The spark had caught. That strange enthusiasm common to all votaries of the chase brightened John Garnet's eye, while he continued the other's narrative of an imaginary stag hunt.

"Then, with a crash of broken twigs and leafy branches, up he starts from a brake of deep green hazels,--stares about him for half a minute, time enough to count his points, and look him over--turns his head from side to side, displaying his mighty neck and n.o.ble width of beam, lays his antlers back, and leaves the wood at a springing trot, too proud to hurry himself, and deliberating calmly where he shall go next. Presently we lose sight of him, to emerge a mile off on the open moor. When he treads heather he breaks into a gallop, and speeds away like an arrow from a bow. You have moved him fairly now. Take up your tufters and let us lay on the pack."

"Right you are!" exclaimed Rube, holding his breath in sheer excitement.

"You've been there before, I'll wager a gallon!"

"Talk of music and the organ in Exeter Cathedral!" proceeded John Garnet, "thirty couple of such voices as these would silence a battery of cannon. They spread like a lady's fan; they swarm like a hive of bees. Soon they settle into their places and stream across the moor, like horses in stride and speed, like lions in strength and energy, and fierce desire for blood. Now's your time, old man. You sit down in your saddle and say to yourself, there is nothing on earth worth living for compared to such moments as these."

"_My_ work is over when you come to that," said Rube, adding respectfully, "You're a true sportsman, sir. If I do know how to harbour a stag, you do know how to hunt him, I'll warrant. Yet I never saw you out with us on the moor here, as I can call to mind."

"Do you think there is no hunting but in the West?" replied John Garnet.

"We have red deer in my country, and hounds that can set them up to bay.

Horses, too, and men who dare ride them as straight as a bird of the air can fly. There's many a horn wound, and many a pair of spurs going from morning till night, all the season through, in the canny North."

"Like enough!" answered Rube. "But I'll always maintain that the moor is the moor. When your honour has once forded Badgeworthy water, you'll never want to follow hounds in any other country again."

"And that shall be before I am many days older," replied John Garnet, reflecting what an agreeable addition to the amus.e.m.e.nts of his retirement would be this favourite pursuit; and remembering also, no doubt, that Mistress Carew, on the wonderful white pony that fed in the orchard, was a keen votary of the chase. "Do _you_ find a good stag, and, unless we get into a bog again, my grey horse and I will try to see him killed."

"I'll do my best," said Rube; and with a clumsy obeisance, turned back towards the moor, looking after John Garnet's figure as it disappeared amongst the giant stems of Horner Wood, with a puzzled expression on his quaint old face. This frank, well-spoken stranger was a riddle he could not read; "a slot," as he would have expressed it, that left him "at fault." The man might be a robber and an outlaw; but at any rate he rode to admiration, was cordial, open-handed, and a sportsman to the back-bone.

CHAPTER XVII.

"LISTEN AND LEARN IT."

"And you never told me your life was in danger, never said that a careless word might ruin both of us at a blow. Dear heart, surely you might have trusted _me_."

It was Nelly Carew's voice, and her brow was pressed to John Garnet's shoulder, while she spoke. The red-cheeked apples hanging overhead in her grandfather's orchard had ripened less quickly under a hot harvest sun, than the love that a few short days brought to maturity in the maiden's heart. She could not believe that a month ago she had never so much as heard of the man whose presence now seemed a condition of existence, like the very air she breathed. Could she be the same Nelly Carew, whose whole being was once engrossed in grandfather's posset and the incubations of the speckled hen. Or was it all a dream. If a dream, she only prayed she might never wake again.

"Why should I have told you?" he asked. "It could but make you anxious and unhappy, dearest; we have surely enough of difficulty and vexation as it is. Besides," he added, in a higher tone, "how was I to know, Nelly, that you liked me well enough to care?"

There came a very kind look in the blue eyes--"Didn't you guess?" she whispered, softly. "Didn't you think it very strange of me, that day, when I gave you the posy out of the hedge?"

There is a pleasant fiction amongst lovers, that the tender pa.s.sages to which they constantly refer, must have taken place in the remote past.

Nelly spoke of _that_ day as if the time since elapsed was to be counted by years, instead of hours.

"I thought you the dearest, and the best, and the loveliest girl on earth!" was the appropriate reply; "and now I could almost find it in my heart to wish we had never met. For _your_ sake, Nelly, not for mine--not for mine."

They were the old conventional words which have probably been the prelude to every rupture of attachments since men grew weary and women false; yet it was impossible to look in John Garnet's face, or listen to the tone of his voice, and doubt that this was the outcry of an unselfish heart, so loving, that it longed for the happiness of another, rather than its own.

