Part 11

“The book says: ‘The ancient family of Daunet, who beareth sable gultie, argent and a canton ermine.…’ Yes, Guy Daunet’s tomb is in the church at Redmire--remember it?--His feet are cased in brass-toed sollerets. Above his lady’s head are three shields of arms. She appears to have been a Conyers. Well, they seem to be pretty well extinct now. The last Daunet was out and killed in the fifteen. There were Daunets in the Great Rebellion, Daunets in the Gunpowder Plot--in the Rising in the North----”

“Poor romantic dears!”

“Yes, that’s the plague of lost causes. They swayed the emotions so forcibly and through the emotions the very lives of the old families--those that had any good in them. One imagines them, up to the very latest day, having an indistinct glimmering of their own original _raison d’être_, that is, lands given in exchange for service.… Their modern representatives have lost even the glimmering. Well, oughtn’t we to be driving on?”

“Oh, no. After what you’ve been making out, I must have a try to see over it. I want to make out that blurred shield over the door. Gules argent and canton ermine, was it? They can but refuse us.”

The young couple alighted, under mute protest from the driver, and entered the courtyard, the lady bold, the man nervous, deprecating. They received forthwith a Teniers-like vision of an interior. Farm-hands were sitting round a wooden table, placed in the oak-panelled greasy blackness of a low raftered hall. All looked up, and ceased pulling at their mugs. A frowsy young girl of eighteen, wiping her mouth, came forward.

“Could we see over?” The glint of a silver coin in the lady’s hand pleasingly accentuated her request.

A voice came from the interior as the girl stood hesitating and shy.

“Mind, hinny, thou’st not take the lady anywhere it isn’t safe. Keep out of the room the captain’s leg came through. And mind, the stairway beyont isn’t much to crack on.”

The girl thus admonished, turned and led the enthusiastic pair in and up the rich darkness of the stair.

“That’s the best part of it her mother told her to leave out!” whispered the lady. “That about the captain’s leg. It sounds most exciting. Ask her--or I will.”

The girl, questioned, replied over her shoulder.

“It’s a tale, ma’am. A long while back it were--ages and ages. They do say a man’s leg came through the floor, and he’s always called the capting. The boards is rotten just there, and was then. That whole end o’ the house is fair gone to powder. My grandfeyther used for to say that a man’s leg made it coming through. But it was long before his time, and he were a very old man. The ceilings of that part of the house is that powdery, would you believe it, that we can always scrape the plaster and get a bit for baby.”

“How funny and utilitarian! And is it haunted?”

“Grandfeyther always said ’twas.”

“Who by?”

“They do say a poor man went clean daft there--came home and found every one lying dead about the place.”

“But what had they died of? Plague?”

“The smit? Naw. Grandfeyther allus said ’twor a tragedy, same as they has in the papers now-a-days.”

“Where is your grandfather now?”

She jerked her finger over towards the north.

“Churchyard. But he knew all about this place. His feyther before him was ostler about the inn at Redmire--you’ll pass it on your way to Bolton. He always said there was a hiding hole here, and mor’n that, a secret way, but teacher says that’s all nonsense and we mustn’t waste our time looking for it, besides it isn’t safe. We shut oop this part, and just pack into the other, where it’s still pretty good, and at Michaelmas we’ve all got to go out and Lord Scrope is going to pull the old place down.”

“Shame!”

“Oh, I dunno. It’s fair rotten.”

“Are you sure you can’t take us into the rotten part--just for once before it all goes?”

“That I cannot. The worst room is the one the man’s leg came through--they call it the Lady Christina’s room. And it’s there Grandfeyther says the priest’s hole was.”

“It was generally out of the principal room in the house,” said the man. “They wanted him under their own hand and to be able to feed him at night. Come along, Mary, you really can’t see it.”

“I suppose not.” She sighed. “But I do somehow seem to see Christina--the Lady Christina. I suppose her spirit is about? Why ‘Lady’? The Daunets had no title.”

“These people always dignify ghosts and raise them to the peerage. Let’s see if we can’t make up a story for her. Christina Daunet and her lover--was he the man who went mad or the priest she hid?”

