Part 25

Into the sweet dusk of the wet woods rode Jeffray with Bess beside him. The western sky was still streaked with gold beyond the trees, but the woods before them were tangled deeps of mysterious gloom. All the June perfumes of the earth streamed out from the brakes and thickets, mingling with the pungent breath of the pines. Bluish vapor filled the hollows, merging into the deep purple of the forest’s shadows. Here and there some rain-pool in the grass was touched with the faint light from the western sky. An infinite languor seemed to weigh upon the calm and misty trees. There was still the dull drip of the storm’s dew from ten thousand branches, the rhythmic plashing of water upon the bracken and the grass.

The two red-coats and the rough laborer who acted as guide moved some twenty paces ahead of Jeffray and the girl. There was still some peril of their falling in with the folk who had been scattered from the hamlet, and the troopers kept their carbines ready. Jeffray held the bridle of Bess’s horse, so that they were very close in the dusk. Bess had recovered from her faintness of an hour ago. Jeffray had given her brandy from his flask, though she had refused the bread and meat one of the soldiers had brought her from old Isaac’s cottage. The day’s burden of dread seemed to lift from her as they drew away from the hamlet and its memories, and sank deeper and deeper into the silence of the forest. She was near Jeffray; sometimes her knee touched his. They could almost hear each other breathing, while the sweet smell of the wet woods steamed up like incense into the night.

Jeffray appeared sunk in thought. He looked often at Bess with kindlings of tenderness in his eyes. The pleasurableness of life seemed to steal into either heart, chastened by a melancholy born of the troubled happenings of the day. They remembered, both of them, the dead man lying in the grass. It seemed that the blood-red flower of Bess’s dream had colored forth the shedding of Dan’s blood.

As they crossed White Hind walk, Jeffray drew in Bess’s horse very close to him, stretched out his hand and touched her arm.

“You are not unhappy, child?” he asked.

She hesitated a moment.

“No, no, not unhappy.”

“You are thinking of Dan?”

“Yes.”

“Why should you pity him?”

“Ah, he was pointing his pistol at you—”

“It was for my sake, Bess, I know, I know.”

He looked at her thoughtfully and half sadly as though realizing how much she had dared to save his life. It was a grim thing for a woman to have blood upon her conscience, and that too—the blood of her own husband. His tenderness deepened immeasurably towards Bess. The guilt, whatever guilt there was, was his—not hers.

“There may still be danger for us,” he said, gravely.

Bess looked at him as though all terror would melt away before the calm strength upon his face.

“Is Isaac alive?” she asked, putting her hair back from her forehead.

“I do not know,” he answered.

“If he should guess!”

“No one shall ever know that you fired the shot that killed your husband.”

Bess questioned him with her eyes.

“Should the law ever snatch at us,” he continued, “I shall swear that it was I who shot Dan Grimshaw.”

“You would swear that?” she asked, her whole face aglow.

“I would.”

“Ah—I should love you better than to suffer that.”

They rode on awhile in silence under the trees, the dark figures of the troopers moving vaguely before them, the stars above like silver bosses set in the vaultings of the forest. Often their eyes met; the girl’s white face seemed to shine with an inward light through the darkness of the woods.

“Bess,” said the man, at last.

She watched him—and waited.

“Let us leave this riddle to rot in Pevensel. What do I care whether you are of the Grimshaw blood or no!”

She held out her hands to him with a great sigh.

“Take me away from it all,” she said. “I want you—and nothing more.”

A young moon was showing its silver crescent above the trees when Bess and Jeffray came out upon the heath. The two troopers and the guide were waiting for them, their figures showing dimly against the sky-line. Jeffray hailed the men, assured them that he had no further need of an escort, and, giving them a couple of guineas apiece, advised them to ride back and rejoin their troop. The fellows pocketed the money, and wished Jeffray a very good-evening. There might be spoil to be had at the hamlet in Pevensel, rooms to be rifled, hidden money to be unearthed. They turned back with the guide into the woods, leaving Bess and her man to ride on to Rodenham alone.

XLIV

Thus Bess and Jeffray rode into Rodenham together, while the scent of the wet grass floated on the warm air, and the great cedars smelled of Lebanon. The storm shower had beaten down the grass in places, so that in the dim light it seemed like the swirling eddies of a restless sea. A night-jar whirred in the beechwoods above the road. Rabbits scurried hither and thither. Jeffray could faintly see the heads of his deer rising above the bracken on the edge of the wood.

