Patricia at the inn

WHEN a few slow hours had passed, and the household of the “Sea Rover” were astir, the landlord lost no time in despatching his son to the stable to summon Will Jackson to his presence.

The serving-man soon afterwards shambled into the kitchen, wearing a particularly sleepy and unkempt look. He pulled his forelock to Gamaliel gravely; yawned, and rubbed his weary eyes on the sleeve of his jerkin. The landlord regarded him keenly. It seemed almost impossible that this rustic clod and the beautiful woman upstairs should have anything in common. But what of her behaviour on the rock during the night? Could it merely have been fright at his appearance? Hardly that: besides, his own behaviour had been very incongruous, considering what a bucolic clown of a fellow he was during the daytime. Yet was he such a clown after all? Had not the landlord first remarked about him that he appeared to have wits rather above his station? However, he would see.

“My lad,” said Gamaliel, sternly, “what did you during the night?”

“Slept,” said the fellow, laconically.

“Did you not walk abroad?” said the landlord.

“Nay, not I,” said the fellow. “Too tired I was; I lay down in my straw and slept like a hog.”

“You are lying to me,” said the landlord, raising his voice. “You walked out on to the top of one of those rocks by the seashore, and there you met the woman in the chamber upstairs. You met her there in the middle of the night; you talked to her; and she fell on her knees before you, and she kissed your hands. I know all, you lying villain! Now, sirrah, confess the reason of it all, or take the consequences.”

The serving-man twitched not a muscle. He regarded his master with a stolidity amounting almost to the bovine, and he blankly professed his ignorance of the charge. The landlord grew furious.

“Do you give the lie to my ears and eyes?” he cried.

The serving-man merely replied by a look of profound indifference. To the angry and astonished landlord, it seemed to amount almost to contempt. Will Jackson appeared to consider that his denial was enough. He neither entered into the merits of the matter, nor took the trouble to soften the force of his affirmation.

Gamaliel had never been so nonplussed in his life. He had proof positive that his serving-man had been out in the night, and that he was intimately acquainted with the woman upstairs. Yet here he audaciously denied all knowledge of her.

“By God, sirrah!” cried the landlord, “I will see to it that you hang before a week is out, as an aider and abettor of proscribed Royalists fleeing the country, if you persist in this most abominable falsehood.”

The serving-man shrugged his shoulders. He still seemed to have a perfect indifference to the landlord’s threats. And, indeed, Master Gamaliel fumed and browbeat in vain. It was precious little satisfaction he got out of the lumpish Will Jackson.

He breakfasted upon the matter. Coming to review it afterwards, he did but grow more firm in his conviction that the woman and his drawer had something more to conceal than he had at first suspected. At last he decided to confront them face to face. First, he sent up his son with a message to the lady’s chamber. Would she step down immediately to his father, as he desired to speak with her on a matter of the first importance? Her fear of the landlord was now so great, that she lost not an instant in complying with his demand.

Will Jackson was already submitting to another interrogatory from his master, when she came whitely and wearily down the stairs. The cunning landlord had contrived that their meeting should be in his presence. They should have no chance to pre-arrange an ignorance of one another. He now observed their demeanour with a devilish intentness, and he could swear he saw a sudden swift flush dart across the woman’s face and a hunted, hungry look of fear spring in her eyes the moment her gaze alighted on Will Jackson.

As for that clod-like servitor, he was just as imperturbable as ever. Not by the relaxing of a muscle did he betray that he had encountered the woman before. The landlord admitted to himself that such a studied stolidity was remarkable. The fellow made respectfully to withdraw on the woman’s appearance.

“Not so,” said his master, roughly. “I would have you stay here, sirrah. You shall be condemned out of the mouth of your accomplice.”

He then turned, bully as he was, even more roughly on the woman.

“Madam,” he said, “I have sent for you to demand an explanation of your last night’s conduct. In the middle of the night you crept out of my house, climbed upon a rock in front of the open sea, and while there you encountered this serving-man of mine, Will Jackson. Madam, I demand to know what passed between you; also when and where you met my serving-man before.”

“How can madam say that,” the serving-man promptly answered for her, before she had a chance to reply on her own part, “when I have told you over and over again, good master, that I was never out last night at all; and, if you must know, the only time she hath seen me before this morning was when you sent me up the ladder to spy upon her. Then it was she happened to raise her eyes to the window, and accidentally caught mine looking at her.”

“Silence, you insolent scoundrel!” roared the landlord. “How dare you presume to put words in the mouth of this lady! You impertinent dog! Come, madam, I await your explanation of this odd circumstance.”