Nelly's eyes filled with tears. "I care for you," she said--"I care for you; that's enough! If you were to go to prison, I should go with you.

If you were to die, dear heart, I should die too."

The girl spoke truth. Who shall account for these sudden overmastering pa.s.sions, that take possession of humanity to defy all considerations of self-esteem, self-preservation, probability, fitness, and, especially, common sense? A man pa.s.ses a shape in the street, catches the glance of an eye at a window, the turn of an ear in a playhouse, and straightway, as in the taking of an epidemic, his whole system becomes impregnated with a strange and subtle poison, for which there is no antidote, and but one remedy. The disease must run its course. In a few days the fever is at its height, the delirium paramount, liver deranged, appet.i.te impaired, brain seriously affected, and the patient, to all intents and purposes, raving mad. He is haunted by delusions; an inevitable figure is always dancing before his eyes; he forgets his business and friends, his nearest and dearest; neglects his mother, sisters, aunts, cousins, and in some aggravated cases, even his wife. His sleep is broken, his eye wild, his speech incoherent. His fellows shun him like a leper, and he rejoices in this enforced isolation. He meets with no encouragement and little sympathy. Fresh const.i.tutions, as yet unimpaired, and old battered patients who have recovered from the disease, shrug their shoulders and say, "Poor devil! he's in love;" but these observers entertain for him less of pity than contempt. The calamity is accepted as a dispensation, and n.o.body thinks it worth while to offer a syllable of comfort or advice, because experience has shown that the illness must at last be cured by indulgence, or die a lingering death in disappointment.

A woman, too, is liable to the same disorder, contracted even more unreasonably, and with less apparent cause. Her symptoms, if not so obtrusive, or troublesome to others, are none the less dangerous to herself. In some cases, happily but rare, they prove incurable. It is of _men_ that the poet says: "They have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love."

Nelly Carew, whose life had hitherto flowed on in a calm unruffled stream, little thought the gentle, scarce perceptible pleasure she experienced in a stranger's society, on the memorable evening when she addressed him for the first time, to thank him for his courtesy, while he helped her grandfather home, must soon grow into a hunger of the heart, that nothing but absolute reciprocity could appease. The second time she saw him, she feared the third time, she admitted the fourth, she gloried in her enslavement. They had known each other barely a week, when Nelly discovered and confessed that henceforth, if life was to be pa.s.sed apart from John Garnet, she would rather elect to die. He, too, surrendered at discretion, or rather without discretion, so soon as the blue eyes opened fire. Wilfully blind to his ruined prospects and his false position, he abandoned himself to the happiness of the hour, forgetting the past, ignoring the future--Waif, Katerfelto, Lord Bellinger, robbery, high treason, and Tyburn-hill, while he held Nelly Carew's hand, and looked lovingly in her delicate face under the apple-trees by Porlock Bay.

"I need not go to prison, and I need not die," he answered, lightly.

"This is a secure hiding-place enough. I should like to stay here for the rest of my life."

"It must be very dull!" observed Nelly, plaiting the hem of her ap.r.o.n.

"I wonder how long it would take for you to weary of us all?"

There could be but one answer to such an accusation, and he was ready with it before she could explain.

"Weary!" he repeated, "weary of Porlock! weary of _you_, Nelly, from whom I never mean to part! How can you say such things. You know you did not mean it!" And again Nelly's disclaimer was stifled on her lips.

"Besides," he added, gaily, "What can a man want to make him happy more than I have here? The sweetest girl in the world to walk with, and the best horse in England to ride. I gave him a ten-mile stretch on the moor this morning, while you were fast asleep and dreaming. _Were_ you dreaming, Nelly?"

"Never mind my dreams," she answered, blushing. "If I _did_ dream of somebody, I'm not going to say so. Tell me about your ride."

"I met a strange old man," he continued, "so weird-looking, that in the North we should have thought him something uncanny, a Brownie, at least, or a wandering spirit of the moor. Not that he was a jack-o'-lanthorn nor will-o'-the-wisp, for he showed me the way out, instead of luring me _into_ a bog, or I should have been there now."

"You must never try to cross our moors without _me_," said Nelly, gravely, "or somebody who knows them well, to take care of you."

"Will you take care of me?" and "never mind, that is not the question now," were two necessary interpolations before John Garnet could proceed.

"The man knew his ground, every inch of it," he continued, "and offered to put me in the right way for home. His pony, he said, was hobbled at the head of the coombe, but he seemed to think very little of walking ten miles out of his road, and he looked between seventy and eighty."