They were descending the stairs. Their cicerone broke in suddenly.

“Nay, that weren’t the way. The real heir was troth-plight to the Lady Christina, and he was drowned one day here in the ford, here under her very eyes.”

“Another touch!” said her companion eagerly. “So legend grows. Let us go and sit out on the hill, here, and look towards the ford, and I’ll try to reconstruct her story for you. I’m not a novelist for nothing. This is how the man went mad when he came home.”

* * * * * * *

There was no priest. The lover was that “little spark in a blue bonnet that fought at Preston” Boswell speaks of. I’ve always wanted to connect him up with a story. Miss Christina Daunet--not Lady--was tall and pale, and a fine girl, so long as she had enough to eat, and nothing to brood on. But her adolescence and greatest need of nourishment happened to coincide with Jacobite times of stress, when loyal subjects starved in order that the Stuarts might come by their own. The females of her family were used--even hardened to the more domestic consequences of the males’ unfaltering loyalty. When the fuss was about priests, Christina’s own grandmother had successfully concealed one in the hiding-place in her room--that very room that we were not permitted to investigate, looking towards the ford and the road to Richmond. To-day her own mother lay there, eighty, bedridden, daft and doited.

These two women were the widow and daughter of the last Daunet of the direct line. Since the great Guy of the canton ermine, the race had continually dwindled. So many of them had been strangled, so many hanged and drawn and quartered, a half-dozen desiccated heads belonging to the strain had rotted on Temple Bar. Cold steel and a touch of poison had been responsible for some others, and thus the foolish, forlorn race had been cleared off to make room for persons of finer judgment and less realistic ideals. Acts of attainder, recusant fines, had impoverished their estates, and mulcted them of their goods, till of all the broad lands, castles and noble manor houses that had bred and sheltered and maintained Daunets for the King’s service, only the austere, embattled farm-house on the Richmondshire moors remained, and therein the two women that alone bore the fine fighting name slowly pined and withered away.

They had not enough to eat. Yet their appetites were no larger than feminine appetites are reputed to be. Sir Christopher Daunet, Christina’s father, was killed at Sheriffmuir when his little daughter was a year old, and her mother, grown doited with the shock, lived on to give very little trouble, and represent no great charge on the family finances. She lay always in her big room in the south-west wing. Her heavy four-post bed, too mighty and perhaps too rotten to be moved, remained firm in its old place on the safer part of the flooring; the tester was hung by heavy rings to the ceiling. Her daughter, ministering to her slight wants, had learned to walk warily round the bed.

Christina Daunet was loyal--as women are loyal. She realized very fairly that this task of the reinstatement of the Stuart dynasty on the throne of England had been set by Providence on her and hers, incidentally carrying with it the doom of extermination set on the race. Their blind inherent loyalty clustered as it must, round the losing side which sucked in, naturally, these people who always went where their advantage was not--and the losing side had drawn in her father, her uncle, even the man she loved.

She loved her cousin, Charles Daunet of Scanwood. Scanwood House lay three miles hence on the Richmond Road. Charles was the only son of her father’s only sister. Christina and this young man were early troth-plighted--they were about to wed--but the Stuarts came first. It was the Cause that intervened and forbade the innocent banns. Charles Daunet allowed the just impediment and went out as a matter of course. He was more eager for the day of the stranger’s crowning than for the morn that should usher in his wedding with Christina whom he knew and loved. He had left her too easily. Folk in the neighbourhood said he was slack. Christina herself admitted that Charles was more of a fighter than a lover. But the Stuarts called! What was a Daunet to do?

She cried sometimes and mourned over her baulked betrothal with her only confidant, a certain Luke Daunet. Her father had had a son, but he was not her mother’s child. Luke lived with them--his mother had been innkeeper’s daughter over at Redmire, a good girl enough till Sir Christopher Daunet came her way. He lived so near, at Wallburn, and he was not the man to leave so fair a flower ungathered.

