No sooner had Ralph discovered that the straggler from the North who lay insensible in the yard of the inn at Kendal was Simeon Stagg than he pushed through the crowd, and lifting the thin and wasted figure in his arms, ordered a servant to show him to a room within.
There in a little while sensibility returned to Sim, who was suffering from nothing more serious than exhaustion and the excitement by which it had been in part occasioned.
When in the first moment of consciousness he opened his eyes and met the eyes of Ralph, who was bending above him, he exhibited no sign of surprise. With a gesture indicative of irritation he brushed his long and bony hand over his face, as though trying to shut out a vision that had more than once before haunted and tormented him. But when he realized the reality of the presence of the man whom he had followed over many weary miles, whose face had followed him in his dreams,—when it was borne in upon his scattered sense that Ralph Ray was actually here at his side, holding his hand and speaking to him in the deep tones which he knew so well,—then the poor worn wayfarer could no longer control the emotion that surged upwards from his heart.
It was a wild, disjointed, inconsequential tale which Sim thereupon told, which he had come all this way to tell, and which now revealed its full import to the eager listener in spite of the narrator's eagerness rather than by means of it. Amid spasms of feeling, however, the story came at length to an end; and gathering up the threads of it for himself, and arranging them in what seemed to him their natural sequence, Ralph understood all that it was essential to understand of his own position and the peril of those who were dear to him. That he was to be outlawed, and that his estate was to be confiscated; that his mother, who still lived, was, with his brother and Rotha, to be turned into the road,—this injustice was only too imminent.
“In a fortnight—was it so?” he asked. “In a fortnight they were to be back? A fortnight from what day?”
“Saturday,” said Sim; “that's to say, a week come Saturday next.”
“And this is Tuesday; ten full days between,” said Ralph, walking with drooping head across the room; “I must leave immediately for the North. Heigh!” opening a window, and hailing the ostler who at the moment went past, “when does your next coach start for the North?”
“At nine o'clock, sir.”
“Nine to-night? So late? Have you nothing before—no wagon—nothing?”
“Nothing before, sir; 'cept—leastways—no, nothing before. Ye see, it waits for the coach from Lancaster, and takes on its passengers.”
“John, John,” cried the landlady, who had overheard the conversation from a neighboring window, “mayhap the gentleman would like to take a pair of horses a stage or two an he's in a hurry.”
“Have you a horse that can cover thirty miles to-day?” said Ralph.
“That we have, yer honor, and mair ner ya horse.”
“Where will the coach be at six to-morrow?”
“At Penrith, I reckon,” said the ostler, lifting his cap, and scratching his head with the air of one who was a good deal uncertain alike of his arithmetic and his geography.
“How long do they reckon the whole journey?”
“Twelve hours, I've heeard—that's if nothing hinders; weather, nor the like.”
“Get your horse ready at once, my lad, and then take me to your landlady.”
“You'll not leave me behind, Ralph,” said Sim when Ralph had shut back the casement.
“You're very weak, old friend; it will be best for you to sleep here to-day, and take to-night's Carlisle coach as far back as Mardale. It will be early morning when the coach gets there, and at daybreak you can walk over the Stye Pass to Shoulthwaite.”
“I dare not, I dare not; no, no, don't leave me here.” Sim's importunity was irresistible, and Ralph yielded more out of pity than by persuasion. A second horse was ordered, and in less than half an hour the travellers, fortified by a meal, were riding side by side on the high road from Kendal to the North.
Sim was not yet so far recovered from his exhaustion but that the exertion of riding—at any time a serious undertaking to him—was quick in producing symptoms of collapse. But he held on to his purpose of accompanying Ralph on his northward journey with a tenacity which was unshaken either by his companion's glances of solicitude or yet by the broad mouthed merriment of the rustics, who obviously found it amusing to watch the contortions of an ill-graced, weak, and spiritless rider, and to fire off at him as he passed the sallies of an elephantine humor.