"It must have been Red Rube!" exclaimed Nelly, joyfully. "Did he say there were deer in Horner Woods? Oh! how I long for a gallop over the moor after a stag, and--with you!"

John Garnet pondered. There would be little risk, he thought, in joining these West-country gentlemen in the hunting-field. Most of them were of his own way of thinking in politics, and for many, his ready audacity had preserved, at least temporarily, both life and lands. Even if recognised, it was unlikely he would be denounced; and then, the temptation! To ride Katerfelto far ahead of meaner steeds from ridge to ridge and coombe to coombe, sweeping over mountain and moor as though on the wings of an eagle, to hover at last alone in his glory above the dying deer, while a burst of music from the good hounds pealing louder than its roar, announced in a crash of triumph that here, under the deafening waterfall, they had set him up to bay!

Yes, he would have a ride, he resolved, in pursuit of the red deer, at any risk and at any cost!

"Who talked about dreaming?" she said, "and who is dreaming now? Where have your thoughts flown to all in a minute? They are miles and miles from Porlock. I can see it in your face."

She had already arrived at the stage of jealousy--jealousy, that was fain to be mistress of his thoughts, no less than of his words, deeds, looks, and actions. Truly, for Nelly, the pleasantest part of the whole delusion was even now at an end. To be on the brink is delightful, but to fall in love is more than uncomfortable; it is a process akin to pain. The fire looks bright and cheerful enough, but wisdom warms its hands thereat, while folly burns its fingers to the bone.

"I was thinking how comely you must look on the white pony with your hair blown about by the Exmoor breezes," said he; and Nelly seemed so pleased with his answer, that the rest of their conversation was carried on in whispers, too low to be overheard even by the "little bird on the green tree," but of which the purport may be gathered from a final sentence delivered by John Garnet in a louder tone, as of a man who resolves to carry his point in defiance of all obstacles.

"Then I may come up and speak to your grandfather this afternoon?"

She acquiesced with a timid little nod and a bright blush, that she stooped her head to hide, retiring with swift and noiseless steps towards her home.

But whatever pa.s.sages of folly between these young people may have escaped notice from the "little bird on the green tree," whose own love-songs must seem to it so much more rational than "what he is saying, what answereth she," there crouched behind the hedge of the orchard one whose dark eye and tawny ear missed not the lowest whisper, the lightest gesture--whose tameless heart quivered and throbbed with every syllable, every caress, as at the stroke of a knife. If women are all jealous, even in the silks and satins and conventional fetters of civilized life, what must be the jealousy of a savage nature unreclaimed by education, untamed by principle, untaught by the selfishness that is so essential a const.i.tuent of respectability and good sense? It is possessed by a devil, who tears and rends it, refusing to be cast out.

Waif, or Thyra, as she was called by her own people, had journeyed with them into the West-country nothing loth, for she knew they were following in the track of the man she loved. Restored to her tribe after an absence of many years, her familiarity with the habits of the Gorgios rendered her an exceedingly valuable acquisition. She had the knack of _dukkering_, or telling fortunes, with a tact that brought in handfuls of silver, and many a "_balanser_" in red gold; therefore she came and went unquestioned in the tents; could be absent at all hours, and for as long as she pleased. Nor, so soon as she found herself within reach of John Garnet's retreat, was she slow to take advantage of her liberty.

A dozen miles afoot, across the moorland heather and along the sweet-scented Somersetshire lanes, was an easy journey to Waif's supple frame and light untiring tread. The honest carriers, leading their string of pack-horses, looked after her in open-mouthed admiration, with blessings, homely but sincere, on her strange swarthy beauty, so well set off by the short scarlet cloak and the gold in her raven hair. A house-wife possessing the old faith would cross herself perhaps, or her gossip, a Primitive Methodist, would mutter a charm against witchcraft as the dark girl pa.s.sed; but the country-folk generally, though regarding her people with little favour, were not proof against Waif's flashing eyes and flattering tongue, while she returned their "good-morrow" and promised them good luck. One stout farmer, riding a half-broken colt, insisted on stopping to have his fortune told, crossing his broad palm with a silver shilling, and demanding in return a shilling's worth of her craft. "Three groats, uncle," said Waif, looking up in his jolly face with a roguish leer, while the colt fidgetted, and the rider, half pleased, half ashamed, hid his confusion in a "Woa! drat ye, stan' still!" and a sheepish laugh.

"Three is a lucky number, good gentleman.

"'Three silver groats, Three women's lives, Three cows, three calves, Three scolding wives.