Madam Daunet was not a hard woman. She undertook the child’s maintenance when its mother died and Sir Christopher fell at Sheriffmuir. Luke grew up. He was not “all there,” but he was an honest, kindly, gentle fellow, and for the two lonely women he did a man’s work about the place. There was not much to do. There was not a beast left in the stable, except a wall-eyed, knock-kneed pony that Luke rode into Redmire or Marske now and then to buy necessaries. They could afford no other servant. The white-handed proud Christina tended her mother, cooked, and did the inside work of the house. It was all one. When the Prince should come into his own, Christina would do so likewise.

Of that she had doubts sometimes, especially when the wind whistled over the moor, and the stream ran heavy and turbid below the garden, so that the ford was ill to cross. The Prince’s final triumphing then seemed surer than her own. Charles had been away now a long while. He had not been assiduous about her for many months before his departure to join the Prince. He had sent her no message first or last. She had even heard of another lady.…

For rumours flew. The news of the brief Stuart apotheosis at Edinburgh, tidings of the Prince’s meteoric Court at Holyrood, had filtered down to Redmire, and the bar of the inn there. Preston fight, too, was mentioned. She thought, but was not sure, that Charles had been noticed there. Now the Prince was marching south… had marched.…

On that day of December, mild and calm and presageless as it seemed, Christina was ill at ease, peevish, apprehensive. She went about the houseplace and courtyard with her ears pricked to the free roving wind that might have brushed her Charles’s bonnet in passing, as he marched south with his troops? Or, weary of this fairy listening, she would droop her eyes, till they rested dreaming on the waterway below the dip of the hill where Wallburn Hall stood. Then she would raise them slowly to look a little higher on the level where the turrets of Scanwood were just visible nestling in their encompassing woods. Scanwood was a fine place, and would it be hers some day?

Puzzled, like a fox that is hunted, she snuffed the air and could not tell which way danger, or perhaps bliss, might come. Had the Prince’s army passed them on its way south? For indeed the last news Luke had brought had been that the Stuart heir was marching on his own capital, with his victorious rabble of Highlanders. King George was quaking. Would not Charles, if this were so, have to pass by Scanwood to see to his domestic concerns? Her mother babbled for ever of drums; the old woman would have it that she heard them.…

“They’ve gone by, my dear, they’ve gone by. Oh, the bonny lads!… The Prince has gone into England, never to leave it again, dearie. Listen to the old doited woman, for she speaks truth. Rub-a-dub!… Rub-a-dub!…”

“Whisht, whisht, mother!” Christina now and again murmured softly but not imperatively, as she stood by the window and herself with her slight long fingers performed the manœuvre known as drumming on the pane. Yes, her heart lifted; he had passed, at a point perhaps miles away, too far for him to get leave to call in and see his sweetheart. She must have patience. One day soon she would be looking out of this very window and she would see Charles on his fine horse crossing the ford at the old place, coming to her, with a light heart, and all his troubles and hers behind him, cast aside, healed, over and done with. She could discern the very spot now where the bottom was nearest and the water shallowest, even exposed at times in drought. The waters flowed glumly over it now, there had been much rain to swell them. Sometimes, to the excited girl, who stood there, her nerves wrought by the faint vocal rub-a-dubbing that came from the bed behind her, it seemed that the water gathered itself up into shapes--shapes of horses and men. The little waves seemed to rise obediently under the harsh wind, and form themselves into the semblance of uncanny humanity. They massed themselves and menaced, yes, she came to fancy that one figure rose again and again from the sullen flow to shake a quivering fist at her. She stared the silly vision down. Soon the water ran by as usual, huddling, lumping itself into small ridges under the wind, but nothing so tall as a man.

She turned to receive and divert the mother’s peevish voice. The old woman had ceased to imitate the drums; she was now convinced in her senile way they had passed. She talked strange nonsense, used strange names. “Bound for the South, they are.… The Bridge.… Swarkstone! Swarkstone.”

“Where’s that, mother?”

“Bad luck! Bad luck! The Bridge.… No further.… Swarkstone. No further. Back! Back! I’m cold, Christina. I’m cold.…”

“The day’s changing and you feel it,” said Christina sadly, altering the position of the coverings. It was all she could do.

“Nay, ’tis the smit of death I’ve got, Christina! I know it.”