When the pair started away from Kendal, Sim had clearly no thought but that their destination was to be Wythburn. It was therefore with some surprise and no little concern that he observed that Ralph took the road to the right which led to Penrith and the northeast, when they arrived at that angle of the highway outside the town where two turnpikes met, and one went off to Wythburn and the Northwest.
“I should have reckoned that the nighest way home was through Staveley,” Sim said with hesitation.
“We can turn to the left at Mardale,” said Ralph, and pushed on without further explanation. “Do you say that mother has never once spoken?” he asked, drawing up at one moment to give Sim a little breathing space.
“Never once, Ralph—mute as the grave, she is—poor body.”
“And Rotha—Rotha—”
“Yes, the lass is with her, she is.”
“God bless her in this world and the next!”
Then the two pushed on again, with a silence between them that was more touching than speech. They rode long and fast this spell, and when they drew up once more, Ralph turned in his saddle and saw that the ruins that stood at the top of the Kendal Scar were already far behind them.
“It's a right good thing that you've given up your solitary life on the fells, Sim. It wilt cheer me a deal, old friend, to think you'll always live with the folks at Shoulthwaite.” Ralph spoke as if he himself had never to return. Sim felt this before Ralph had realized the implication of his words.
“It's hard for a hermit to be a good man,” continued Ralph; “he begins with being miserable and ends with being selfish and superstitious, and perhaps mad. Have you never marked it?”
“Maybe so, Ralph; maybe so. It's like it's because the world's bitter cruel that so many are buryin' theirsels afore they're dead.”
“Then it's because they expect too much of the world,” said Ralph. “We should take the world on easier terms. Fallible humanity must have its weaknesses and poor human life its disasters, and where these are mighty and inevitable, what folly is greater than to fly from them or to truckle to them, to make terms with them? Our duty is simply to endure them, to endure them—that's it, old friend.”
There was no answer that Sim could make to this. Ralph was speaking to the companion who rode by his side; but in fact he seemed to be addressing himself.
“And to see a man buy a reprieve from Death!” he continued. “Never do that—never? Did you ever think of it, Sim, that what happens is always the best?”
“It scarce looks like it, Ralph; that it don't.”
“Then it's because you don't look long enough. In the end, it is always the best that happens. Truth and the right are the last on the field; it always has been so, and always will be; it only needs that you should wait to the close of the battle to see that.”
There would have been a sublime solemnity in these rude words of a rude man of action if Sim had divined that they were in fact the meditations of one who believed himself to be already under the shadow of his death.
The horses broke again into a canter, and it was long before the reins of the riders brought them to another pause. The day was bitterly cold, and, notwithstanding the exertion of riding, Sim's teeth chattered sometimes as with ague, and his fingers were numb and stiff. It was an hour before noon when the travellers left Kendal, and now they had ridden for two hours. The brighter clouds of the morning had disappeared, and a dull, leaden sky was overhead. Gradually the heavy atmosphere seemed to close about them, yet a cutting wind blew smartly from the east.
“A snowstorm is coming, Sim. Look yonder; how thick it hangs over the Gray Crag sheer ahead! We must push on, or we'll be overtaken.”
“How long will it be coming?” asked Sim.
“Five hours full, perhaps longer,” said Ralph; “we may reach Penrith before that time.”
“Penrith!”
Sim's tone was one of equal surprise and fear.
Ralph gave him a quick glance; then reaching over the neck of his horse to stroke its long mane, he said, with the manner of one who makes too palpable an effort to change the subject of conversation: “Isn't this mare something like old Betsy? I couldn't but mark how like she was to our old mare that is lost when the ostler brought her into the yard this morning.”
Sim made no reply.
“Poor Betsy!” said Ralph, and dropped his head on to his breast.
Another long canter. When the riders drew up again it was to take a steadier view of some objects in the distance which had simultaneously awakened their curiosity.