The woman stood silent, with her head bent upon the ground. The landlord was obliged to admit that the exceeding promptness of his clod of a servant had done a great deal towards outwitting him. She had had her cue from this impudent rogue. It was too plain that she was striving to summon up the courage to utilise it.

“Come, madam,” cried the landlord; “I would not have you attempt to dissemble. You are not of the pattern of a dissembler, as witness your somewhat melancholy performance in that role in the small hours of this morning. Be frank, madam. I prithee do not exhaust my patience. Your respite of twenty-four hours may suffer a curtailment else.”

This threat was not without its effect. The landlord grimly noted how the fear sprang to her eyes. He noted, too, that as she raised them they rested a moment wildly on Will Jackson’s face. His countenance, however, the landlord saw with a new amazement, was absolutely empty and passive. The fellow was either a clown of no capacity at all, or a man of an infinite wit, resource, and intelligence.

“Madam, I demand an answer,” said the landlord.

“I have never seen this—this—this man ere now,” the woman faltered.

“You are lying, madam!” the landlord cried in his brutal manner; “and, my God! if you lie to me I will rescind my promise, and your husband shall be delivered within the hour into the hands of his enemies. And this fellow, Will Jackson, shall be given up also, as an aider and abettor of dangerous Royalists.”

The woman grew white to the lips.

“No, no; not that!” she moaned. “Not that! You will not be so cruel—so unmerciful.”

“Madam, I will not be trifled with,” said the landlord. “If you do not speak the truth to me, all three of you shall be given up.”

“Oh, sir,” she said, trembling like a reed in the wind, “it is indeed the truth. I beg you to believe me.”

“I never saw a worse hand at a lie,” said the landlord, with a sneer. “But, ’fore God! you shall pay for it. Joseph, do you come here instantly.”

The landlord summoned his son. That rather dismal youth obeyed his father’s call with a resentful alacrity.

“Madam,” said the landlord, “I give you one minute by this watch of mine in which to make your decision. Confess the truth, and the twenty-four hours’ respite holds good. Persevere in this monstrous falsehood, and you shall pay for it in your husband’s blood. I have never yet seen the man, let alone the woman, who could trifle with Gamaliel Hooker. And, sirrah, do you heed this also. As I’m a live man, you shall swing in a gibbet for this!”

The old man ended in a gust of fury that carried him away. He then said to his son:

“I fear me, Joseph, that you must go saddle your horse in a minute. I shall be wanting you to take a message to a certain place I wot of.”

The landlord pulled forth his watch and began to count the seconds dramatically. The woman seemed petrified to stone.

“I ask you for the last time, madam, what you know of this fellow,” said the implacable landlord. “Refuse to tell me, and it is your unhappy husband, not yourself, who pays the price.”

None knew more perfectly than the landlord how to torture her. Again he had the wretched creature on her knees before him; and again he had the privilege of laughing in her face.

“Rise, madam,” said Will Jackson.

The landlord turned towards him and gazed at him in blank astonishment. It was not so much the drawer’s words, audacious as they were, that had this electrical effect on Gamaliel Hooker. It was the manner of their utterance. They were spoken in a full, calm voice, quiet and self-contained, and one that sounded mighty odd from the mouth of a servant. For, above all, it had a tone that even a bold man would have found it hard to disobey.

“Rise, madam,” said the serving-man, and, bending forward towards her, he assisted her to do so.

She trembled so violently when she got upon her feet that she could hardly stand. But she kept her face averted from the audacious servitor in a singularly painful way. She seemed afraid to look at him.

“We will have done with play-acting, if you please,” said the drawer, addressing his master, but, strangely enough, in the same authoritative voice. “After all, is it not a little vulgar, and a little cowardly?”

The astonished landlord spluttered out a string of oaths. But he was almost inarticulate with anger and bewilderment. A frank sparkle of amusement showed at the same time in Will Jackson’s eyes. The transformation of his voice was extending to his face; nay, to his person and his bearing too. Where a minute ago there had been stolid inanimation and indifference, were intelligence and vivacity. Where there had been lumpishness and awkwardness of gait, were graciousness and breeding. The fellow still wore his coarse rustic clothes, his face was still bedaubed with dirt, but he was no longer the same person. The landlord was slowly beginning to recognise the fact.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

It seemed that his transformed serving-man was on the point of telling him, when the poor lady, who seemed just now to be acting in a kind of delirium, stayed him suddenly by placing her two hands on the leathern sleeve of his jerkin.

“No, no, no!” she cried; “it must not be. Whatever the cost, it must not be.”

“Think of your husband’s life, madam,” said the triumphant landlord.

Neither the man nor the woman paid heed to him now, however. There seemed some far graver matter between them.

