The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  ” My heart turned over in me at his mention of Exeter.

  King Dick rolled his eyes at us. “Ain’t nobody goes out on ’is moor night-times! Not nobody! Ah wouldn’t, lessen Ah had to, an’ Ah ain’t never goin’ to have to. ’Ey’s ha’nts on it.”

  “Haunts hell,” Jeddy said somewhat thickly, because of the bread and cheese in his mouth. “How do they know there’s haunts if they don’t ever get out where the haunts is?”

  King Dick chuckled. “’At’s all right foh li’l’ Feevolus lak you,” he said, “sayin’ Haunts Hell; but me, Ah stick in ’at ole prison! Ah ain’t goin’ puckussin’ roun’ wif no pickies. ’At’s what ’ey call ’em: pickies. ’Ose pickies, ’ey holler ’nuff to whuffle yo’ haiuh raight offen yo’ haid; so effen you sees anyone on ’at ole moor, jes start a-pickeyin yo’se’fs.”

  Jeddy contorted his face at King Dick in a horrible grimace. The King stared at him, fascinated, then drooped his head on his shoulder and giggled weakly: the giggle of a brainless, foolish young girl.

  He straightened his bearskin cap, looking, in that dim attic, like a tremendous, overwhelming black djinn out of the Arabian Nights.

  “Effen you needs money—” he said, then hesitated.

  “I’ve got some,” I told him. “What about this?” I pointed at our clothes.

  “ ’At ain’t no ’count,” he said.

  Jeddy shook his fist at him. “You old rascal!” he said gruffly. “If I wasn’t busy I’d get up and knock your old head off!”

  This black mountain of a man stared soberly at us, while I fumbled for words to tell him how I felt. In the midst of my fumbling he stepped backward and left us without a sound; and to this day I have never found the words for which I sought.

  XXVI

  WE CAME down from the cold, black hills into the warm, green, neatly hedged valleys of the Teign and the Exe, gawping and gawking at everything we saw as though we had never before set foot outside our native Dartmoor. When hailed or questioned, as we sometimes were, we stared as in a daze, scratching our heads and hanging our mouths so wide open that bats might have flown into them. This acting served us well, for it occasioned no surprise; and folk never persisted in their questioning after seeing the witless countenances we turned upon them.

  The town of Exeter lies against a ridge above the river Exe; and the Goose with Three Heads Tavern crowds close to the road which joins the town to the pleasant fertile moorland behind it—the moorland that is the beginning of the steep ascent to the wretched heights of Dartmoor.

  By dint of pretending to get ourselves drunk on Exeter spring beer, dark and fruity and smooth, and by lying in the field opposite the inn with one eye glued always on the front door, we caught bowlegged Mark Tate spraddling down the road for his evening’s quart or two. Wishing to show myself no more than was necessary, I shouted at him from the field where we lay, “ ’Ey, Ma-ark Ta-a-ate.”

  He stopped, peering in our direction. “ ’Oo the ’ell’s that?”

  “Zhut ’ee va-a-ace an’ coom ’ere!” Jeddy growled.

  He took a step toward us, uncertain in the late English twilight, so I stood up and faced him.

  “Well,” he said, offended at such familiarity from a mud-stained wagoner, “of hall the blooming gall! I ain’t tradin’, an’ ain’t buyin’ an’ ain’t got no time to waste to-night, neither.”

  He turned toward the tavern, but I got him by the arm and shook some sense into him. “Stow your clack!” I told him. “Look at me and remember where you saw me last.” I took off my carter’s hat and ran my fingers through my rumpled hair.

  He thrust his small face close to mine, then fell back and swept me with a horseman’s eye.

  “Hods!” he exclaimed. “How the ’ell—get back in the field, ye wild man, before somebody suspicions something!” He pushed me back, and we jumped the ditch to where Jeddy sat.

  “This is Jeddy,” I told him, “my second mate.”

  “Aye, I heard about him! He’s the little feller that got into a fight in Ameriky and got carried home, all bloody, on your shoulder.” He scanned us, scratching his chin.

  “So ye done it!” he said at length. “I dunno how ye got away, but ye certainly done something! What ye goin’ to do now?”

