had been preternaturally clear, the domed foliage of the distant woods, the swell of the southern downs standing out in beautiful distinctness under the June sky. Old Gladden had been grumbling all the morning at the heat, prophesying thunder and a heavy fall of rain. As Jeffray climbed slowly up the long slope towards the forest ridge, the black outliers moving ahead of the massive wall of vapor began to stream across the sun. The whole landscape was bathed in a strange splendor of slanting sunlight, the woods and meadows lying a wondrous green under the imminent gloom of the purple north.

Jeffray pricked up his horse, and came at a fast trot into Rodenham village. Already there were vague mutterings running athwart the distant sky. Outside the Wheat Sheaf Inn Jeffray came upon some twenty troopers of a regiment of Light-Horse drinking beer at the wooden tables, their horses picketed upon the green. Some of the men were watching the thunder-clouds, reckoning on the drenching of the outer man as they were moistening the inner. Their cornet, a dark-faced youth with a hooked nose and a libidinous mouth, came to the doorway of the inn with George Gogg as Jeffray passed. The innkeeper saluted the Squire, the officer staring at him with an insolence of militant youth, as though remarking, “And who the devil may you be?” Jeffray attached no significance to the incident for the moment. He supposed that the troopers were on the march, and that the cornet had called a halt out of courtesy to the coming storm.

As Jeffray turned in under the yews at the park gate he was stopped by the lodge-keeper’s wife running out in a red petticoat and a very slatternly pair of stays. The woman, who was something of a drunkard, appeared flushed and excited. She had the eager, officious look of a common creature big with information.

“Well, Mrs. Wilder, what is it?”

“My man’s gone up to the house, your honor; there’s been a scrimmage at the priory.”

Jeffray’s face hardened on the instant.

“A scrimmage! What do you mean?”

The woman appeared to swell with the satisfaction of her sensational confession. Her red and coarse-featured face shone out at Jeffray with every suggestion of ill omen.

“Mr. Gladden sent down word, sir, as how a number of rough fellows from the forest have broke in, cut the painter gentleman over the head, and trussed up the young woman as was staying with ye.”

Jeffray waited to hear no more. He insulted the woman’s eloquence by clapping in his spurs and leaving her standing open-mouthed and loose-bosomed in the road. It was even as the lodge-keeper’s wife had told him. Jeffray entered the house to find Dick Wilson propped up on the library sofa with a bandaged and bloody head. Bess was gone.

XLI

Dan and old Isaac had been lying hid all day like a couple of leopards in one of the sloping shrubberies that closed in the garden on the west. Their patience had been rewarded, for they had seen Bess appear for that fatal moment upon the terrace when she had taken leave of Jeffray when he rode to Rookhurst. They had watched her return into the house, pass the windows of the dining-room and seat herself at the window of the blue parlor. Her own dreamy and passionate sense of security had delivered her into her husband’s hands. Dan and Isaac had crept round to the eastern end of the terrace, entered with masterly boldness at the porch door, and caught Bess alone in the blue parlor. The girl had fought like a wild thing, only to be stunned by Dan in savage impatience with a blow from the hilt of his hanger. In the hall he had come face to face with Dick Wilson rushing, pistols in fists, from the library. The painter, nothing of a marksman, had fired at Isaac and missed, and taken a cut across the pate from Dan’s hanger for his pains. Peter Gladden, discreetly deaf to all this pother, had only run to Mr. Wilson’s help when he was assured that such dangerous ruffians as the Grimshaws had departed. Officious to the point of fanaticism when the peril was past, he had scuttled away to rouse the grooms in the stable, and had stormed and hectored when the fellows displayed no overmastering desire to give chase to the Grimshaws over Rodenham heath.

During Peter Gladden’s explanations and Mr. Wilson’s condemnation of his own carelessness, the thunder-storm had burst over the old house. Great lightning cracks streamed across the sky; the wind labored and gathered itself into spasmodic and mournful gusts; the tall trees battled one with another; rain rattled on the broad-leaved laurels and hollies. The very deeps of the old house seemed to quiver beneath the mighty reverberations of the heavens. Gray sheets of rain dimmed the landscape, and shrouded the struggling and wind-tossed trees.

Gladden, querulous and uneasy, moved to the library window and closed it against the rain. Jeffray was standing motionless in the centre of the room, looking at the bands of blood-blotched linen about Dick Wilson’s head. He turned to the table abruptly, picked up the pistols the painter had used so clumsily, and glanced at the flints and the priming-pans. Going to an old armoire that stood in the far corner, he opened it and took out a leather belt that carried a powder-flask, a bag of bullets, and a hunting-knife. He loaded and primed the empty pistol, buckled the belt about his body, and then spoke to Gladden in a quiet and determined voice.

“Order the mare to be saddled,” he said; “she will stand the thunder better than Brown Will.”

Gladden stared at his master incredulously.

“Do you hear me, Gladden?”

“I do, sir.”

“Then obey my orders. Quick with you, and see that the brandy flask is filled and strapped to the saddle with the holsters.”

The butler slouched away, unbuttoning and buttoning his coat in agitation. Wilson, who was weak from loss of blood, and had been listening to Jeffray’s orders, staggered up from his chair, and faced his friend.

“Where are you going, sir?” he asked, almost roughly.

“To Pevensel, Dick.”

“To Pevensel?”

“Where else—after what has happened?”

The painter stretched out his hands as though to plant them appealingly on Jeffray’s shoulders. Richard drew two steps back from him with a slight frown.

“Are you mad, sir?—are you mad?”

“No, I am not mad, Dick.”

“They will murder you, sir. I tell you they are desperate men.”

“So am I, Dick,” said the other, simply.

Wilson beat his left fist into his right palm.

“You can’t ride out in such weather. Wait and get help; take your servants with you if you must meddle in this mad business.”

Jeffray appeared unmoved by the suggestion.