Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “You drab!” he cried, “do you come down, or it will be the worse for you! Do you hear me? Come down, you slut, or when I fetch you I will have no mercy. You don’t know what I shall do to you; I do, and — —”

  He stood, he was silent, he choked with rage; for as if he had not spoken, her figure first and then her feet, mounting without pause or hesitation, vanished from sight. He was left, scared and baffled, alone in the great desolate kitchen where his light shone a mere spark, making visible the darkness that canopied him. A rat moving in the dim fringe between light and shadow startled him. A rope of onions swayed by the draught of air that blew through the open door, brought the sweat to his brow. He took two steps forward and one backward; the shroud on the cradle fluttered, and but for the men waiting outside, he would have fled at once and given up woman and booty. But fear of ridicule still conquered fear of death; conquered even the superstition that lay dormant in his Irish blood; he forced himself onward. His eyes fixed balefully, his hands withheld from contact with the wall — as if he had been a woman with skirts — he crept upwards till his gaze rose above the level of the upper floor; then for a moment the light of two thick candles, half-burned, gave him back his courage. His brow relaxed, he sprang with a cry up the upper stairs, set his foot in the room and stood!

  On the huge low wooden bed from which the coarse blue and white bedding protruded, two bodies lay sheeted. At their feet the candles burned dull before the window that should have been open, but was shut; as the thick noisome air of the room, that turned him sick and faint, told him. Near the bed, on the farther side, stood that he sought; Sophia, her eyes burning, her face like paper. His prey then was there, there, within his reach; but she had not spoken without reason. Death, death in its most loathsome aspect lay between them; and the man’s heart was as water, his feet like lead.

  “If you come near me,” she whispered, “if you come a step nearer, I will snatch this sheet from them, and I will wrap you in it! And you will die! In eight days you will be dead! Will you see them? Will you see what you will be?” And she lowered her hand to raise the sheet.

  He stepped back a pace, livid and shaking. “You she-devil!” he muttered. “You witch!”

  “Go!” she answered, in the same low tone. “Go! Or I will bring your death to you! And you will die! As you have lived, foul, noisome, corrupt, you will die! In eight days you will die — if you come one step nearer!”

  She took a step forward herself. The man turned and fled.

  CHAPTER XIX

  LADY BETTY’S FATE

  Lady Betty had left the house on the hill a mile behind, her breath came in heavy gasps, her heart seemed to be bursting through her bodice; still she panted bravely along the road that stretched before her, white under the moonbeams. Sophia had bidden her run, the moment the man’s back was turned. “Give the alarm, get help,” she had whispered as she thrust the diamonds into the child’s hand; and acting on that instinct of obedience, prompt and unquestioning, which the imminence of peril teaches, Betty had fled on the word. She had slipped behind the man’s back, passed between the houses, and escaped into the open, unseen, as she fancied.

  For a time she had sped along the road, looking this way and that, expecting at each turn to discover a house, a light, the help she sought. At length, coming on none of these, she began to suspect the truth, and that Sophia had saved her at her own cost; and she paused and turned, and even in her distraction made as if she would go back. But in the end, with a sob of grief, she hurried on, seeing in this their only chance.

  At length her strength began to fail. Presently she could go no farther, and with a cry of anguish came to a stand in a dark part of the road. She was alone, in an unknown country, with the night before her, with the sounds of the night round her; and commonly she was afraid of the night. But now all the child’s thought was for Sophia; her heart was breaking for her friend. And by-and-by she pressed on again, her breath fluttering between sobs and exhaustion. She turned a corner — and oh, sweet, she saw a light before her!

  She struggled towards it. The spark grew larger and larger; finally it became the open doorway of an alehouse, from which the company were departing. The goodman and two or three topers were on their feet having a last crack, the goodwife from her bed above was demanding lustily why they lingered, when the girl, breathless and dishevelled, her hair hanging about her face, appeared on the threshold. For a moment she could not speak; her face was white, her eyes stared wildly. The men fell back from her, as a flock of sheep crowd away from the dog.