“There seem to be many of them,” said Ralph; and, shielding his ear from the wind, he added, “do you catch their voices?”
“Are they quarrelling?—is it a riot?” Sim asked.
“Quick, and let us see.”
In a few moments they had reached a little wayside village.
There they found children screaming and women wringing their hands. In the high road lay articles of furniture, huddled together, thrown in heaps one on another, and broken into fragments in the fall. A sergeant and company of musketeers were even then in the midst of this pitiful work of devastation, turning the people out of their little thatched cottages and flinging their poor sticks of property out after them. Everywhere were tumult and ruin. Old people were lying on the cold earth by the wayside. They had been born in these houses; they had looked to die in these homes; but houses and homes were to be theirs no more. Amidst the wreck strode the gaunt figure of a factor, directing and encouraging, and firing off meantime a volley of revolting oaths.
“What's the name of this place?” asked Ralph of a man who stood, with fury in his eyes, watching the destruction of his home.
“Hollowbank,” answered the man between his teeth.
Ralph remembered that here had lived a well-known Royalist, whom the Parliament had dispossessed of his estates. The people of this valley had been ardent Parliamentarians during the long campaign. Could it be that his lordship had been repossessed of his property, and was taking this means of revenging himself upon his tenantry for resisting the cause he had fought for?
An old man lay by the hedge looking down to the ground with eyes that told only of despair. A little fair-haired boy, with fear in his innocent face, was clinging to his grandfather's cloak and crying piteously.
“Get off with you and begone!” cried the factor, rapping out another volley.
“Is it Hollowbank you call this place?” said Ralph, looking the fellow in the face. “Hellbank would be a fitter name.”
The man answered nothing, but his eyes glared angrily as Ralph put spur to his horse and rode on.
“God in heaven!” cried Ralph when Sim had come up by his side, “to think that work like this goes on in God's sight!”
“Yet you say the best happens,” said Sim.
“It does; it does; God knows it does, for all that,” insisted Ralph. “But to think of these poor souls thrown out into the road like cattle. Cattle? To cattle they would be merciful!—thrown out into the road to lie and die and rot!”
“Have they been outlawed—these men?” said Sim.
“Damnation!” cried Ralph, as though at Sim's ignorant word a new and terrible thought had flashed upon his mind and wounded him like a dagger.
Then they rode long in silence.
Away they went, mile after mile, without rest and without pause, through dales and over uplands, past meres and across rivers, and still with the gathering blackness overhead.
What force of doom was spurring them on in this race against Life? It was the depth of a Cumbrian winter, and the days were short. Clearly they would never reach Penrith to-night. The delay at Hollowbank and the shortened twilight before a coming snowstorm must curtail their journey. They agreed to put up for the night at the inn at Askham.
As they approached that house of entertainment they observed that the coach which had left Carlisle that morning was in the act of drawing up at the door. It waited only while three or four passengers alighted, and then drove on and passed them in its journey south.
Five hours hence it would pass the northward coach from Kendal.
When Ralph and Sim dismounted at the Fox and Hounds, at Askham, the landlord came hastily to the door. He was a brawny dalesman, of perhaps thirty. He was approaching the travellers with the customary salutations of a host, when, checking himself, and coming to Ralph, he said in a low tone, “I ask pardon, sir, but is your name Ray?—Captain—hush!” he whispered; and then, becoming suddenly mute, without waiting for a reply to his questions, he handed the horses to a man who came up at the moment, and beckoned Ralph and Sim to follow him, not through the front of the house, but towards the yard that led to the back.
“Don't you know me?” he said as soon as he had conveyed them, as if by stealth, into a little room detached from the rest of the house.
“Surely it's Brown? And how are you, my lad?”
“Gayly; and you seem gayly yourself, and not much altered since the great days at Dunbar—only a bit lustier, mayhap, and with something more of beard. I'll never forget the days I served under you!”
“That's well, Brown; but why did you bring us round here?” said Ralph.
