"No idea," said I.
"Blast ye. I wish y"had," he growled viciously, and I turned away to smile.
We pa.s.sed through a village littered with the Duke"s baggage wagons and pretty full of soldiery. This chilled my spirit somewhat, for it looked as if we were about to run into the rear of the Royal army. Outside the village, however, we again had the road to ourselves, and a mile farther on dropped to a walk to climb a long slant of road.
Whenever the road curved my way I had seen the corporal and his two men riding from fifty to a hundred yards ahead of us. Not very far up the slope we came on a farmstead lying flush on the roadside. In the yard were some thirty head of s.h.a.ggy black cattle, of the northern kind seldom seen in our parts and therefore attractive to a farmer"s eye. A farm-hand leaning over the gate had some noisy gossip with the dragoons as they pa.s.sed, and bawled his news to a group of men sitting at meat under a hovel. It was a poor enough place to support so many men, for the farm-wife, who came to her kitchen door to see what the clatter was about, was of no better seeming than a yokel"s wife with us. My eyes were on her curiously when the man on the gate skipped off and flung it open right across the muzzles of our horses.
In the tick of a clock the whole scene changed. The men under the hovel rushed out, fell on the cattle, thrashed them mercilessly with great battoons, yelled at them like maniacs, and drove them in a shoving, bellowing, maddened ma.s.s into the road, which here had a stone wall on the side opposite the farm. When the torrent was fairly going, two of the supposed yokels s.n.a.t.c.hed up carbines, climbed on to the hovel, and opened fire on the dragoons in our rear.
The master hand of the Colonel was in this beyond a doubt. With a loud curse, the sergeant, who was on the side away from the farm, opened the door and was for leaping out. He bethought himself and half turned, one hand on the door and one foot on the step, to look an evil inquiry at me.
That half-turn was his undoing. Part of the living, struggling torrent of cattle was shoved round our way and came sweeping by. One beast brushed the door open even as he glared at me and tumbled him outwards. As he twisted in his fall another drove her sharp horns clean into him, and shook and twirled him off again like a terrier playing with a rat. The rearguard turned tail and fled. The vanguard had simply been swept off the scene, and I saw them spurring up the slope with the cattle surging after them. The plan had been thought out to a nicety and had worked to perfection. I was free, free for Margaret. I sat down again dizzied and happy.
My rescuers took no notice of me but ran down the road in a body and stood round the sergeant. After some excited talk they carried him back, called on me to aid, and rammed him into the coach, where he lay huddled on the seat in front of me. Without so much as a word to me, the commander pulled our driver off the box, ordered a man up in his place, climbed after him, and said briefly, "Go like the devil!"
The carriage turned up a rough lane which ran eastward out of the high road opposite the farm, leaving most of my rescuers standing uncertain in a group. The driver cut his horses savagely with his whip, and we went at a hard gallop. The jolting tumbled me about in the coach, and I had hard work, shackled as I was, to keep the sergeant on the seat. He was still alive, though so hideously injured that death could only be a question of minutes. Where we were going and why they were carrying him along with us, were questions it was useless to bother about. Margaret would explain everything when we met. I could make little of the men who had rescued me.
They were clearly not farm-hands, for they were well armed, the guns I had seen looked to me to be military carbines, and they had carried through their business briskly and intelligently.
I heard the men on the box talking, but their speech was only about the road and the speed. The country got rougher and wilder; the distant hills were losing their clear-cut, rolling outlines, and becoming neighbours and obstacles. The horses were thrashed unmercifully, but at times even the well-plied whip could get no more than a crawl out of them.
The sergeant"s end was at hand. He rallied, as men commonly do before they put foot in the black river, and looked at me unrecognizingly. He closed his eyes again, and began to writhe and mutter strange words.
Suddenly he cried plainly, "Curse the swine! Another wedge, ye d.a.m.ned chicken-heart!" He looked at me again, and this time made out who I was, and cursed loathsomely in his disappointment.
"D"ye know where y"re going?" he ended, leering wickedly.
"No," said I.
"Blast ye! I wish ye did!" He gurgled this almost jocosely, as if it were a pet bit of humour.
"Do you know where you are going?" I asked solemnly.
"To h.e.l.l," he cried, and, after a spout of blood that spattered me as I leaned over him, went.
The carriage stopped and, before I could rise to see why, the door was opened and some one without said politely, "This is indeed a pleasure, Master Wheatman!"
It was my lord Brocton.
It would be foolish to pretend that I was not bitten to the bone, and I can only hope that I did not give outward expression to a t.i.the of the chagrin and dismay that possessed me. Being commanded to do so, I got out of the coach without a word and looked around.
The rough road along which we had been travelling ran on through a slit in the hills. Where we stood a bridle-path parted from it at a sharp angle and made its way over the lower skirts of the hill country. It was a desolate, dreary spot where, as I suspected, the king"s writ ran not and where, therefore, a man might be done to death with all conveniency.
Master Freake would be useless to me now, and my chiefest enemy had me at his will.
There was no delay. A long cloak was put over me, so disposed as to hide my fetters, and I was lifted on a spare horse led by one of the new-comers. The skill with which the affair had been planned was shown by the fact that this horse, to accommodate my shackled legs, had been saddled as for a lady.
"You know exactly what to do?" asked his lordship of the men on the coach.
"Yes, my lord," said one of them, "but what about--" He finished the sentence by a jerk of his thumb towards the dead sergeant.
"Leave him there! Egad, Master Wheatman, is not that a touch of the real artist?"
"The key of these things is in his breeches" pocket," said I, speaking for the first time, and waggling my fetters as I did so.
"Get it out, Tomlins!"