  Jeddy gave him a confidential answer. “We’re going to send you for a five gallon can of beer and six feet of sausages,” he said; and when we had done this and were seated in the soft, sweet-smelling grass, washing down sausages with long draughts of mellow spring beer, it seemed to me that we must be near the end of all our troubles and that there could be little more that was cold and cruel in a warm and pleasant world.

  “This Exeter ship canal,” Mark told us, “she takes boats up to nine-foot draft, and we can get you aboard one of ’em, if ye give us time-only we’ll near have to buy the bloody boat, prob’ly!”

  “How far is Ransome Hall from here?” I asked.

  He studied me for a time. “All right,” he said. “Blummy if I don’t do it, though it’ll mean a lashin’ o’ trouble if I’m cotched!”

  “What do you think it’ll mean for me?”

  He laughed sourly. “Hods!” he said. “Ye don’t know Sir Arthur! He does what’s right, even if he has to cut the ears off everybody in the world but himself!”

  “I know him as well as I want to,” I said. “Why work for him if you feel that way about him?”

  “Work for him!” he said violently. “I wouldn’t work three seconds for the damned old sharkskin! Me, I work for Leddy Ransome, same’s I used to work for her old man. The money comes out of his pocket, but by rights it’s hers. By rights he ought to pay her everything he’s got, just for living with him! If she got what she deserved for doing that, blam it, she’d be richer’n the Duchess of Portsmouth!”

  “You used to work for her father?”

  He sucked at the can of beer and nodded. “There was the nicest old feller in the whole damned county of Devon. The nicest old feller and the worst Faro player! He’d go into the Regimental Club or Sadler’s or the Boot and Bit, pour down four bottles o’ port and get himself into a game of cards with some red-faced old buck as never took nothin’ but toast and water before playin’. When he got through there wouldn’t be a gorrammed horse in the stable or a gor-rammed dog in the kennels!”

  I had heard tales of the gambling among the English, and of London gaming clubs such as the Cocoa Tree Club, White’s, Boodle’s, and the Thatched House, where it was no uncommon thing for an English macaroni who imagined he was playing the gentleman to lose five thousand pounds, or even his home, in a single evening’s play. I had heard of these things, but had thought of them, always, as impossible tales out of a book. Yet here was Mark Tate sitting in a field in Devonshire, wagging a sausage at me, and telling me how Emily Ransome’s father had been saved from the Jews and the debtors’ prison: saved because Sir Arthur Ransome had taken over his broad acres and his daughter at a higher valuation than could be got from the Jews, since the Jews would make no offer on the daughter.

  “There’s gambling clubs in Exeter, is there?” Jeddy asked.

  “Is there!” Mark exclaimed pityingly. “There’s gambling clubs wherever there’s gentlemen.”

  “Is there now!” Jeddy said thoughtfully. “And do they play the Wheel of Fortune at any of ’em?”

  Mark laughed shortly. “Do they! Do they, when there ain’t no man can play it without leaving his money behind? I’ll love a duck if they don’t!”

  “And where’s Lady Ransome’s father now?” I asked, while Jeddy chewed contemplatively at his sausage.

  “Dead,” Mark said. “Shot himself. Lost some more and blew off the back of his head with a load of duck-shot. Nicest old feller that ever lived, too: always pleasant. Pity he hadn’t learned earlier that he couldn’t play cards, so he could ’a’ hopped the twig before Miss Emily had the snaffle hooked on her!”

  * * *

  Late at night, when there was no more passing on the road, Mark
led us back in the direction from which we had come; then bore off to the right, through a stone gate and into a grove of trees as black as the inside of a powder barrel. We caught the scent of newly turned earth; then the smell of stables; then the perfume of newly sickled lawn grass; and while the odor of lawn grass still hung around us Mark steered us off to the right again, and we felt ourselves close to a building. When Mark had pushed us through the doorway and lighted a candle, we found ourselves in a cottage little bigger than the cuddy of a Quoddy boat. There was a bunk in the wall, like the bunk in a cabin, and a fireplace in one comer with a kettle hanging before it. To the right was another room, smaller by a foot or two, which might also be called a kitchen or a bedroom, depending on however one’s fancy happened to run; for it had another fireplace; but also it had a bunk in the wall and an outer door facing in the opposite direction from the one by which we had entered.