“Hush!” whispered the landlord. “I've a pack of the worst bloodhounds from Carlisle just come. They're this minute down by the coach. I know the waistrels. They've been here before to-day. They'd know you to a certainty, and woe's me if once the gommarels come abreast of you. It's like I'd never forgive myself if my old captain came by any ill luck in my house.”
“How long will they stay?” “Until morning, it's like.”
“How far is it to the next inn?”
“Three miles to Clifton.”
“We shall sleep till daybreak to-morrow, Brown, on the settles you have here. And now, my lad, bloodhounds or none on our trail, bring us something to eat.”
Upon reaching the Woodman at Kendal, Robbie found little reason to doubt that Sim had been there and had gone. A lively young chambermaid, who replied to his questions, told him the story of Sim's temporary illness and subsequent departure with another man.
“What like of a man was he, lass—him as took off the little fellow?” asked Robbie.
“A very personable sort; maybe as fine a breed as you'd see here and there one,” replied the girl.
“Six foot high haply, and square up on his legs?” asked Robbie, throwing back his body into an upright posture as a supplementary and explanatory gesture.
“Ey, as big as Bully Ned and as straight as Robin the Devil,” said the girl.
Robbie was in ignorance of the physical proportions of these local worthies, but he was nevertheless in little doubt as to the identity of his man. It was clear that Sim and Ralph had met on this spot only a few hours ago, and had gone off together.
“What o'clock might it be when they left?” said Robbie.
“Nigh to noon—maybe eleven or so.”
It was now two, and Ralph and Sim, riding good horses, must be many miles away. Robbie's vexation was overpowering when he thought of the hours that he had wasted at Winander and of the old gossip at the street corner who had prompted him to the fruitless search.
“The feckless old ninny,” he thought in his mute indignation; “when an old man comes to be an old woman it's nothing but right that he should die, and have himself done with.”
Robbie was unable to hire a horse in order to set off in pursuit of his friends; nor were his wits so far distraught by the difficulties tormenting them that he was unable to perceive that, even if he could afford to ride, his chance would be inconsiderable of overtaking two men who had already three hours' start of him.
He went into the taproom to consult the driver of the Carlisle coach, who was taking a glass before going to bed—his hours of work being in the night and his hours of rest being in the day. That authority recommended, with the utmost positiveness of advice, that Robbie should take a seat in his coach when he left for the North that night.
“But you don't start till nine o'clock, they tell me?” said Robbie.
“Well, man, what of that?” replied the driver; “yon two men will have to sleep to-night, I reckon; and they'll put up to a sartenty somewhear, and that's how we'll come abreast on 'em. It's no use tearan like a crazy thing.”
The driver had no misgivings; his conjecture seemed reasonable, and whether his plan were feasible or not, it was the only one available. So Robbie had to make a virtue of a necessity, as happens to many a man of more resource.
He was perhaps in his secret heart the better reconciled to a few hours' delay in his present quarters, because he fancied that the little chambermaid had exhibited some sly symptoms of partiality for his society in the few passages of conversation which he had exchanged with her.
She was a bright, pert young thing, with just that dash of freedom in her manners which usually comes of the pursuit of her public calling; and it is only fair to Robbie's modesty to say that he had not deceived himself very grossly in his estimate of the interest he had suddenly excited in her eyes. It was probably a grievous dereliction of duty to think of a love encounter, however blameless, at a juncture like this—not to speak of the gravity of the offence of forgetting the absent Liza. But Robbie was undergoing a forced interlude in the march; the lady who dominated his affections was unhappily too far away to appease them, and he was not the sort of young fellow who could resist the assault of a pair of coquettish black eyes.
Returning from the taproom to announce his intention of waiting for the coach, Robbie was invited to the fire in the kitchen,—a privilege for which the extreme coldness of the day was understood to account. Here he lit a pipe, and discoursed on the route that would probably be pursued by his friends.
