Patricia at the inn

IT was a rather late hour when the landlord went to bed that night. As was usual with him on the cold nights of the autumn and winter time, he found it hard to tear himself away from the cosy warmth of the fireside and his generous potations. Midnight had long gone when he rose from his chair, tried the kitchen door according to his inveterate custom, and then stumbled up the creaking stairs to the icy sheets of his chamber.

Perchance they clapped too cold about his ancient blood for sleep to visit him; or likelier, he had an indigestion of the mind from excess of things to think about, for close his eyes as often and firmly as he might, or insinuate his fat person in every fantastic posture in the cold recesses of his bed, sleep was banished from him utterly. Those nerves of his still twittered in his old head. The events that had recently come within his ken were telling upon him. He could not grapple with them with the ease and deftness of a younger man, or a man endowed with stronger fibres in his character.

Do as he would, there was no sleep for him to-night. When he shut his eyes he saw the King with rime on his fine cloak, and rings on his fingers, and a feather in his hat, and a retinue of noble-looking gentlemen bowing low before him. When he opened them, the ugly visage of Diggory Fargus, that dreadful mariner, was grinning at him from the foot of the four-poster. His image was quite as realistic as the King’s. How those earrings bobbed about in his ears! Twice when he was dozing off a convulsive twitch shot through his limbs, and he was compelled to draw his breath cautiously, for he felt a knife to be buried to the hilt in his back.

Suddenly he withdrew his ears from a coil of sheets, and twisted his nightcapped head half across the bed in a strained attitude of listening.

When the sound had first assailed him, he thought it was a rat scratching through a wainscot. But now there was the muffled grunt of a key revolving in a lock; and then a distinct, timid patter of footsteps. The chamber in which he lay was next to that of the lady; she was leaving her room at last.

She was probably only descending to the buttery to procure some necessary for her stricken companion. Or could it be that she was making her escape from the inn? Certainly her movements were cloaked in caution itself. He could hear her stealthy feet on the creaking stairs. Less than a minute afterwards he sprang from his couch with an oath; he could hear her unbarring the outer door.

The bitter darkness was a fierce enemy to the old man, but not even it could daunt his curiosity. With many groans he swiftly grappled with his breeches, dragged on his vest and doublet, and wriggled his cold toes into hose and leather. The night bit him keenly, but he was determined that this woman should not be allowed to pass out of his house, in the dead of the night, with impunity. The landlord was sure she could not be going forth thus with an innocent intention. And in any case, his curiosity apart, he was the last man in the world to neglect a chance of obtaining a weapon against her.

In the midst of these brief speculations he found himself downstairs in the kitchen, protecting an unsteady candle with his hand. A sudden rush of air extinguished it. He was left entirely in the dark, with no precise knowledge of his bearings. He struck a course, however, for the kitchen door, and found it, as he expected, open wide.

On entering the night, his face and hands were stung with the icy kisses of the falling sleet; little waves of it were running down the wind; the sea was crying with loud and many voices; and the hour seemed perishingly desolate and cold. The landlord peered up the path leading to the shore, and saw, many yards away, with the starlight playing round it, a wind-blown figure, whose bent head and flapping cloak were fighting hard against the blast. It was a woman struggling to the sands, and the thing that made her form the more conspicuous was a lantern that she bore. It picked her out in a prominence of light, and made a mark of her for the landlord’s eyes.

Crossing the road, the innkeeper came within the shadows of the rocks. Crouching in them, he dogged her step by step to the open sea. She was not long upon her road. She strode forth through the very teeth of the gale, straightly and confidently, either as one well-broken to adventure with no mind to shrink from this, or, as the landlord more shrewdly preferred to think, as one by nature timid—himself, for example—who, being involved in a course of a highly daunting character, was compelled to act in a manner of frenzied eagerness, or not at all.

The landlord, panting after her in stealth, found his breath quite insufficient for the wicked wind, and, too, his head became the prey of neuralgic pains. He had never been so nearly a hero in his life as his curiosity, his cunning, and rapacity made him now. Presently a sheer and narrow cleft appeared between the rocks. The woman walked along, and a minute afterwards her gaze was strained upon the sea. She approached to the extreme verge of the waters, so that her feet were wetted with the tide. She held her hand across her brows to shield them against the darkness and the driving sleet; and that her eyes might cleave the boiling waste before her.

Nothing could she see, however, except the sea whining and straining from the wind and snow, and casting up its giant belly to the stars like some impotent god of emptiness and fury frothing its threats against the universe. Again her eyes embraced this chaos, but only a lightship could she see swaying many a mile away; the light upon it seemed to hang above a chasm on the very margin of the world.

The night had now pierced her to the blood, while the upthrown surf had stung her face so bitterly that she could support its devilries no more. The landlord, in his wisdom, had not advanced beyond the shelter of the rocks; but the lantern that the woman bore was much his friend, and now at last the tardy moon showed signs of bursting through the wrack that forever raced across it. To him the lady’s movements were therefore made excellently plain; their very visibility, however, did but render her motives the more obscure. After a little while the landlord saw her turn her back upon the black waste of roaring winds and waters, and retrace her steps near to where he crouched encumbered in shingle and rank grass. He crept the closer into secrecy, so that presently she walked so closely past him that in her unconsciousness the hem of her cloak nearly brushed his feet.

