She laughed long and merrily. "Old Bloggs taught you the silly rigmarole you men call logic, but he didn"t teach you woman"s logic, that"s plain.
Don"t you see what I"ve made you do, Master Wheatman?"
"Not yet, Mistress Waynflete."
"Poof, slow-coach! I"ve made you admit that you were going to say "cross"
but altered it, too late, to "grave.""
"You outrun me with your nimble and practised wit," said I, smiling.
"And when did you offend me, think you?"
"I answered you rather roughly when you took me up about the guinea."
"Oh, then? Not at all. You snibbed me, but I richly deserved it."
Another silence.
"Well?" she said. "Go on! I say I richly deserved it. Go on!"
"Go on where?" I asked testily. "You"re not expecting me to say you didn"t, are you?"
"No, I"m not," she said, "but it was good practice trying to make you."
So saying, she slipped her hand under my arm again, and we stepped it out together.
The current of her thoughts now ran and glittered in the opposite direction. She made me for the moment her intimate, lifting up the veil over her past life, and giving me peeps and vistas of her wanderings and experiences. She jested and gibed. She sang little s.n.a.t.c.hes of song in some foreign tongue. "You"re sure you don"t understand Italian?" she demanded, stopping short half-way through a bar, and quizzing me with her eyes, now blue as sapphires in the bright sunshine.
"Not a word of it," said I.
"A grave disadvantage," she said airily. "It"s the only language one can love in." And off she struck again.
Now she sang something soothing and sad, with a wistful lilt in it that died into a low wail. It needed no Italian to be understood, for it was written in the language of human experience. A woman"s heart throbbed in the lilt and broke in the wail.
This sweet interval of intimacy verging on friendship was ended by our close approach to the main road. We had been travelling, heedless of roads and tracks, across a champaign country, and the slope up to the top of Yarlet Bank now lay before us. I led the way, skulking behind such poor cover as the gaunt hedgerows provided, and, when only a hundred paces from the top, I asked her to crouch down, awaiting my signal to advance, while I crept forward on my hands and knees to the edge of the road which here climbed the brow of the hill through a deep cutting, along either margin of which ran a straggling hedge.
To my relief, the road down the hill, both to right and left, was completely deserted. I joyfully waved my arm to Mistress Waynflete, who was soon by my side, looking down the road. To the right we could see for nearly a mile. On the left our view was cut short by a bend, and I walked a score of yards in that direction and shinned up a stout sapling. Our luck was absolute. Not a soldier, not a living soul, was in sight.
"We might have had to skulk here for hours, waiting for an opportunity to cross unseen," said I, on rejoining her, "but our G.o.ds above are victorious, and we share their victory. So now for the "Ring of Bells."
There"s a gate at the bottom of the hill. Come along, Mistress Waynflete!"
She followed me down the hedge-side. I turned once or twice to look at her, carefully pretending that it was only to see how she was getting on.
The last time I thus stole another memory of her splendid presence we were only a few paces from the gate, and when my reluctant eyes turned again to their rightful work, they looked straight into a pair of fishy eyes set in a face as blank and ugly as a bladder of lard.
Face and eyes belonged to a big, sleek, sly man, perched on the top bar of the gate. He had a notebook in his hand in which he had been entering some jottings. He suspended his writing to examine us, picking his nasty, yellow teeth meanwhile with the point of his pencil. His horse was. .h.i.tched to the post on the Stoneward side of the gate, where the stile was. He was well enough dressed, and, as far as I could see, unarmed.
It was a most exasperating thing to have pitched into him, whoever and whatever he was, and indeed I much disliked the look of him, and would gladly have knocked him on the head. True, travellers were not rare on this road, since it was part of the great highway from London to Chester, and the little thoroughfare town of Stone, some three miles ahead, had a noted posthouse. However, I kept, or tried to keep, my feelings out of my face and voice, and accosted him cheerily.
"Good day, friend! What may be the price of fat beeves in Stafford market to-day?"
"Dearer than men"s heads will be at the town gates after the next a.s.sizes," he replied, stroking his notebook and grinning evilly.
"You"ll never light on a Scotsman, dead or alive, that"s worth as much as a Staffordshire heifer," said I, leading the way past him to the stile, over which I handed Mistress Margaret into the road.
"They won"t all be Scotsmen, my friend," he replied, still stroking his notebook.
"No?" said I, eager at heart to knock him off his perch.
"Nor men," he added, leering at Margaret.
"Come along, Sal," said I to her laughingly, "before the good gentleman jots you down a Jacobite."
So we left him, and when, fifty paces down the road, I looked back at him, he was jotting in his notebook again.
"I think he knows something about us," said I.
"Very likely," she replied calmly. "I"ve seen him once before in London, talking to Major Tixall. Who could forget a face like that?"
"He"s uglier than the big-mouthed dragoon."
"The dragoon was at any rate a soldier."
"And the worst of soldiers has, no doubt, some savour of grace in him."
"Quite so," she retorted. "His calling makes it necessary."
"And, so reasoning, you would say, I suppose, that the best of farmers was to seek in the higher reaches of manliness."
"Have I not told you, Master Oliver, that between man"s logic and woman"s logic there"s a great gulf fixed?"
"Minds are minds," said I.
"And hearts are hearts," replied she, and so shut me up to my thinking again.
We turned into a cart-track on our left leading in the direction of Eccleshall. As we turned I saw that Bladder-face had mounted his horse and was coming on toward Stone. There was no doubt that we should be pursued from that quarter before long, and I grew heavy with anxiety as I saw how hardly we were being pressed. The encounter had not, however, disturbed Mistress Waynflete. On the contrary, she became gayer than ever, so gay that, fool-like, I got quite vexed at it, for it was clear that something had relieved her anxiety, and I knew it was nothing that I had done. I worried over it, and at last hit on the explanation. She was rejoicing in the help of the new partner.
"What do you make of Master Freake?" said I boorishly, cutting short a lightsome trill, more Italian maybe.
"Make of what?" said she lightly.
"Master Freake."
"Forgive me, Master Wheatman," she replied, "but I didn"t take you as quickly as I ought to have done. I like the look of him. How pretty, pluck them for me."
I stopped to gather the spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied, saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, or what?"
She seemed much more concerned with her berries, which she praised rapturously, and placed carefully in the bosom of her riding-dress before replying.
"He"s no doubt a grave and prosperous citizen of London. I"ve seen many such, and he looks sworn brother to worthy Alderman Heathcoat. Moreover, he talks merchantlike."