Now it so happened that at this moment, some fifty yards down the gully, and well screened by the overhanging rock, Charley Hannaford was crouching with a wire in his hand. Even had you known his whereabouts and his business, it would have been hard to stalk Charley Hannaford single-handed on the face of the White Rock. But the wiliest poacher cannot provide against such an accident as this--that a young gentleman, supposed to be in France, should return by an unfrequented path, and by reason of an awkward French boot catch his toe and slide precipitately, without warning, down twenty feet of scree, to drop another six feet on to a gra.s.sy ledge. Yet this is just what happened. Charley Hannaford, already p.r.i.c.king up his ears at the unfamiliar footfall up the gully had scarcely time to rise on his knees in readiness for retreat, when Walter a Cleeve came sprawling almost on top of him.
"Hallo!" gasped Walter, scarcely more confused by his fall than by the singular meeting. "Clumsy of me--" His eyes fell on the wire which Hannaford was stealthily trying to pocket, and grew wide with understanding. Then they sought the ground by Hannaford"s feet, and glanced from that up to the fence of the plantation overhanging the far side of the gully.
"Well, Charles Hannaford, you don"t look overjoyed to see me home again!"
The poacher grinned awkwardly. He was caught, for certain: nevertheless, his wariness did not desert him.
"You took me rather sudden, Mister Walter."
"That"s fairly evident. Maize, eh?" He scooped a few grains into his palm and sniffed at them. "Better maize than my father"s, no doubt.
Where"s Macklin?"
"Somewhere"s about. I say, Mister Walter--"
"And Jim Burdon?"
"Near abouts, too. Be you goin" to tell on me?"
"Why on earth shouldn"t I? It"s robbery, you know, and I don"t care any more than my father does for being robbed."
"That was a nasty tumble of yours, sir."
"Yes, I suppose it _was_ something of a spill. But I"m not hurt, thank you."
"It might ha" been a sight worse," said Charley Hannaford reflectively.
"A foot or two more, now--and the rock, if I remember, sloping outwards just here below." He leaned his head sideways and seemed to drop a casual glance over the ledge.
Walter knew that the drop just there was a very nasty one indeed.
"Oh, but yon"s where I came over--I couldn"t have fallen quite so wide--"
he began to explain, and checked himself, reading the queer strained smile on Hannaford"s face.
"I--I reckon we"ll call it Providence, all the same," said the poacher.
Then Walter understood. The man was desperate, and _he_--he, Walter a Cleeve, was a coward.
Had he known it, across the gully a pair of eyes were watching.
He had help within call. Jim Burdon had come to the upper end of the plantation a few seconds too late to witness the accident. By the time he reached the hedge there and peered over, Walter had disappeared; and Jim-- considerably puzzled, half inclined to believe that the stranger had walked over the edge of the White Rock and broken his neck--worked his way down the lateral fence beside the gully, to be brought up standing by the sight of the man he sought, safe and sound, and apparently engaged in friendly chat with Charley Hannaford.
But Walter a Cleeve"s back was turned towards the fence, and again Jim failed to recognise him. And Jim peered over the fence through a gorse-whin, undetected even by the poacher"s clever eyes.
"It"s queer, too," went on Charley Hannaford slowly, as if chewing each word. "I hadn"t even heard tell they was expectin" you, down at the Court."
"They are not," Walter answered. He scarcely thought of the words, which indeed seemed to him to be spoken by somebody else. He was even astonished at the firmness of their sound; but he knew that his face was white, and all the while he was measuring Hannaford"s lithe figure, and calculating rapidly. Just here he stood at a disadvantage: a sidelong spring might save him: it would take but a second. On the other hand, if during that second or less . . . His eyes were averted from the verge, and yet he saw it, and his senses apprised every foot of the long fall beyond.
While he thought it out, keeping tension on himself to meet Charley Hannaford"s gaze with a deceptive indifference, his heart swelled at the humiliation of it all. He had escaped from a two years" captivity--and, Heavens! how he had suffered over there, in France! He had run risks: his adventures--bating one unhappy blot upon them, which surely did not infect the whole--might almost be called heroic. And here he was, within a few hundred yards of home, ignominiously trapped. The worst of it was that death refused to present itself to him as possible. He knew that he could save himself by a word: he foresaw quite clearly that he was going to utter it. What enraged him was the equal certainty that a courageous man--one with the tradition he ought to have inherited--would behave quite differently. It was not death, but his own shameful cowardice, that he looked in the face during those moments.
Into the poacher"s eyes there crept his habitual shifty smile.
"You"ll have a lot to tell "em down there, Mr. Walter, without troublin"
about me."