Soon the old house, black-chimneyed, a pile of shadows, with here and there a window gleaming, rose up before them out of the east. Bess drew her breath in deeply, seeing that his eyes were fixed upon the place. She was wondering whether he was sad at leaving such a home to go alone with her into strange lands.

“Of what are you thinking?” he asked her, suddenly.

“I was thinking of that,” she said, pointing to the house.

“Yes.”

“Can you leave it all for me?”

“Why not?” he asked, with no wavering of his words.

“It is your home.”

“And will be yours.”

“Ah—”

“Some day, when the clouds are gone. We are young yet; we can take our home with us in our hearts.”

She looked at him very dearly, yet with some sadness in her eyes.

“I am wondering,” she said.

“Yes, what are you wondering, Bess?”

“Whether I can make you happy, I who am so poor and ignorant.”

“I have no doubts,” he said, “no doubts whatsoever.”

As they rode up to the terrace with the gardens and shrubberies dim and full of perfume under the night sky, Dick Wilson and Gladden came out from the porch. Wilson gave Jeffray a hearty hail, running forward with out-stretched hand, his eyes twinkling below the bandages that swathed his head.

“Egad, sir,” he said, “I am glad to see you alive. The wilful man has won his way.”

Jeffray had dismounted, but Bess was still on her horse looking down half shyly, half haughtily at the painter, as though mistrusting the good-will of her lover’s friend. Wilson, who had the instinct of chivalry quick and warm under his ugly exterior, went to her with a twinkle in his eyes, and, bowing in the most impressive fashion, took her hand and kissed it.

“May I ask your pardon, madam,” he said, quaintly, “for having proved such a dunderhead of a fellow this afternoon?”

Bess eyed him questioningly.

“You have been wounded?” she asked.

“A slight cut, a slight cut across the pate with a hanger. I am a clumsy fool at my weapons. May I have the honor of helping you to dismount?”

Bess was down beside him before the words were half passed his lips. She stood at her full height before the painter, the light from one of the windows falling on her face. Wilson understood of a sudden how this tall, proud-faced forest child had set Jeffray’s manhood in a blaze.

Jeffray, who had been speaking to Gladden, came back and laid his hand on Wilson’s shoulder.

“This is Mrs. Elizabeth Grimshaw, Dick,” he said, with the pride of a lover; “you have been paying your respects to her.”

“I have, sir, I have,” quoth the painter with a bow.

Bess, who had taken a liking to this ugly but honest-eyed man, smiled at him, and held out a hand.

“I thank you for having helped us,” she said.

“Don’t thank me, madam,” retorted the painter, bluntly. “Mr. Richard here is quite capable of fighting his own battles.”

They laughed—the three of them, Bess and Jeffray looking into each other’s eyes. Wilson still studying with inevitable admiration the face and figure of the woman who had changed a dreamer into a man of fire and action. Peter Gladden was waiting at the hall-door, smirking, and rubbing his smooth chin with his fingers. Jeffray, giving his hand to Bess, led her with an Old-World courtliness up the steps and into the house. The butler stood aside, bowing and fixing his eyes deferentially upon his master’s shoes. He cast a peering, birdlike glance at Bess after she had passed, grinned as he caught Mr. Wilson’s eye, and smothered the smirk instantly as the painter’s stare snubbed him. Jeffray led Bess to the dining-room where supper had been spread hastily upon the table. He drew back a chair for her, dismissed Gladden, who came in with a mincing shuffle, and prepared to wait on Bess in person.

“You must eat,” he said, bending slightly over her chair.

She lay back and looked at him, her eyes shining through her half-closed lashes.

“I am not hungry.”

“No, but you must keep up your strength. I will carve you some venison, and here is good red wine. I shall stand behind your chair till I am satisfied with you. And then—”

“And then?” she said, smiling with her eyes.

“I shall send you above to bed. The coach will be ready for us at seven. Come now, you must humor me; I have the guarding of your health.”

