CHAPTER IX.

STRONG AS DEATH.

To have lost a hundred guineas after supper was bad enough, but to yield possession of the best horse he ever owned, and pursue Lord Bellinger into the West on foot, or by the tardy progress of a stage-waggon, was not to be thought of.

He never intended permanently to part with either, or John Garnet would have been more loth to risk his horse and to pay up his gold. The money must be recovered, and Katerfelto, as he now determined to call the animal, must be retained at all hazards. Pondering these matters deeply, the unlucky card-player only waited till the lights were out and the hotel became quiet, to put his plans in execution. An hour after midnight he had drawn off his boots, and satisfied himself that his lordship's door was securely fastened. He must find another opportunity of taking by violence that which he now despaired of gaining by artifice; and he stole out to the stable, there to saddle his horse and effect his escape. Though by no means satisfied with his night's work, he did not consider he had entirely wasted time or money. In the course of conversation, he had made himself acquainted with Lord Bellinger's intended movements, and could prepare for a bold stroke. "If I had been more fortunate with the cards," he thought, "I might have improved my acquaintance sufficiently to join them as a travelling-companion, perhaps accompanying my lord and my lady in their coach. It would have been easier then to effect my purpose, though I do _not_ think I could have found it in me to make love to her ladyship any more than to her waiting-maid. But I never held a card! That hundred guineas I paid down on the table I must have back again, as surely as I do not mean to part with my good grey horse. There is only one way. I must seize the warrants, and recover my money with the strong hand. Some unknown highwayman may bear the blame, and if I can get off, I will lose no time in gaining the West Country, and warning the honest squires of Devon and Somerset that they are in danger. Nothing venture, nothing have! I'm in it now, over shoes, over boots! Let me think. Highway robbery. It's an ugly word, and a hanging matter, but so is high treason; and if every neck that risks the noose must be stretched, why, as I heard those player fellows sing last winter--

"I wonder there ain't better companie Under Tyburn tree!"

Thus meditating, John Garnet, who had made himself acquainted with the geography of the hotel and its surroundings, proceeded noiselessly to the stable, not without anxious glances toward the East, where that forerunner of morning, the false dawn, was already visible.

A true horseman, he had identified himself so completely with his steed, and busied himself so earnestly about its wants, that Katerfelto neighed with pleasure to acknowledge the friendly presence as he approached its stall thus stealthily and in the dark. While he hurried to the horse's head, that he might silence this untoward greeting, a slim figure rose from below the manger and glided like a phantom to the door. John Garnet was no less prompt than resolute. In an instant he had seized this shadowy intruder by the throat. Outcry and escape were alike impossible; but his hand opened as if it grasped a red-hot iron, when a half-stifled voice, that he remembered only too well, murmured, "Hold!

do not hurt me. I am here to serve you. I will follow you to the end of the world."

"Waif!" he exclaimed, in an accent that, smothered as it was, denoted the very extremity of surprise; but even while he spoke, the figure slid through the dark stable out into the night.

For a few seconds John Garnet was persuaded that he must be dreaming--the meeting had been so sudden, so unexpected, and so soon over. When he realised the fact, his surprise amounted to dismay. That this impracticable gipsy-girl should have followed him, watched him, and made herself acquainted with his movements, seemed a fatal climax to the disasters of the night. For one disheartening minute he thought of riding back to London, returning Katerfelto to his former owner, and abandoning the whole project. Then he reflected, that under any circ.u.mstances he must make his escape before daylight, and so saddled his horse with what alacrity he might. Dawn was breaking as he led the animal out of the court-yard softly and at a walk, though its tramp was smothered in the snores of a stalwart ostler who slept in a loft above, for protection of the stables, and a red streak of sunrise bound the eastern horizon, to which he looked back on emerging from a belt of coppice that skirted the high-road a mile from the inn. Bold as he was, Katerfelto shied at an object moving in the brushwood, while a slim boyish figure sprang out, laid its hand on the horse's shoulder, and looked wistfully up in the rider's face.

Waif--for it was none other--attired as a country lad, and only the more beautiful for her disguise, seemed to antic.i.p.ate no less affectionate a greeting than she was prepared to offer. But already she knew every change of the face she had studied so fatally, and her own fell, while she marked the displeasure that settled on the brows and about the lips she loved.

"Speak to me," she murmured, "for pity's sake. I tracked you so patiently, and followed you so far!"

"Waif, why are you here?" he asked, while his heart smote him to think of the distance travelled by that slender form, those shapely delicate limbs.

"I could not bear you to go away," replied the girl, laying his hand to her heart and pressing her cheek against Katerfelto's warm shoulder. "I could not live without you; and for the matter of that, you could not live without _me_. If I had let you go by yourself, every mile you rode was a mile towards your grave."