The unhappy lad forced a laugh. "You might say so, if you knew what I"ve been through. One doesn"t escape out of France in these days without adventures, and mine would make pretty good reading."
"Surely, sir."
"But if I--if I overlook this affair, it"s not to be a precedent, you understand. I intend to live at home now and look after the estate.
My father will wish it."
"To be sure."
"And stealing"s stealing. If I choose to keep my own counsel about this, you are not to suppose I shall forget it. The others suspect only, but I _know_; and henceforth I advise you to bear that in mind."
"And much obliged to you, sir. I know a gentleman and can trust his word."
"So the best advice I can give you is to turn over a new leaf."
Walter turned to go with an air of careless magnanimity, conscious of the sorry part he was playing, yet not wholly without hope that it imposed upon the other. "I want to be friends with all my neighbours, you understand. Good-bye."
He nodded curtly and began to pick his way down the gully with a slowness almost ostentatious. And as he went he cursed his weakness, and broke off cursing to reconstruct the scene from the beginning and imagine himself carrying it off with contemptuous fearlessness, at hand-grips with Charley Hannaford and defying him. He would (he felt) give the world to see the look Charley Hannaford flung after him.
The poacher"s eyes did indeed follow him till he disappeared, but it would have taken a wise man to read them. After a meditative minute or so he coiled up his wire, pocketed it, and made off across the face of the rock by a giddy track which withdrew him at once from Jim Burdon"s sight.
And Jim Burdon, pondering what he had seen, withdrew himself from hiding and went off to report to Macklin that Charley Hannaford had an accomplice, that the pair were laying snares on the White Rock, and that a little caution would lay them both by the heels.
II.
Walter a Cleeve did not arrive at the Court by the front entrance, but by a door which admitted to his mother"s wing of the house, through the eastern garden secluded and reserved for her use. This was his way.
From childhood he and his mother had lived in a sort of conspiracy-- intending no guile, be it understood. She was a Roman Catholic.
Her husband, good easy man, held to the Church of England, in which he had been bred; but held to it without bigotry, and supposed heaven within the reach of all who went through life cleanly and honourably. By consequence the lady had her way, and reared the boy in her own faith. She had delicate health, too--a weapon which makes a woman all but invincible when pitted against a man of delicate feeling.
The Squire, though shy, was affectionate. He sincerely loved his boy, and there was really no good reason why he and Walter should not open their hearts to one another. But somehow the religious barrier, which he did his best to ignore, had gradually risen like an impalpable fence about him, and kept him a dignified exile in his own house. For years all the indoor servants, chosen by Mrs. a Cleeve, had been Roman Catholics.
In his own sphere--in the management of the estate--he did as he wished; in hers he was less often consulted than Father Halloran, and had ceased to resent this, having stifled his first angry feelings and told himself that it did not become a man to wrangle with women and priests. He found it less tolerable that Walter and his mother laid their plans together before coming to him. Why? Good Heavens! (he reflected testily) the boy might come and ask for anything in reason, and welcome! To give, even after grumbling a bit, is one of a father"s dearest privileges. But no: when Walter wanted anything--which was seldom--he must go to his mother and tell her, and his mother promised to "manage it." In his secret heart the Squire loathed this roundabout management, and tried to wean Walter by consulting him frankly on the daily business of the estate. But no again: Walter seemingly cared little for these confidences: and again, although he learned to shoot and was a fair horseman, he put no heart into his sports. His religion debarred him from a public school; or, rather--in Mrs. a Cleeve"s view--it made all the public schools undesirable.
When she first suggested Dinan (and in a way which convinced the Squire that she and Father Halloran had made up their minds months before), for a moment he feared indignantly that they meant to make a priest of his boy.
But Mrs. a Cleeve resigned that prospect with a sigh. Walter must marry and continue the family. Nevertheless, when Great Britain formally renounced the Peace of Amiens, and Master Walter found himself among the _detenus_, his mother sighed again to think that, had he been designed for the priesthood, he would have escaped molestation; while his father no less ruefully cursed the folly which had brought him within Bonaparte"s clutches.
Mrs. a Cleeve sat by her boudoir fire embroidering an altar frontal for the private chapel. At the sound of a footstep in the pa.s.sage she stopped her work with a sharp contraction of the heart: even the clattering wooden shoes could not wholly disguise that footstep for her. She was rising from her deep chair as Walter opened the door; but sank back trembling, and put a hand over her white face.
"Mother!"
It was he. He was kneeling: she felt his hands go about her waist and his head sink in her lap.
"Oh, Walter! Oh, my son!"
"Mother!" he repeated with a sob. She bent her face and kissed him.
"Those horrible clothes--you have suffered! But you have escaped!
Tell me--"