An hour later Bess was lying under the crimson canopy in the great bed above, her limbs between the white sheets, her black hair in a love tangle on the pillow. Jeffray had called Gladden to him in the dining-room, and given him his orders. Poor Gladden imagined that the family dignity must be sinking very deep into the mire. He met the amazing foolhardiness of it all with melancholy stoicism, finished the contents of a half-emptied wine-bottle when his master had gone, and confessed to himself that time and women can wreck empires.

Jeffray found Dick Wilson in the library, lighting his pipe at one of the candles, sucking in his cheeks, and looking as solemn over the ceremony as though the truth of immortality hung upon the proper kindling of the weed. He cocked one eye at Jeffray, smiled, and set himself with his back to the mantle-shelf, one white cotton stocking in wrinkles half way down his leg, his waistcoat fastened by two solitary buttons, the folds of the bandage slipping over his left eyebrow. He puffed away at his pipe, while Jeffray turned to the bureau, unlocked it, and took out the letters he had written the previous morning.

“You will see these delivered, Dick,” he said, “after I am gone?”

Wilson looked at his friend keenly.

“So you are going, sir?” he said.

“Yes, I have ordered the coach at seven. We have no time to be married in England.”

Wilson screwed up his lips and blew forth an expressive stream of smoke.

“What, you are going to be married!”

“Yes. The girl’s husband is dead.”

“The devil he is!”

“There has been a tussle between Garston’s smugglers and the King’s men; the fellow Grimshaw was shot in the scrimmage.”

A look of most unchristian satisfaction spread itself over the painter’s face. He stepped forward and held out his hand.

“I congratulate you, sir—I congratulate you.”

“Thanks, Dick.”

“The stumbling-block is removed out of the path of propriety. And why, if I may ask you, must you be in such an infatuated hurry to be gone?”

“There are reasons, Dick, that I cannot divulge to you.”

“Snub me, sir, snub me if I seem too forward. You can come by a license in a few days; there must be some obliging surrogate in the neighborhood. At the worst you can travel up to London, march to Doctors’ Commons, and secure a proper passport to the seventh heaven.”

Jeffray, pacing to and fro with his shoulders squared and the heels of his shoes coming down squarely on the polished floor, shook his head, and refused the suggestion.

“I have my reasons, Dick,” he said, “and I have thought the whole thing through for myself. Some years ago old Sugg could have married us here in my own house, and for my sake I should like to see Lord Hardwicke and his grandmotherly legislation damned. I want to get the girl away from all the pother that will be brewing, to save her from the tongues of our most Christian friends. To-morrow we drive to Lewes; the next day to the sea.”

Wilson rammed down the tobacco in his pipe with the end of his little finger, relit it at the candle, and puffed on reflectively.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I should like to know how you rescued the lady.”

And Jeffray told him, all save the way in which Dan Grimshaw met his death.

It was well after midnight when Peter Gladden lighted Jeffray to his room. Portmanteaus and valises were scattered about, some half filled, others yawning for the white linen, breeches, silk stockings, and clothes that covered the floor in confusion. Jeffray insisted on Gladden completing the packing before he went to bed. He had already discovered a polite and voiceless antagonism in the old man’s manner, as though Gladden persisted in believing that the romance was but the madness of an hour. He helped the butler to fill and strap the valises, and then dismissed him, ordering him to wake him at five.

The candles were still burning in the library when the dawn came creeping into the east. Wilson, rubbing his eyes as he woke from a short sleep, heard the rumbling of wheels as the great coach was drawn out of the coach-house into the stable-yard. There was the jingling of harness being cleaned, the sound of rough voices gossiping together, an occasional coarse laugh bursting out upon the misty air. The grooms were discussing their master’s love affair. Wilson yawned and stretched his limbs, climbed up out of his chair, snuffed the candles, and went out into the hall.

He met Jeffray coming down the oak stairs, a cloak over one arm, his sword under the other. As the men shook hands there was the sound of a door opening in the gallery above. Light footsteps came down the stairway; Bess, with her gray cloak over her shoulders, descended slowly towards the hall. She looked fresh and pure after her night’s rest, her eyes soft and dewy, her red lips parted in a smile. Jeffray waited for her at the foot of the stairs. He took her hand and kissed it, and led her into the dining-room, looking into her eyes.

“You are rested?” he asked her, with a pressure of the hand.