  It was good to sleep on real beds again, after the hammock mattresses of Dartmoor, which might have been stuffed with clam shells for all the comfort we took on them. Our ears, it seemed to me, had scarcely touched the pillows before morning had come and Mark Tate, bowlegged and alert, was tugging at us to get us up again.

  “You keep to the back room,” he said, pitching my clothes at me, dragging me from the room in which I had slept and pushing me in with Jeddy. “Front room stays open: back room stays locked. Lock both doors an’ don’t let a yip out of you! Don’t open nothing, only for me or Leddy Ransome! They’s water in the pail in the corner, an’ a razor under the window, an’ bread in the cupboard over the fireplace.”

  He spraddled from the cottage. Jeddy stared resentfully after him; then fell back on his bed and took on the aspect of a dead man—as I might have done if it had not been for Mark’s hint about Lady Ransome. With this in mind I could neither stay still nor get a decent breath into me. I set to work brushing off each piece of my wagoner’s dress, though there was no way of making it look like anything but what it was; and I was slow indeed at my dressing, what with taking my miniature from my pocket to stare at it, and listening at the door, and peering from the small back window at the wide expanse of meadow stretching off among clumps of towering oaks, elms and beeches, to lose itself eventually in a warm, golden haze.

  It was too regular for my fancy, this spread of English park; for I have a liking for our rough New England meadows, swelling and rolling among solid masses of pines, birches and maples, or for flat marshes threaded with twisting silver ribbons of salt creeks, or even for ragged dunes, green and gold against the blue of the sea. Yet knowing what I knew and expecting what I expected, I said to myself that this little part of England, soft in its golden haze, was more beautiful than any piece of land I had ever seen.

  I waited and waited in this low-ceiled room, sitting down and jumping up a hundred times, and wishful of going out into the warm June sunlight where I would feel less stifled from the thumping of my heart. She might, it crossed my mind, have gone to London. She might be ill, even; and at this thought I was in despair for fear I might have to go away without seeing her.

  I recalled, at last, what Mark had said about bread; and when I found it I remembered how I would go along the Arundel beaches, between voyages, to shoot plovers or yellowlegs for aunt Cynthy’s pies, and how I could never sit down among the dunes to take a mouthful of food without having a flock of yellowlegs come flying along just out of gunshot; and I, my mouth clogged with food, unable to whistle them down within range. Thinking this, I cut off a slice of the bread and found it white and sweet, and so cut off another, and then another; and while I was biting at the third, I heard a clattering of claws in the next room: the clattering my little dog Pinky makes when he hastens eagerly around a room in search of something, alert and stepping on his toes.

  I stopped and listened, my mouth half full of bread, and my heart pounding fit to choke me. I heard Pinky blowing at the cracks beneath the door—blowing, and then sucking the smells of the cottage into his black nose. He scratched at the door and whined; then barked three times, sharp barks, impatient and peremptory. A moment later I heard Emily Ransome’s voice, soft and husky: “Sh! Stop it!”

  I jumped to the door, opened it, strode across the threshold, and closed the door behind me. I think I would have had my arms around her in spite of the bread in my hand and the mouthful I could not swallow if Pinky had not leaped against my chest and set up such a squealing of delight that I knelt down and took him up for fear his outcries would bring someone in on us.

  When I had his head under my elbow, he lay and blew against my ribs, fluttering his tail with pleasure. I stared up at Emily. She stood looking down at me, a queer half smile on her red lips, as a person smiles at the memory of some pleasant far-off happening that comes dimly into the mind. She seemed to me as beautiful as she was kind.

  “You should never have come here,” she said, looking intently into my eyes. ‘You should never—” She broke off and glanced around the room; then looked back at me again. “No, that’s not true! I’d have felt—I’m glad you came! There’s nothing I can do, but I’m glad! I’ve thought of you often. I thought—I thought—”

  “Well,” I said, “there was no end to my thinking of you.” I reached for her hands, but she lifted them quickly to her throat and clasped them there, as I had often seen her do before.