It was obvious that Ralph and Sim had not taken the direct road home to Wythburn, for if they had done so he must have met them as he came from Staveley. There was the bare possibility that he had missed them by going round the fields to the old woman's cottage; but this seemed unlikely.
“Are you quite sure it's an old man you're after?” said the girl, with a dig of emphasis that was meant to insinuate a doubt of Robbie's eagerness to take so much trouble in running after anything less enticing than one of another sex who might not be old.
Robbie protested on his honor that he was never known to run after young women,—a statement which did not appear to find a very ready acceptance. The girl was coming and going from the kitchen in the discharge of her duties, and on one of her journeys she brought a parchment map in her hand, saying: “Here's a paper that Jim, the driver, told me to show you. It gives all the roads atween Kendal and Carlisle. So you may see for yourself whether your friends could get round about to Wy'bern.”
Robbie spread out the map on the kitchen table, and at once proceeded, with the help of the chambermaid, to trace out the roads that were open to Ralph and Sim to take. It was a labyrinthine web, that map, and it taxed the utmost ingenuity of both Robbie and his little acquaintance to make head or tail of it.
“Here you are,” cried Robbie, with the air of a man making a valuable discovery, “here's the milestones—one, two, three—them's milestones, thou knows.”
“Tut, you goose; that's only the scale,” said the girl; “see what's printed, 'Scale of miles.'”
“Oh, ey, lass,” said Robbie, not feeling sure what “scale” might mean, but too shrewd to betray his ignorance a second time in the presence of this learned chambermaid.
The riddle, nevertheless, defied solution. However much they pored over the map, it was still a maze of lines.
“It's as widderful as poor old Sim's face,” said Robbie.
Robbie and the chambermaid put their heads together in more senses than one. The map was most inconveniently small. Two folks could not consult it at the same time without coming into really uncomfortable proximity.
“There you are,” said Robbie, reaching over, pipe in hand, to where the girl was intent on some minute point.
Suddenly there was a cloud of smoke over the map. It also enveloped the students of geography. Then, somehow, there was a sly smack of lips.
“And there you are,” said the girl, with a roguish laugh, as she brought Robbie a great whang over the ear and shot away.
Jim, the driver, came into the kitchen at that moment on his way to bed, and unravelled the mystery of the map by showing that it was possible for Robbie's friends to go off the Carlisle road towards Gaskarth and Wythburn at the village of Askham.
Robbie was satisfied with this explanation, and did his best under the circumstances to rest content until nine o'clock with the harbor into which he had drifted. He succeeded more completely, perhaps, in this endeavor than might be expected, when the peril of his friends and his allegiance to Liza Branthwaite is taken into account.
But when nine o'clock had come and gone, and still the coach stood in the yard of the inn, Robbie's sense of duty overcame his appetite for what he would have called a “spoag.” It was usual for the Carlisle coach to await the coach from Lancaster, and it was because the latter had not yet arrived at Kendal that the former was unable to depart from it. Robbie's impatience waxed considerably during the half-hour thence ensuing; but when ten o'clock had struck, and still no definite movement was made, his indignation became boisterous.
There were to be four inside passengers, all women; and cold as the night might prove, Robbie's seat must be outside. The protestations of all five passengers were at length too loud, and their importunity was too earnest, to admit of longer delay. So the driver put in his horses and took his seat on the box.
This had scarcely been done when the horn of the Lancaster coach was heard in the distance, and some further waiting ensued.
“Let's hope you'll have no traffic out of, it when it does come,” said Robbie with a dash of spite. A few minutes afterwards the late coach drove into the yard and discharged its travellers.
Two of these, who were going forward to Carlisle, climbed the ladder and took seats behind Robbie. It was too dark to see who or what they were except that they were men, that they were wrapped in long cloaks, and wore caps that fitted close to their heads and cheeks, being tied over their beards and beneath their chins.
The much-maligned Jim now gave a smart whip to his horses, and in a moment more the coach was on the road.