They were pacing on together, Waif walking at his stirrup with a free untiring step, that the good horse must have fairly broken into a trot to leave behind. John Garnet looked at her with an astonishment in which there was no little interest and admiration.

"What mean you?" said he, "and how came the Doctor to let you go?"

"I never asked the Patron's leave," was her answer, "because, if he had forbidden me, I should have lain down to die. No; when you rode out of London, I was scarcely half an hour behind. The Patron must have been very angry when he found me gone. What do I care? I care for n.o.body but _you_. I knew where to get these clothes well enough. Do you like me in them? I might have had a horse from our people before I had done a day's journey, but I thought I could be nearer you on foot, and I've walked all the way. I'm not tired. I'd walk as far again only to hear your voice."

John Garnet was in utter perplexity. Such a phase in his affairs he had never contemplated, yet there seemed something so ridiculous in his position, bound on a political adventure thus attended, that he could not forbear a laugh.

"Nonsense, my la.s.s!" said he kindly enough. "You must go back; indeed you must. I won't have you come a step farther. You ought never to have followed me at all."

The tears were in Waif's dark eyes, and she raised them to his face with the pleading, reproachful look of a dog that you chide when he knows he is doing right.

"Not follow you!" she repeated. "How am I not to follow you, when you are going into danger? I can share it even if I cannot keep it off; and you tell me I must go back to London! You cannot mean it. I don't think you quite understand."

"That's the truest word you have said yet," was his answer; "but I do understand that, for your own sake, you ought not to be here now. Still, if you persist in accompanying 'a beggar on horseback,' you ought to have your share of the saddle, till we get down."

With these words, he took her by the hand, and braced his foot in the stirrup to afford a purchase for her ascent. In one bound she stood on his instep, light and buoyant as a bird; in another, she was seated before him with her arm round his neck, and her comely smiling face very near his own. It might have been the exertion, or the novelty of the position, or something he whispered, with his lips close to hers, that turned Waif crimson, and then deadly pale. She seemed more out of breath now, clinging to the rider, than she had been awhile ago walking beside his horse. Katerfelto, in obedience to his master's hand, broke into a canter; before she spoke another word, they were nearing a hamlet, of which the smoke was visible above the trees, when she made shift to ask in a trembling voice if she might not be set down, and taken up again when they had pa.s.sed through? For answer, John Garnet laughed, and increasing his pace, dashed along the street at a gallop. When he relapsed once more into a walk, the startled villagers had been left two miles behind.

Waif's nerves were of the firmest, and she had now recovered some of her self-possession, no easy matter for a woman who finds herself seated on the same horse with the man she loves. Her heart beat fast indeed, and the colour came and went in her cheek; but she could review the situation calmly, and resolved that now was the time to explain all she had done, all she intended to do in John Garnet's behalf. Even those women, whose station renders them slaves of custom, like other slaves, a.s.sume the wildest freedom when they have elected to throw off the yoke; but this gipsy-girl, an unsophisticated child of nature, had no scruples to vanquish, no social laws to break, found nothing to restrain the ardent expression of her feelings, save the innate delicacy of a proud and loving heart.

It was not, therefore, without such a blush and downward glance, as few men could have withstood, and none, perhaps, less firmly than John Garnet, that she announced her resolution.

"I shall hold by you to the last. I shall never desert you till you have performed your task in safety. It is right you should know it.

But--but--I cannot expect to accompany you like this. Only promise that you will not try to leave me behind, and never fear, but I can find my way from place to place, and be at hand when I am wanted, without shaming you by my presence. The gipsy-girl is proud to give her life for _you_, though you may blush to acknowledge one of my people as your friend!"

"Blush!" repeated John Garnet, and perhaps because their faces were so near together, the blushing seemed all on the other side. "I would never blush to own a true friend; and Waif, my pretty la.s.s, you have proved yourself more than a friend to-day. You say that I am in danger; I know well enough that I soon shall be; but my head is out of the halter as yet, and I see not how you could help if it were in!"

"Out of the halter!" said Waif. "How little you fear and how little you seem to care! Do you think I was not listening at the door when Abner Gale came to the Patron thirsting for the man's blood who took his brother's life? You know not our people, John Garnet, nor the gifts that nature bestows on us, instead of hearth and home, bed and board, gold and silver, houses and land. Do you believe the gipsy can forget a path once trod, a voice once heard, a face once seen? I was dancing in Taunton Fair, when Abner Gale, one of your priests, as you call them, tossed me a bit of silver, with a coa.r.s.e laugh and a brutal jest. The gipsy has no feelings to wound, no character to sustain, no honour to defend, but she has the instincts and the memory of a dog for friend or foe! Parson Gale had better have bitten his tongue through and kept his silver in his pocket. I know his home, his habits, his haunts, his vices, as I know my own ten fingers. I listened because I hated _him_.