“Oh, mother, not now, just when we are going to be so happy.” But her heart did not back her words. “Look here, I’ll have Luke go to Redmire at once and get you some of Betty Candlish’s cordial. She promised me some for you the moment I wanted it, and you seemed low as you do to-day. We won’t let you die just yet.”

“Ay, but can you keep me?” said the voice from the bed gently. “It’s that I’ve got and no mistake. I’ve felt it all day.… Come back and kiss me, Christina. You’re a good girl--a very good girl.… The Bridge at Swarkstone--I saw him there--the Prince.… Remember that, Christina.”

“Yes, mother, I will, though I never heard of such a place in my life!” cajoled the girl as she went downstairs to seek the half-witted Luke and confide her errand to him.

He sat, as usual, on the oak settle, swallowed up in the glooms of the chimney corner. She roused him up, and told him what she wanted. She helped him to saddle the pony and watched him potter slowly up the hill towards Bolton. Then she re-entered the house and cut up, on the corner of the big seamed oaken table, some vegetables which she had fetched from an outhouse. Into a pot on the fire she threw the sliced turnips and carrots. There was not much fire to hang over, but her forehead got hot, her cheeks flushed, and her hair escaped a little from its binding.

Presently, having put the mess to one side on the hob, she walked slowly out into the courtyard to get air, of which she suddenly felt a violent need. She languidly ascended the few broken steps that led up to the old battlement. At that time one could still walk along it without having one’s attention too much distracted by the necessity of picking one’s way among the rubble. She strolled backwards and forwards, enjoying the fresh moorland air that caressed her reddened cheeks and blew her pale yellow hair away in an easterly direction.

Holding her hand to her forehead instinctively to restrain it, though there was no one to be seen for miles, she scanned the country to the south. Her blue eyes roved over the low rolling hills that let her see a very long way. But not as far as that bridge at Swarkstone, six miles south of Derby, where the lines of her fate had been converging for several days past, and were now radiating away from thence in ragged streaks and strands of fugitive soldiers and brutal complacent pursuers.

She was overcome with a sudden trepidation, a rush of feeling that somehow impelled her to get back to the room where her mother lay, and see for herself how the helpless woman was getting on. But she sat down on the parapet, which at the point where she was still stood firm at the side of the battlement next the road. Overcome by a sudden faintness, she hid her face in her hands. She had eaten very little to-day. Her back was to the road, and her eyes, should she uncover them, would have rested on the empty grass-grown courtyard.

It was not empty. A noise like a dead leaf twisting startled her. Luke come back on foot, without the pony! She had pressed her knuckles into her eyes until her eyes had grown hazy and suffused, and it was a second or two before she saw there was actually a man in the courtyard below her. A man, not Luke.…

His bonnet, faded by sun and wind and rain, had once been blue. She heard his breath that came quickly, and, very drily, scenting a beggar and a demand for alms, she asked him his business.

He raised his drooping head.

“Charles!”

“Christina, quick! Who else is here? Can you harbour me?”

“What? What?”

“I come from Derby--the rout at Derby. We got six miles beyond and turned back.… I am pursued. Quick, can you hide me, will you? They will search my house at Scanwood, they are there now.…”

Christina was not looking at him. She had half turned when he spoke of Scanwood, and her eyes pried into the bosky mazes lying between.… The fugitive thought that the brusque movement had its occasion in a natural change in her sentiments towards himself. He deserved no better, he had practically deserted her, he had never written--a woman scorned!… Yet in his urgent necessity he must needs appeal to her again.…

“Christina, an answer, I beg of you! Shall I go further for a shelter?”

“Take off that cap--reach it up to me here. Now go in to the chimney corner--you know it--sit down--at ease. Not another word.”

While speaking she had taken the blue cap and flung it down into the chapel garth on the other side of the wall. The cluster of “ramps” and fronds of wild garlic parted and opened to receive it and came together again. Meantime such was the power of insistence in her voice that the fugitive obeyed her as he would obey the military word of command. Heavily walking over the stones of the courtyard, he took his place on the settle in the chimney nook and crossed his legs negligently. He could still see Christina standing on the battlement looking down towards the ford. She stood first on one leg and then on the other; she agitated her body strangely, she made signs. Then faint sounds, voices, the clink of bridles, came to his ears from the direction in which she looked. His pursuers most likely, for the noise came from Scanwood. He stretched his legs, stiff from two nights’ exposure, further out in an attitude of ease as she had bidden him. He did not know what Christina meant to do. She was revengeful--then she would give him up? She meant perhaps to save him? Well, his life belonged to her. He waited.