  “What beest ‘ee?” the landlord bleated faintly. “Lord save us and help us! Be ‘ee mortal?”

  “Help!” she muttered, as she leaned almost swooning, against the doorpost. “Help! Come quickly! They’ll — they’ll murder her — if you don’t!” And she stretched out her hands to them.

  But the men only shuddered. “Lord save us!” one of them stammered. “It’s mostly for murder they come.”

  She saw that no one moved, and she could have screamed with impatience. “Don’t you hear me?” she cried hoarsely. “Come, or they’ll kill her! They’ll kill her! I’ve left her with them. Come, if you are men!”

  They began to see that the girl was flesh and blood; but their minds were rustic, and none of the quickest, and they might have continued to gape at her for some time longer, if the goodwife, who had heard every word, had not looked through the trap in the ceiling. She saw the girl. “Lord sake!” she cried, struck with amazement. “What is it?”

  “Help!” Betty answered, clasping her hands, and turning her eyes in that direction. “For pity’s sake send them with me! There’s murder being done on the road! Tell them to come with me.”

  “What is it? Footpads?” the woman asked sharply.

  “Yes, oh yes! They have stopped Lady Coke’s carriage”

  The woman waited to hear no more. “Quick, you fools!” she cried. “Get sticks, and go! Lady Coke’s carriage, eh? You’ll be her woman, I expect. They’ll come, they’ll come. But where is’t? Speak up, and don’t be afraid!”

  “At a house on a hill,” Lady Betty answered rapidly. “She’s there, hiding from them. And oh, be quick! be quick, if you please!”

  But at that word the goodman, who had snatched up a thatching stake, paused on the threshold. “A house on a hill?” he said. “Do you mean Beamond’s farm?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “It’s on a hill about a mile or more — oh, more from here — on the way I came! You must know it!”

  “This side of a ford?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “They’ve the smallpox there?”

  “Yes, I think so!”

  The man flung down the stake. “No,” he said. “It’s no! I don’t go there. Devil take me if I do. And she don’t come here. If you are of my mind,” he continued, looking darkly at his fellows, “you’ll leave this alone!”

  The men were evidently of that mind; they threw down their weapons, some with a curse, some with a shiver. Betty saw, and frantic, could not believe her eyes. “Cowards!” she cried. “You cowards!”

  The woman alone looked at her uncertainly. “I’ve children, you see,” she said. “I’ve to think of them. But there’s Crabbe could go. He’s neither chick nor child.”

  But the lout she named backed into a corner, sullen and resolute; as if he feared they would force him to go. “Not I,” he said. “I don’t go near it, neither. There’s three there dead and stiff, and three’s enough.”

  “You cowards!” Betty repeated, sobbing with passion.

  The woman, too, looked at them with no great favour. “Will none of you go?” she said. “Mind you, if you go I’ll be bound you’ll be paid! Or perhaps the young sir there will go!”

  She turned as she spoke, and Betty, looking in the same direction, saw a young man seated on the side of a box bed in the darkest part of the kitchen. Apparently her entrance had roused him from sleep, for his hair was rough, and he was in his shir
t and breeches. His boots, clay-stained to the knees, stood beside the bed; his coat and cravat, which were drying in the chimney corner, showed that he had been out in bad weather. The clothes he retained bore traces of wear and usage; but, though plain, they seemed to denote a higher station than that of the rustics in his company. As his eyes met Lady Betty’s, “I’ll come,” he said gruffly. And he reached for his boots and began to put them on; but with a yawn.

  Still she was thankful. “Oh, will you!” she cried. “You’re a man. And the only one here!”

  “He won’t be one long!” the nearest boor cried spitefully.