By the time the woman had gone some yards beyond him, the landlord got upon his legs and followed her with the same precaution as before. To his bewilderment, and untold annoyance too, instead of pressing directly back upon the path leading to the inn, as he had calculated that she would, she began swiftly to ascend one of the beetling faces of the rocks. The landlord put the stern question to himself whether he should attempt to follow her. The rocks, as he was well aware, were at this point of no particular height, nor were they very difficult or steep. But even in broad daylight they called for an effort from a man in years ambitious to ascend them. Curiosity, however, had its tentacles upon the landlord’s soul; it insensibly drew him panting, groaning, and stumbling up the cliff in the wake of the woman, even as he debated the matter in his mind. The god of circumstance was stronger than he.

The landlord tore his hands on the sharp fragments that studded the face of the rocks; he tripped over others that lay concealed. He barked his shins, tore his clothes, bruised his body; but where the woman with the lantern went, he went to. In the teeth of the gale she won her way up to the pinnacle. The uncertain flame in the lantern blinked and tottered in her hand; but, like its bearer, it somehow prevailed intrepidly against the gale. Once more her eyes were for the sea; and as they confronted it even more steadfastly than before, the moon suddenly swam forth from a black patch of storm, and painted the tense lines of her form in a weird grey ghostliness. It even fell upon her face, and betrayed it wilder and more sombre than the night itself.

Still this grim moon and the few sardonic stars that revealed the woman’s face and form so clearly, mocked the groping blind-eyed rogue who, lying in a new concealment, strove to profit by their aid. They showed him all, yet showed him nothing. He could see her precariously poised under the awful sky, confronting the more awful sea. He could see the very flesh of her quiver in the wind; he could hear her garments flapping in the blast; and as once she raised her lantern a fortunate angle to the moon, he saw the pale tears shine upon her cheeks. All this: yet how much did he know! To the sensual landlord it was symbolical of nothing; of nothing beyond the elements lurking in his own base intelligence. To him the woman was indubitably mad or drunk or criminal. He clenched his frozen hands upon the thought. Body of God! she should be made to pay a price for exposing his sacred person to the night and the tempest in this manner. He would have his two clotted hands upon her. He would tear every jewel, every rag off her mad body; he would tear out the very heart of her for this; and then she and that precious husband of hers should be delivered over to the gibbet; and they should swing in the wind o’ nights such as these, forever.

There was unction in these thoughts to the bruised and beaten landlord, now spying full-length upon his belly behind a boulder. But either these ideas or a particular phrase recalled Diggory Fargus to his mind. How he loathed the image of that mariner! Could it be possible that this woman was searching for him? Indeed, what more likely? He doubtless had some wretched smuggler lying in some little cove on the beach; lying in readiness to take fugitive cavaliers by night into France. Could it be that she was waving that lantern as a signal to Diggory Fargus?

Already the landlord’s mind was at work on that new phase of the night’s mystery; already, despite the extreme bodily discomfort in which he was, he fell to tracing its bearing on his own private interests, as was his invariable wont, under every conceivable condition. His mind did not follow that trend very long, however. For while the woman stood with the moon and the stars, the wind and the spray beating upon her, a second figure sprang silently and mysteriously out of the night.

It appeared so suddenly upon the platform of rock on which the woman stood at gaze, that the astonished landlord could not tell how it had come there. It had evidently climbed up from the other side, however, and, strangely enough, the woman seemed neither to be aware of its apparition nor to expect it; for even when the figure was less than ten yards behind her, her back was towards it, and she still looked out to the sea.

After the landlord’s first shock of excitement and surprise was over, he was quite prepared to recognise the form of Diggory Fargus in this unexpected vision. But one keen look at it, as it struggled and stumbled through the fierce wind, showed it to be too tall for that stunted mariner. The landlord heaved a sigh of vast relief.

It was not until the man, for man it clearly was, had come directly behind the absorbed woman, and plucked her by the cloak, that she withdrew her eyes from the sea and confronted him. And her manner of doing so was so wild and startled, that she could have had no cognisance of his presence. A cry escaped her lips; a cry so great that it pierced through the gale to the landlord’s ears; and it appeared to the watcher’s astonished eyes that had the man not supported her in his arms, she might have fallen headforemost down the cliff. And then a little moment afterwards occurred a thing more singular.

The woman sank on her knees on the rock before this strange appearance; and, taking his outstretched hand within her own, she bent her face convulsively against it, so that it seemed to him who watched that her eyes, her lips, her hair, her tears were imbrued upon it in a strange mad passion, the like of which he had never seen before.

She might have been a minute or an hour thus, the act was so vivid, so unforgettable, so pregnant with that which sears the memory and leaves it raw. But at last the man seemed to draw her to her feet, and thereafter they stood together, talking eagerly. There was that in the frantic gestures of the woman, in her wrought attitude, and the perfervid manner of her utterance, that the landlord was able to interpret. It seemed to him that she was pouring forth a wild appeal. But listen as tensely as he might, the noise of the sea and the wind, and the intervening distance, were too great for him to catch a word that fell between them.

The next thing of which the landlord was aware, was, that they were leaving the altitude on which they stood. As they prepared to descend to the path beneath, the woman hung heavily upon the strange man’s arm. And as they came down the incline of the rocks, they approached so near to Gamaliel’s hiding-place that the old man was able to train his eyes full upon them; and the moonlight and the light of the woman’s lantern falling on them too, they became a feast for his curiosity. He was able to discern almost every detail of the stranger’s countenance; and as he did so, he had to strangle the cry of surprise that welled up on his lips. The woman’s mysterious companion was none other than the landlord’s new serving-man, Will Jackson.