The night was dark and bitterly cold, and once outside the town the glimmer of the lamps which the coach carried was all the light the passengers had for miles.
A slight headache from which Robbie had suffered at intervals since the ducking of his head in the river at Wythburn had now quite disappeared, but a curious numbness, added to a degree of stupefaction, began to take its place. As the coach jogged along on its weary journey, not even the bracing surroundings of Robbie's present elevated and exposed position had the effect of keeping him actively awake. He dozed in short snatches and awoke with slight shudders, feeling alternately hot and cold.
In one of his intervals of wakefulness he heard fragments of a conversation which was being sustained by the strangers behind him. Robbie had neither activity nor curiosity to waste on their talk, but he could not avoid listening.
“He would have been the best agent in the King's service to a certainty,” said one. “He's the 'cutest man I ever tackled. It's parlish odd how he baffles us.”
The speaker was clearly a Cumbrian.
“Shaf!” replied his companion, in a kind of whisper, “he's a pauchtie clot-heed. I'll have him at Haribee in a crack.”
The second speaker was as clearly a Scot who was struggling against the danger there might be of his speech bewraying him.
“Well, you're pretty smart on 'im. I never could rightly make aught of thy hate of 'im.”
“Tut, man, live and learn. Let me have him in Wilfrey Lawson's hands, and ye'll see what for I hate the proud-stomached taistrel.”
“Well,” said the Cumbrian, in a tone indicative of more resignation than he had previously exhibited, “I've no more cause to love 'im than yourself. You saw 'im knock me down in the streets of Lancaster.”
“May ye hang him up for it, Bailiff Scroope,” replied the Scot. “May ye hang him up for it on the top of Haribee!”
Robbie understood enough of this conversation to realize the character and pursuit of his travelling companions; but the details and tone of the dialogue were not of an interest sufficiently engrossing to keep him awake. He dozed afresh, and in the unconsciousness of a fitful sleep he passed a good many miles of his dreary night ride.
A sudden glare in his eyes awoke him at one moment. They were passing the village of Hollowbank. Fires were lit on the road, and dark figures were crouching around them. Robbie was too drowsy to ask the meaning of these sights, and he soon slept once more.
When he awoke again, he thought he caught the echo of the word “Wythburn” as having been spoken behind him; but whether this were more than a delusion of the ear, such as sometimes comes at the moment of awakening, he could not be sure until (now fully awake) he distinctly heard the Cumbrian use the name of Ralph Ray.
Robbie's curiosity was instantly aroused, and in the effort to shake off the weight of his drowsiness he made a backward movement of the head, which was perceived by the strangers. He was conscious that one of the men had risen, and was leaning over to the driver to ask who he himself might be, and where he was going.
“A country lad of some sort,” said Jim. “I know nought, no mair.”
“I thought maybe he were a friend,” said the stranger, with questionable veracity.
The conversation thereupon proceeded with unrestrained vigor.
“It baffles me, his going to Carlisle. As I say, he's a 'cute sort. What's his game in this hunt?”
“Shaf! he's bagged himself, stump and rump.”
“I don't mind how soon we've done with this trapesing here and there. Which will be the 'dictment, think ye?”
“Small doubt which.” “Murder, eh? Can you manage it, Wilfrey and yourself?”
“Leave that to the pair of us.”
The perspiration was standing in beads on every inch of Robbie's body. He was struggling with an almost overpowering temptation to test the strength of his muscles at pitching certain weighty “bodies” off the top of that coach, in order to relieve it of some of the physical burden and a good deal of the moral iniquity under which it seemed to him just then to groan.
Snow began now to fall, and the driver gave the whip to his horses in order to reach a village which was not far away.
“We'll be bound to put up for the night,” he said; “this snowstorm will soon stop us.”
The two strangers were apparently much concerned at the necessity, and used every available argument to induce the driver to continue his journey.