  But the lad, dropping for a moment his listless manner, took a step in the speaker’s direction; and the clown recoiled. The young fellow laughed, and, snatching up a stout stick that rested against his truckle bed, said he was ready. “You know the way?” he said; and then, as he read exhaustion written on her face, “Quick, mother,” he cried in an altered tone, “have you naught you can give her? She will drop before she has gone a mile!”

  The woman hurried up the ladder and fetched a little spirit in a mug. She handed it to the girl at arm’s length, telling her to drink it, it would do her good. Then, cutting a slice from a loaf of coarse bread that lay on the table, she pushed it over to her. “Take that in your hand,” she said, “and God keep you.”

  Betty did as she was bidden, though she was nearly sick with suspense. Then she thanked the woman, turned, and, deaf to the boors’ gibes, passed into the road with her new protector. She showed him the way she had come, and the two set off walking at the top of her pace.

  She swallowed a morsel of bread, then ran a little, the tears rising in her eyes as she thought of Sophia. A moment of this feverish haste, and the lad bade her walk. “If we’ve a mile to go,” he said wisely, “you cannot run all the way. Slow and steady kills the hare, my dear. How many are there of these gentry?”

  “Three,” she answered; and as she pictured Sophia and those three a lump rose in her throat.

  “Any servants? I mean had your mistress any men with her?”

  Betty told him, but incoherently. The postboys, the grooms, Watkyns, Pettitt, all were mixed up in her narrative. He tried to follow it, then gave up the attempt. “Anyway, they have all fled,” he said. “It comes to that.”

  She admitted with a sob that it was so; that Sophia was alone.

  The moonlight lay on the road; as she tripped by his side, he turned and scanned her. He took her for my lady’s woman, as the mistress at the alehouse had taken her. He had caught the name of Coke, but he knew no Lady Coke; he had not heard of Sir Hervey’s marriage, and, to be truthful, his mind was more concerned for the maid than the mistress. Through the disorder of Betty’s hair and dress, her youth and something of her beauty peeped out; it struck him how brave she had been to come for help, through the night, alone; how much more brave she was to be willing to return, seeing that he was but one to three, and there was smallpox to face. As he considered this he felt a warmth at his heart which he had not felt for days. And he sighed.

  Presently her steps began to lag; she stood. “Where are we?” she cried, fear in her voice. “We should be there!”

  “We’ve come about a mile,” he said, peering forward through the moonlight. “Is it on a hill, did you say?”

  “Yes, and I see no hill.”

  “No,” he answered, “but perhaps the fall this way is gentle.”

  She muttered a word of relief. “That is so,” she said. “It’s above the water, on the farther side, that it is steep. Come on, please come on! I think I see a house.”

  But the house she saw proved to be only a deserted barn, at the junction of two roads; and they stood dismayed. “Did you pass this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she cried. “Yes, I think so.”

  “On your right or your left?”

  She wrung her hands. “I think it was on my right,” she said.

  He took the right-hand turn without more ado, and they hurried along the road for some minutes. At length her steps began to flag. “I must be wrong,” she faltered. “I must be wrong! Oh, why,” she cried, “why did I leave her?” And she stood.

  “Courage!” he answered. “I see a rising ground on the left. And there’s a house on it. We ought to have taken the other turning. Now we are here we had better cross the open. Shall I lift you over the ditch, child? Or shall I leave you and go on?”

  But she scrambled into the ditch and out again; on the other side the two set off running with one accord, across an open field, dim and shadowy, that stretched away to the foot of the ascent. Soon he outpaced her, and she fell to walking. “Go on!” she panted bravely. “On, on, I will follow!”

  He nodded, and clutching his stick by the middle, he lengthened his stride. She saw him come to a blurred line at the foot of the hill, and heard him break through the fence. Then the darkness that lay on the hither slope of the hill — for the moon was beginning to decline — swallowed him, and she walked on more slowly. Each moment she expected to hear a cry, an oath, the sudden clash of arms would break the silence of the night.