  “Why do you say that, Richard?” she asked. “It’s useless to say it!”

  “I say it because I want to say it—because I have to. Why, if you didn’t wish to hear it, did you bring back your miniature?”

  “Yes, I know. It was wrong; but you said it had brought you luck. I thought—I thought you might have need of it.”

  “Need!” I said. “Need of it! I’m afraid of wearing it out, taking it from my pocket and looking at it a thousand times a day.”

  She moved to a small woven rug near the fireplace and sank to her knees, facing me.

  “I suppose,” I went on, “it’s useless to say that, too.”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t mind hearing it, though?”

  “La!” she said with that queer half smile on her face, “I don’t hear such things often enough to know whether I mind or not!”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s easily remedied if you’ve no objection to hearing the truth about yourself—how your eyes are smoke-colored; how I see them in every mist and cloud, and in the sunlight and the dark, for that matter: how your lips are—”

  She rapped her clasped hands against her knee. “Richard, it’s no good, none of this! The more you say the more you’ll want to say, and I won’t listen. I’ve heard you boast how Americans keep their word; yet you want me to go back on mine!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, “that’s entirely different!”

  “Oh, of course!” she said, smiling ruefully, “it’s entirely different since it’s you who want it. If anybody else wanted me to forget my vows, it would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I said; but when I saw the look in her eyes, I admitted she was right. “Yes,” I agreed, “and the reason it would be terrible is—”

  “No,” she said. "No! You’re my friend, and I’m yours, so—”

  “Friend! I’m no friend of yours!”

  “Yes, you are, and that’s all you are, and I must do what I can to get you safely away. I’ve talked to Mark, and he says—”

  A shadow fell across the window. Pinky jerked his head from under my arm, his whiskers and eyebrows sadly rumpled, and growled a ferocious, rumbling growl that set his body to vibrating like a halyard in a gale. I moved back against the closed door, and my hand behind me fumbled at the latch; but I had been too rash in the coming out. Emily rose to her feet as the front door opened quickly. There stood Sir Arthur, a fowling piece held easily in the crook of his elbow, and on his gray, horse-like face a look that seemed to me to have more of satisfaction in it than anything else. The fowling piece, I saw, was cocked.

  “Owl” he
said, peering at me along his nose, “I was right! Here you are, where you’re not wanted! You’ve a genius for it, on my wahd!”

  He cast a glance over his shoulder. “Stay there!” he called to somebody beyond our sight. “I’ll whistle when I want you!” He stepped in, shut the door behind him, and leaned easily against it, cradling the fowling piece in his arms. He looked from me to Lady Ransome, breathing heavily; while Pinky growled deep in his throat and blinked his eyes, knowing I would slap him, which I did, though gently.

  “Countryside has word of your evasion from Dartmoor, Nason. Great bargain, really, that cur of yours! Saw him rooting about Tate this morning, and it came to me like that—” he snapped his fingers —“that he must have caught a rather rank scent, eh?” I watched him with some curiosity, wondering that he showed so little anger. “Had a feeling it was you he was snuffing for.”

  He lowered the right hammer of his fowling piece: then cocked it again, so it clicked sharply, twice, in the silence of that small room. “Fancy you finding your way here, of all places! One would think you’d been directed!”

  “No,” I said, “it was an accident.”

  “Indeed!” he said. “More of a misfortune than an accident, I des-say!” He cast a calculating glance at Lady Ransome. “They never come singly, eh, my dear? Here’s Tate, I mean, running to you about this fellow! It’s my money he takes, and one would think it might enter his mind that I have the fahst right to know what’s going on. I’m afraid we must let Tate go, eh? Not the thing for him to have done at all!”

  “Please, Arthur,” she said, “please don’t blame Tate! It was only that he—well, I think he wanted to do what he could for a poor man in trouble.”

  Sir Arthur threw up his head, like a horse freeing himself from an undesired hand. “Curious!” he said, “so much sudden sympathy! I fear Tate must be given in charge for aiding and abetting, my dearl”