“At all costs,” the landlord heard the woman say to his serving-man in a hoarse whisper, “I implore you to be wise, to be discreet. It is not for yourself alone I beseech you; think, oh! think of all that it means.”

Her voice, too, was changing. While she spoke, it lost something of its wildness. It still throbbed with its passion, but above it was a yearning tenderness, a maternal solicitude that dominated it completely.

“Nay,” said Will Jackson, with his strange, cool smile again creeping out of his eyes. “What’s the odds? I am weary to death of this farce; it is become intolerable. And, after all, we are in the hands of God, are we not? There is but our destiny to trust to.”

“But must we not shape it?” said the woman. “You may mitigate it, or enhance it, by your unremitting prudence. I beseech you to remember, all is not lost. There are still those that are your friends. Be wary, be discreet, I pray you.”

It distinctly seemed to the landlord’s eager ears that the woman had as great a solicitude for this fellow as her husband—nay, an even greater one. For was she not apparently prepared to sacrifice her lord, rather than Will Jackson should reveal the secret between them?

Gamaliel was cunning enough; but, after all, cunning is a quality with grievous limitations. It is the offspring of a mean mind, and is therefore of value only up to a particular point. Therefore what should have been by now as clear as day to the innkeeper was still quite obscure. Instead of reading the plain, simple truth, he went deeper than a more straightforward person would have done, and missed it altogether. He was convinced that the woman and the man—whoever he was, he was no serving-man—stood one to the other in a guilty relation. The previous night he had witnessed an assignation; and, further, now that the woman had to choose between this fellow and her husband, she was ready to sacrifice her husband.

There never was anything so plain, the landlord thought, yet he flattered himself that it was not everyone who would have found it so. This fine theory was doomed to perish almost as soon as it was born, however. Despite all that the woman had done to urge him to prudence, this strangest of serving-men insisted, in his cool, smiling, slightly indifferent manner, on going his own way.

“My dear madam,” he said, in a louder tone than any he had yet employed, “we honour your devotion and your solicitude; we shall ever cherish it vastly. But we are a-weary of this mumming, of this intolerable play-acting; we yawn to death. ’Twere better far to perish of the axe than to die thus incontinently. Besides, we are hungry and thirsty. The food our landlord reserves for his servants is fit only for swine. Landlord, have the goodness to hold your peace, and fetch us a cup of sack and a nuncheon of bread and meat. ’Od’s body! never was a king’s belly so sharp before.”

At last the landlord saw. At first his bewilderment was so great that he could have been easily felled by a feather. Every emotion that the old rogue had was suddenly laid stark naked by this wonderful revelation of the King; indeed, his behaviour was so ludicrous that that frank young man burst out a-laughing at him. Too excited to speak, too dumbfounded to act, too paralysed with all the conflicting sensations let loose in his head to be able to think, he was as one suddenly become deaf, dumb, and blind. He could neither see nor hear; he could neither speak nor lift a finger. The occasion was too great for him; he had lost control of his own entity.

In the meantime the anguish of the poor lady was even more terrible, more unutterable than before.

“Oh, my King! my King!” she wailed, “what hast thou done? My God! what hast thou done?”

The King put his hand upon her shoulder, gently.

“Peace, dear lady, peace,” he said. “This is no season for your tears. Landlord, I asked you a minute since for a cup of sack. ’Od’s fish! you must obey me, landlord; I am no longer your servitor, to be kicked and cuffed and bullied, but your King. I wonder if the royal coat was ever tarnished with such dirty hands before.”

The King looked a little deprecatingly at the sleeve of his leather jerkin. In lieu of the morose, thick-witted Will Jackson, he now stood forth a frank and jovial rogue enough. For all the disguise of his dirt and his rags, his kingship seemed suddenly to make him a gentleman. As a serving-man or a wandering vagabond he would still have been excellent; but granted his kingliness, he made no such very bad specimen of a monarch. The title shone forth in his swarthy looks, added a freedom to his manners, and a grace to his bearing, as, in the fashion of a simple commoner, he drank his sack and munched his nuncheon, and offered words of gallantry and comfort to his beautiful, distressed companion. But in the absence of the title, he would still have done very well for Will Jackson. As is the way with many another, the coat was the man. It required the label of King to make him one; but once affixed, it certainly suited him admirably.

“Is my lord strong enough to receive me,” he asked the lady as he disposed of the last morsel of his bread and meat.

“I pray that he may ever be strong enough to receive your Majesty,” said the lady, fervently. “May I conduct you to his chamber, Sire?”

The King and the lady went together up the creaking old stairs. The landlord rubbed his hands across his bewildered eyes. He then sat down suddenly, or rather fell, into his chair at the side of the hearth.