“Yes—quite.”

“We shall start in an hour or two. We have much to do at Lewes.”

Bess looked at her clothes, her short skirt and green petticoat, and then glanced at Jeffray.

“I have thought of all that,” he said, smiling.

“Ah—”

“You shall look as fine a lady as any in Sussex. Silks and brocades, Bess, you shall have them all.”

In the midst of all the bustle of preparation, a trooper of the Light-Horse Regiment came cantering through the park with a letter for Richard Jeffray tucked under his white belt. Wilson saw the speck of scarlet from the terrace, and, walking down the drive, met the man as he reined up before the iron gates closing the garden. The trooper produced his letter and explained that he had been told, to deliver it into Mr. Jeffray’s hands. Jeffray himself appeared on the terrace at the same moment, and the painter, beckoning to him, turned back with the soldier.

“A letter for you, sir,” he said, as Jeffray came up to them.

The trooper saluted, and delivered the despatch. Jeffray ordered him to ride round to the stable and have his horse watered, and rubbed down with straw.

“From your cornet, I presume?” he asked.

The man nodded and rode on in the direction of the stables.

Jeffray and the painter went back to the terrace and leaned against the balustrade. There was an anxious frown on Jeffray’s face as he broke the seal, and spread the letter on the stone coping before him. He ran his eyes over the straggling and ill-formed sentences, his face clearing as he neared the end.

“SIR,—Having promised to obtain for you any information bearing upon Mrs. Elizabeth Grimshaw’s past, I send you a rough copy of an extraordinary confession made to me by an old woman we found tied to a chair in one of the cottages. I cannot promise you how much truth there is in her tale, but on searching the place called the Monk’s Grave, we discovered that the turf some twenty paces from the old tree that grows on the mound there, had been trampled down quite recently. On digging we found the earth very loose, as though it had been lately turned, also a ragged piece of sail cloth, but no treasure. It is probable that the money has been taken up and hidden elsewhere, and the suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the old man, Isaac Grimshaw, is still at large. The man whom we found dead in the grass has been sworn to as Mrs. Elizabeth Grimshaw’s husband.

“I trust that these facts will be of interest to you.

“Unfortunately my duties here prevent me from dining with you to-day. I take the liberty of postponing the pleasure till to-morrow.

“JAMES JELLICOE,

“Cornet in his Majesty’s—Regiment of Horse.”

Enclosed within the letter, Jeffray found a page torn from a pocket-book, and covered with the cornet’s boyish writing. He held it towards Wilson, and they spelled it out together, experiencing some difficulty in deciphering the sentences that seemed to have been written in the dusk.

Statement made by Mrs. Ursula Grimshaw this 1st day of July, 17—:

“I am Isaac Grimshaw’s sister. The girl Bess, my nephew’s wife, is not of our blood. Twenty years ago come Michaelmas, four sailor men came into the forest with a treasure chest, arms, and a young child. They lodged in my brother Isaac’s cottage, and he and they talked much together. The chest contained much money and precious things. My brother Isaac and his son John, who has been dead these fifteen years, murdered these four sailors when they were drunk, and buried their bodies in the forest. We kept the child as one of us, and called her Bess, and hid the treasure in the woods.

“My brother Isaac told me that the four sailors had murdered the captain and crew of their ship, also a King’s officer and his wife who were passengers. Bess, who was the lady’s child, they saved out of pity, and because she was scarcely three years old. The ship, whose name I never knew, was scuttled in a fog off Beachy Head, the four sailor men coming ashore in the jolly-boat with the treasure and the child. The chest was buried in the forest near a place known as the Monk’s Grave. This, God help me! is all I know. I have kept this secret twenty years.”

Jeffray and the painter looked hard into each other’s eyes when they had read the confession through. There was a slight flush as of triumph on Jeffray’s face, as he held out his hand exultantly to Wilson.

“We go to Lewes after all,” he said.

“Sir!”

“I shall send a letter back by the trooper to Cornet Jellicoe, thanking him, and saying that I have gone to Lewes on legal business. We will cross the water to-morrow, God helping us!”

Wilson gave his friend a keen look, and tapped the letter with his finger.

“There is still a mystery here, sir,” he said.

“What does it matter, Dick—what does it matter?”