Robbie could not bring himself to a conclusion as to whether it would be best for his purpose that the coach should stop, and so keep back the vagabonds who were sitting behind him, or go on, and so help him to overtake Ralph. The driver in due course settled the problem very decisively by drawing up at the inn of the hamlet of Mardale and proceeding to take his horses off the chains.
“There be some folk as have mercy neither on man nor beast,” he said in reply to a protest from the strangers.
Jim's sentiment was more apposite than he thought.
The two men grumbled their way into the inn. Robbie remained outside and gave the driver a hand with the horses.
“Where's Haribee?” he asked.
“In Carlisle,” said the driver.
“What place is it?” asked Robbie.
“Haribee?—why, the place of execution.”
When left alone outside in the snow, Robbie began to reflect on the position of affairs. It was past midnight. The two strangers, who were obviously in pursuit of Ralph, would stay in this house at least until morning. Ralph himself was probably asleep at this moment, some ten miles or thereabouts farther up the road.
It was bitterly cold. Robbie's hands and face were numbed. The flakes of snow fell thicker and faster than before.
Robbie perceived that there was only one chance that would make it worth while to have come on this journey: the chance that he could overtake Ralph before the coach and its passengers could overtake him.
To do this he must walk the whole night through, let it rain or snow or freeze.
He could and he would do it!
Bravely, Robbie! A greater issue than you know of hangs on your journey. On! on! on!
The agitation of the landlord of the inn at Askham, who was an old Parliamentarian, on discovering the captain under whom he had served in the person of Ralph Ray, threatened of itself to betray him. With infinite perturbation he came and went, and set before Ralph and Sim such plain fare as his house could furnish after the more luxurious appetites of the Royalist visitors had been satisfied.
The room into which the travellers had been smuggled was a wing of the old house, open to the whitewashed rafters, and with the customary broad hearth. Armor hung about the walls—a sword here, a cutlass there, and over the rannel-tree a coat of chain steel. It was clearly the living-room of the landlord's family, and was jealously guarded from the more public part of the inn. But when the door was open into the passage that communicated with the rest of the house, the loud voices of the Royalists could be heard in laughter or dispute.
When the family vacated this room for the convenience of Ralph and Sim, they left behind at the fireside, sitting on a stool, a little boy of three or four, who was clearly the son of the landlord. Ralph sat down, and took the little fellow between his knees. The child had big blue eyes and thin curls of yellow hair. The baby lips answered to his smile, and the baby tongue prattled in his ear with the easy familiarity which children extend only to those natures that hold the talisman of child-love.
“And what is your name, my little man?” said Ralph.
“Darling,” answered the child, looking up frankly into Ralph's face.
“Good. And anything else?”
“Ees, Villie.”
“Do they not say you are like your mother, Willie?” said Ralph, brushing the fair curls from the boy's forehead. “Me mammy's darling,” said the little one, with innocent eyes and a pretty curve of the little mouth.
“Surely. And what will you be when you grow up, my sunny boy?”
“A man.”
“Ah! and a wit, eh? But what will you be at your work—a farmer?”
“Me be a soldier.” The little face grew bright at the prospect.
“Not that, sweetheart. If you have luck like most of us, perhaps you'll have enough fighting in your life without making it your trade to fight. But you don't understand me yet, Willie, darling?”
The little one's father entered the room at this moment, and the opening of the door brought the sound of jumbled voices from a distant apartment. The noisy party of Royalists apparently belonged to the number of those who hold that a man's manners in an inn may properly be the reverse of what they are expected to be at home. The louder such roysterers talk, the more they rap out oaths, the oftener they bellow for the waiters and slap them on the back, the better they think they are welcome in a house of public entertainment.
Amidst the tumult that came from a remote part of the inn a door was heard to open, and a voice was distinguishable above the rest calling lustily for the landlord.
“I must go off to them,” said that worthy. “They expect me to stand host as well as landlord, and sit with them at their drinking.”