But when I heard more, I listened on, because--because I loved _you_!"

It was wrong, no doubt, scandalous, shocking, if not entirely without excuse; but something in the proximity of those two young faces again made the girl blush deeper than before.

"There are no secrets too close for the Patron," continued Waif, "and as you have seen, people come from far and near to consult his art. This man's errand was to discover your hiding-place and hunt you down to death. He gave the Patron money--golden guineas--I heard them jingle. He was in earnest--bitter earnest, and so am I!"

"But what said the Patron?" asked her listener. "I thought he was my friend."

"The Patron is every man's friend," answered Waif, "who is willing to do him service, or to pay him gold. He promised to betray you when the moon was full, but that very night he sent you out of London on his own affairs, and I followed close, lest evil should befall, for I knew you were journeying to the West."

Laughing lightly, he asked if that was a dangerous quarter, and whether the Wise Men, who came there from the East, were ancestors of her own?

But Waif scorned to enter on the subject of genealogy with one who could neither believe nor understand her claims to a descent co-eval with the earliest history of man. Her tone was grave and almost stern, while she looked him steadfastly in the face, and proceeded with her warning.

"When a stag goes down to the water, where an enemy waits to take away his life, the voice of a child, or the wave of a woman's hand, is enough to turn him back into the moor. Abner Gale lives in the very country to which you are bound. I know the man, John Garnet, and I will save you from his vengeance, though I swing for it--there! Now will you let me come with you and help you as best I can?"

John Garnet did not hesitate long. True, he was unable to stifle certain scruples, while he reflected on the dangers into which this wilful girl was running of her own accord, on her loss of character, if indeed she had any character to lose, and the inconvenience he would himself experience in accounting for such a travelling companion, however well disguised; above all, on the advantage he was taking of a professed devotion, that exchanged, as he could not but admit, the pure gold of sincere affection for a baser metal, compounded of grat.i.tude, vanity, and self-indulgence. But men have seldom far to seek for an excuse when they would do that which is pleasant and convenient rather than right; so John Garnet persuaded himself that to make this beautiful girl an a.s.sistant of his schemes, and comrade in his dangers, was an act of self-denial and loyalty vouching for his fealty to the exile whom he called his lawful king.

"Agreed!" said he; "and, now, Waif, if you are really to help me, I must tell you my plans."

He never forgot this ride through the summer's afternoon. The yellow light that glimmered in copse and dingle. The glare on the white road they travelled. The distant lake that gleamed like a sheet of silver--the brook at his feet, that brawled and gurgled and broke into bubbles of gold. The bloom of wild flowers, the song of birds, the murmur of the breeze, the lowing of kine, the deep rich meadows, the stretching uplands, and, over all, that sunny haze which veiled without hiding the distance, and added its crowning grace to the beauties of a landscape that became fairer and fairer, the further he journeyed towards the West.

Katerfelto paced proudly on, while John Garnet poured in a willing ear the details of his journey, and the manner in which he proposed to turn the tables on an adversary who had despoiled him of his money, and could lay claim to his horse. It was difficult to make her understand how the stake could have been lost.

"For," said Waif, "the Patron bids the cards come out just as he likes.

It seems so easy, if a man has only the use of eyes and hands! This lord must be very clever with his fingers, cleverer even than _you_!"

"It's not all cleverness," he answered, impatiently. "There's such a thing as luck, and I never held a card all night."

Waif stared and made a motion with her slender fingers, the import of which it was impossible to misunderstand.

"But that would have been dishonourable," protested John Garnet.

"Dishonourable!" repeated Waif. "Why? When you sit down, you do not mean to be beat. It is only a trial of skill, like a race or a wrestling-match. Let the best man win. Why is it dishonourable?"

Despairing to explain to this untutored mind the code of fair-play as practised amongst so-called men of honour, John Garnet proceeded to discuss the means by which, in a few hours, he hoped to equalise the chances of Fortune, and reimburse himself for his previous losses. Of his scheme Waif greatly approved, holding, nevertheless, to her first opinion, that it would have been wiser to win by fraud than to lose by ill-luck, but promising her hearty a.s.sistance in all parts of the plan he proposed to carry out.

Thus conversing, they arrived at the outskirts of a country town; and here, before John Garnet could suggest that he should alight and lead the horse on foot, thus to avoid the remarks that might be provoked by its double burden, Waif glided like water from the saddle, slipped through a tangled hedge by the way-side, and disappeared. In vain, standing high in his stirrups, he peeped and peered over the obstacle; in vain he galloped to the gate, and searched and traversed the whole meadow, calling her loudly by name. The girl had vanished; and riding thoughtfully into the town, her late companion, for the second time since daybreak, wondered whether he was under the spell of some unholy witchcraft, or was really awake and in his right mind.