“If this be true—”

“True! Why, damn it, Dick, I have always believed it true. Do you think that girl was born in a hovel?”

XLV

The turret clock was striking seven when the coach swung out of the stable-yard, and, turning on the gravel-drive before the house, drew up with rattling harness before the porch. The luggage lay piled upon the roof, a loaded blunderbuss hanging in the straps before the back seat. Both the coachman and the serving-man beside him were armed. Peter Gladden, cloaked, and with a couple of pistols swinging in his tail-pockets, stood with his hand on the handle of the door.

Jeffray, his sword under his left arm, handed Bess down the steps to the coach. Dick Wilson followed them, striving not to look lugubrious, his blue eyes set staringly in his sun-tanned face. Bess tripped into the coach; Jeffray halted with one foot on the step, and held out his hand to his friend with a smile.

“Good-bye, Dick,” he said, “and God bless you.”

Wilson’s powerful fist closed upon Jeffray’s brown and sinewy fingers.

“God go with you, too, sir,” he retorted, a little thickly. “I’ll see to your business. The fellow in Lincoln’s Inn shall have your letter, and we’ll forward all news between us to France.”

Jeffray gave a last grip to the painter’s hand, and sprang into the coach.

“There is the letter to my bankers, Dick,” he said, when Gladden had closed the door, “deliver it in person. A portion of it concerns yourself.”

“Concerns me, sir?”

“Yes, Dick—good-bye—good-bye.”

“God go with you both, sir, and may you be happy!”

Peter Gladden climbed to the back seat. The whip cracked, the horses strained at the traces, the heavy wheels ground into the gravel. The great coach rolled away on its high springs, leaving the old house bowered up amid its trees, moated by shrubs and the thousand faces of its flowers. Dick Wilson ran to the end of the terrace, flapping a red-cotton handkerchief. Jeffray, leaning out of the window, waved to him in turn, Bess looking over her lover’s shoulder. Wilson was still standing there when a cedar hid the gardens and terrace-way from sight. Gable and chimney-stack and lozenged-casement sank away behind the trees; only a faint trail of blue smoke in the heavens showed where the old house stood.

Jeffray, with a melancholy light in his brown eyes for the moment, sighed and turned back towards Bess. She was leaning forward slightly, her elbows resting on her knees, her head thrown back, her white throat showing. She seemed oblivious for the moment of Jeffray’s presence.

“Bess.”

She dropped her hands with a start, and lay back in the coach, looking at him very dearly.

“Well, we are on the road,” said the man, smiling.

Her lips quivered, her eyes flashed up to his.

“To-night we shall be at Lewes.”

“Yes.”

“And to-morrow we shall see the sea.”

Bess stretched out her hand to him. Jeffray took it and held it in his, feeling it warm and dewy, full of the swift moving blood of youth.

“Ursula has confessed,” he said, looking in her eyes.

“Ursula?”

“Yes—”

“Is it of Dan?”

Jeffray’s calm face reassured her as she leaned towards him with sudden dread.

“No,” he said, “I had a letter from the King’s officer an hour ago; they had found Ursula tied to a chair in her cottage, and hearing that Dan was dead—and her kinsfolk scattered, she made a confession about the past. You are no Grimshaw, Bess, but some one’s child from over the sea.”

Jeffray told her all that had been laid bare in the old woman’s confession, Bess lying back in the corner of the coach, her eyes looking out at the country that was sweeping by. Her fingers crept round Jeffray’s wrist, and contracted spasmodically as though she wished to realize that he was near. The wild and fantastic tale unfolded itself before her, the great ship sunk at sea, the murder of the four sailors in the forest, the hiding of the treasure, the beginning of her own life in Pevensel. She began to understand much that had puzzled her of old, why Isaac had been mad for her to marry Dan, and why the old man had wished to kill her after she had watched them uncovering the chest by the Monk’s Grave.

“Richard,” she said, very softly, still looking out of the window.

He bent towards her with great tenderness.

“Who was my mother?”

“Bess, I do not know.”

“Did they kill her?”

This time Jeffray’s hand fastened upon the girl’s.

“I fear so,” he said, gravely.

“She was a lady?”

“Yes, so Ursula believed. It was your mother who wore the brooch your husband gave you. We may learn more of the past if the treasure is discovered.”