When the door closed again, Sim lifted the boy on to his knee, and looked at him with eyes full of tenderness. The little fellow returned his gaze with a bewildered expression that seemed to ask a hundred silent questions of poor Sim's wrinkled cheeks and long, gray, straggling hair.
“I mind me when my own lass was no bigger nor this,” said Sim.
Ralph did not answer, but turned his head aside and listened.
“She was her mammy's darling, too, she was.”
Sim's voice was thick in his throat.
“And mine as well,” he added. “We used to say to her, laughing and teasing like, 'Who will ye marry, Rotie?'—we called her Rotie then,—'who will ye marry, Rotie, when ye grow up to be a big, big woman?' 'My father,' she would say, and throw her little arms about my neck and kiss me.”
Sim raised his hard fingers to his forehead to cover his eyes.
Ralph still sat silent, his head aside, looking into the fire.
“That's many and many a year agone; leastways, so it seems. My wife was living then. We were married in Gaskarth, but work was bad, and we packed up and went to live for a while in a great city, leagues and leagues to the south. And there my poor girl, Josephine—I called her Josie for short, and because it was more kind and close like—there my poor girl fell ill and died. Her face got paler day by day, but she kept a brave heart—she was just such like as Rotha that way—and she tended the house till the last, she did.”
A louder burst of merriment than usual came from the distant room. The fellows were singing a snatch together.
“Do you know, Rotha called her mother, Josie, too. I checked her, I did; but my poor girl she said, said she, 'Never mind; the little one has been hearkening to yourself.' You'd have cried, I think, if you'd been with us the day she died. I was sitting at work, and she called out that she felt faint; so I jumped up and held her in my arms and sent our little Rotha for a neighbor. But it was too late. My poor darling was gone in a minute, and when the wee thing came running back to us, with red cheeks, she looked frightened, and cried, 'Josie! Josie!' 'My poor Rotie, my poor little lost Rotie,' I said, 'our dear Josie, she is in heaven!' Then the little one cried, 'No, no, no'; and wept, and wept till—till—I wept with her.”
The door of the distant apartment must have been again thrown open, for a robustious fellow could be heard to sing a stave of a drinking song. The words came clearly in the silence that preceded a general outburst of chorus:—
“We buried her there,” continued Sim; “ay, we buried her in the town; and, with the crowds and the noise above her, there sleeps my brave Josie, and I shall see her face no more.”
Ralph rose up, and walked to the door by which he and Sim had entered from the yard of the inn. He opened it and stood for a moment on the threshold. The snow was falling in thick flakes. Already it covered the ground and lay heavy on the roofs of the outhouses and on the boughs of the leafless trees. A great calm was on the earth and in the air.
Robbie speed on! Lose not an hour now, for an hour lost may be a life's loss.
Ralph was turning back into the room, and bolting the outer door, when the landlord entered hurriedly from the passage. He was excited.
“Is it not—captain, tell me—is it not Wy'bern—your father's home—Wy'bern, on Bracken Mere?”
“It was my father's home—why?”
“Then the bloodhounds are on your trail!”
The perspiration was standing in beads on Brown's forehead.
“They talk of nothing to each other but of a game that's coming on at Wy'bern, and what they'll do for some one that they never name. If they'd but let wit who he is I'd—I'd know them.”
“Landlord, landlord!” cried a man whose uncertain footsteps could be heard in the passage,—“landlord, bring your two guests to us—bring them for a glass.”
The fellow was making his way to the room into which Ralph and Sim had been hustled. The landlord slid out of it through the smallest aperture between the door and its frame that could discharge a man of his sturdy physique. When the door closed behind him he could be heard to protest against any intention of disturbing his visitors. The two gentlemen had made a long journey, travelling two nights and two days at a stretch; so they'd gone off to bed and were snoring hard by this time; the landlord could stake his solemn honor upon it.
The tipsy Royalist seemed content with the apology for non-appearance, and returned to his companions bellowing,—