Five minutes ago Christina had seen his enemies taking the ford, a well-found troop of horse, and a stoutish personable man riding at their head. Charles Daunet, from the ingle nook, could not see them but he could see his Christina make a trumpet of her white hands and hear her bawl--yes, bawl--to them over the battlement--

“Good gentlemen, hear me. Will you please to take some refreshment? I cannot allow you to go by me, for it is lonely here at Wallburn Hall.”

“Is that what you call it?” said a clear voice. “Wheel, men.”

Charles Daunet saw the speaker ride into the little courtyard at the head of his troop, and dismount. He was a fine florid man of forty or so. He wore a high fixed cap with upon it the White Horse of Hanover; his gaiters were white and at his saddle he carried a dead turkey. Christina had descended from the battlement, and had gone to the horse’s head. The man spoke breezily.

“Captain Butler at your service, Mistress. We will eat a crust with you, the more so because we come to search you in the King’s name.”

“Do you say so?” Christina replied, setting the tone of the interview in a way that made Charles Daunet shiver. “Come you then in, in the King’s name. George or James, ’tis all the same to me, a woman. It’s long enough since a man came this way. I was wearying for the sight of one.”

The Captain laughed heartily.

“Business, first, Miss, if you please. We have a warrant to take a certain Colonel Charles Daunet of Scanwood, who fought for the Pretender at Preston and gave us honest ones a dance of it.”

Christina looked faintly bored.

“My cousin of Scanwood! Is he not at home?”

“We have spent two hours ferreting for him there, and the housekeeper bade us come here. She said he was a good friend of yours.”

“She is chary of her information,” said the girl composedly. “I was more than friend, I was once sweethearts with him, for my sins. But I have no care for the fellow now.” She tossed her head. “Come in, come in, you and your men, as many as the roof will shelter. The wine cask is low, but we will do what we can. I am alone here--nearly.”

“My men--some of them--must search the house.”

“Ay, let them search closely! I was always one for formality. But see they take heed of the flooring of the upper rooms, which is indifferent and might let one of them through, especially if he be a fine man like yourself, Captain!” She giggled. “Shall I go along with them, and indicate the places where the maggots cling and the mouse gnaws, and all is gone to fine powder?”

“No, they must shift as best they can, and you shall stay here and talk with me. Our man should be here, without your knowledge, perhaps, since you say you and he have fallen out?”

“We fell out,” said Christina carelessly, “when he chose to leave me to go and fight for a man I had never seen and didn’t care for. He should have stayed here and taken care of his own.”

“I am with you, Mistress. Little as he is, though, he fought us like the devil at Preston. His blue bonnet was everywhere, and he fairly swinged our poor fellows! The Duke is wild to have him strung up. Well, men, off with you! Thoroughly, mind. Every corner! Is there a cursed hiding hole here?”

“Yes, in my mother’s room,” said the hostess languidly. “She lies there bedridden. Speak her fair and gently, and she will instruct you to find the way in. On the left-hand side of the fireplace--a bolt shaped like a beetle. Only it’s iron, and if Charles is there--so much the worse for him.”

“You’ve got a spirit--nasty at that. Well, let’s in. ’Tis hot, and your liquor comes not amiss.”

Christina led the way under the low-browed doorway to the kitchen, where Charles Daunet was sitting. She made straight for the corner where he was, and lifting up a wooden flap of the settle, rummaged for a bottle of spirits. Aloud she said--

“Get thy great foot out of the way, Luke, wilt ’a!”

“Ay, who’s that?” asked Captain Butler, apprehending the sullen inmate of the chimney corner for the first time.

“That! That’s a poor foolish cousin of mine,” she replied, rising from her knees with the bottle, a little flushed with stooping.…

“You seem full of cousins----”