The man who had asked the question climbed down and obeyed the order with the callousness of a dog nosing a dead rabbit. Then our parties separated.
The coach continued along the main road, if so it may be called, and we took to the track. I looked curiously after the coach, wondering where it was bound, and with what object.
"More art," said his lordship. "A coach is a seeable, trackable thing, and it will throw everybody off the scent. I"m glad the ruffian"s dead. He was overmuch wise in my affairs."
As we rode on into the interminable wastes, he rallied me gleefully, but soon tired of my moroseness.
"His arrival will make an affecting picture," he said mockingly to his men. He was feverishly excited, and must boast to some one. "No pliant damsel to rush into his longing arms! He is to be embraced though, my masters, if need be."
What this obscure threat might portend, I could not see, but it chimed in with the delirious cruelty of the dead sergeant. Threats for the future mattered not, the present being so unendurable. A man in Brocton"s position must be hard put to it to turn traitor in this strange fashion.
He had "rescued" me with his own men, and, lord or no lord, he would hang for it were it once known to a lover of the gibbet like the Duke"s Grace of c.u.mberland. What on earth was the letter about? Master Freake had definitely said lands, and therefore lands it must be, though nothing less than the whole Ridgeley estates could be in question. The thousand and more acres of the Upper Hanyards, sweet meadows stretching a mile along the river and a s.n.a.t.c.h of the chase at its wildest and loveliest, the prize that had fallen to the rascal earl in the great lawsuit, had been promised me as readily as a pinch of snuff. I gloated over the revenge I was winning for my race, a race rooted in those darling Hanyards a century before the Ridgeleys were heard of, for the first earl, the grandfather of the old rogue, started as an obscure pimp to Charles the Second, and was enriched and enn.o.bled for his a.s.siduity.
But no familiary pride could cheer me for long. The dead landscape around chilled me. The chiefest misery was to remember the hope with which I had started that morning. Margaret was the fancied end of my journey, and the real end was this! I had to bite my lips till I felt the trickle of blood in the stubble on my chin to keep back unmanly revilings.
At last we came out on what was by comparison a made road, and now his lordship grew plainly anxious and haggard. We rode madly along it, so that, riding shackled and woman-fashion, I had hard work to keep my seat.
Brocton"s head was incessantly on the turn to see if we were observed, but his luck was absolute. We saw no one on the road, and, after a hard stretch, we turned up a gully to our left and were once more buried among the hills.
After much turning and twisting we came in sight of a small house of grey stone which, from its appearance and situation, I judged to be some gentleman"s shooting lodge. We cut across the valley, on one slope of which it stood, and I caught a glimpse of cottage roofs beyond it. We worked round to the rear of the house, and, in a favouring clump of trees, his lordship called a halt. The horses were tethered, and I was lifted down, and the rings round my ankles were unlocked. The men took one each, and carried their carbines in their free hands. Brocton drew his rapier, and said, "Forward! Make a sound, show the slightest sign of resistance, and I run you through."
There was no sense in disobeying, and I accommodated myself to his design, which was clearly to get into the house un.o.bserved from without.
In this he was successful, or at any rate I saw no one during our crawl from one point of vantage to another up to the back entrance. Now his lordship skipped gaily from behind me and opened the door. He stepped softly in, and I was pushed after him by his dragoons.
""Friends will rescue you and bring you to me,"" he quoted, jeering me.
"There"s no Margaret for you, Farmer Wheatman. I shall have her yet!"
Then, beast as he was, while the men kept me back, nearly tearing my arms out of their sockets, he stuck the point of his rapier over my heart and babbled half-delirious beastliness.
We were in a big, bare kitchen, the other door of which was closed. There was no sign of anyone about, and Brocton, still with his sword ready for me, bawled out, "Where are you, you old hag?"
The door opened at once. Brocton dropped his sword in his fright and I clapped my foot on it. The two men fled like rabbits. Familiar as the picture is to my mind, it is hard to find words to fit this crowning moment of my adventures.
Margaret walked into the room.
For a second she was minded to rush at me, but thought better of it, and walked up to his lordship. She towered over his limp, cringing figure, and said coldly, "You are too poor a cur to be struck by a woman or I would strike you."
She was not alone. Master Freake was now wringing my shackled hands delightedly, and a little, deft man, whom I knew on sight to be Dot Gibson, was searching his unresisting lordship"s pockets for the key of the irons. A minute later he banged them on the floor and said, "And how do you find yourself, sir?"
There"s no more to be said about Brocton. He was as good as dead for the remainder of the business, and no one heeded him any more than if he had been a loathsome insect that a man"s foot had trodden on. And what killed him was the presence of a third man, a perfect stranger to me. He was an old-looking rather than an old man, with rheumy eyes that looked through narrow slits, and a big unshapely nose; the skin of his face was brown and crinkled like a dried-up bladder; his whole appearance as a man was mean and paltry. What distinction he had was given him by gorgeous clothing and the attendance of a pompous a.s.s in a flaming livery. Yet Brocton dared not look at him again, as he shuffled forward on his man"s arm to speak to Master Freake.
"Mr. Freake," he piped, laying an imploring hand on the merchant"s arm, "you will not be too hard on my foolish son?"
It was the old rascal Earl of Ridgeley. I had not seen him since the trial, when I was but a lad. In the meantime vice had eaten out of him such manliness as had ever been in him. Rascaldom was still stamped on him, but he was now in a state of abject terror. He and his son were indeed, as Jane puts it to this day, two to a pair.
"Your lordships will be pleased to wait on me in the room yonder," said Master Freake, in his grave, decisive way, "and I will tell you my will on the matter."