  But the silence held; and still silence. And now the fence brought her up also; and she stood waiting, trembling, listening, in a prolongation of suspense almost intolerable. At length, unable to bear it longer, she pushed her way into the hedge, and struggled, panting through it; and was starting to clamber up the ascent on the other side when a dark form loomed beside her.

  It was her companion. What had happened?

  “We are wrong,” he muttered. “It’s a clump of trees, not a house. And there are clouds coming up to cover the moon. Let us return to the road while we can, my girl.”

  But this was too much. At this, the last of many disappointments, the girl’s courage snapped, as a rush snaps. With a wild outburst of weeping, she flung herself down on the sloping ground, and rubbed her face in the grass, and tore the soil with her fingers in an agony of abandonment. “Oh, I left her! I left her!” she wailed, when sobs allowed words to pass. “I left her, and saved myself. And she’s dead! Oh, why didn’t I stay with her? Why didn’t I stay with her?”

  The young man listened awhile, awkward, perturbed; when he spoke his voice was husky. “’Tis no use,” he said peevishly. “No use, child! Don’t — don’t go on like this! See here, you’ll have a fever, if you lie there. You will, I know,” he repeated.

  “I wish I had!” she cried with passion, and beat her hands on the ground. “Oh why did I leave her?”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s folly this!” he urged. “It’s — it’s of no use to any one. No good! And there, now it’s dark. I told you so — and we shall have fine work getting to the road again!”

  She did not answer, but little by little his meaning reached her brain, and after a minute or two she sat up, her crying less violent. “That’s better,” he said. “But you are too tired to go farther. Let me help you to climb the fence. There’s a log the other side — I stumbled over it. You can sit on it until you are rested.”

  She did not assent, but she suffered him to help her through the hedge and seat her on the fallen tree. The tide of grief had ebbed; she was regaining her self-control, though now and again a sob shook her. But he saw that an interval must pass before she could travel, and he stood, shy and silent, seeing her dimly by the light which the moon still shed through a flying wrack of clouds. Round and below them lay the country, still, shadowy, mysterious; stretching away into unknown infinities, framing them in a solitude perfect and complete. They might have been the only persons in the world.

  By-and-by, whether he was tired, or really had a desire to comfort her at closer quarters, he sat down on the tree; and by chance his hand touched her hand. She sprang a foot away, and uttered a cry. He laughed softly.

  “You need not be afraid,” he said. “I’ve seen enough of women to last me my life. If you were the only woman in the world, and the most beautiful, you would be safe enough for me. You may be quite easy, my
dear.”

  She ceased to sob, but her voice was a little broken and husky when she spoke. “I’m very sorry,” she said humbly. “I am afraid I have given you a vast deal of trouble, sir.”

  “Not so much as a woman has given me before this,” he answered.

  She looked at him furtively out of the tail of her eye, as a woman at that would be likely to look. And if the truth be told she felt, amid all her grief, an inclination to laugh. But with feminine tact she suppressed this. “And yet — and yet you came to help me?” she muttered.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “One has to do certain things,” he said.

  “I am afraid somebody has — has behaved badly to you,” she murmured; and she sighed.

  Somehow the sigh flattered him. “As women generally behave,” he replied with a sneer. “She lied to me, she cheated me, she robbed me, and she would have ruined me.”

  “And men don’t do those things,” she answered meekly, “to women.” And she sighed again.

  He started. It could not be that she was laughing at him. “Anyway, I have done with women,” he said brusquely.

  “And you’ll never marry, sir?”

  “Marry? Oh, I say nothing as to that,” he answered contemptuously. “Marry I may, but it won’t be for love. And ‘twill be a lady anyway; I’ll see to that. I’ll know her father and her mother, and her grandfather and her grandmother,” Tom continued. For poor Tom it was, much battered and weathered by a week spent on the verge of ‘listing. “I’ll have her pedigree by heart, and she shall bring her old nurse with her to speak for her, if marry I must. But no more ladies in distress for me. No more ladies picked up off the road, I thank you. That’s all.”