In Kings' Byways Part 17

With eyes shut, with arms open to receive the thrust. But the man whom she had singled out--for one she had singled out--dropped his point with an oath, and dealt her a buffet with b.u.t.t and elbow that flung her aside unhurt. A second did the same, and a third, until, bandied from one to another, she fell against the wall, breathless and dizzy, but unhurt.

The column swept on; and she rose. She had escaped--by a miracle, as it seemed to her. But despair still held her, and the roar of a mine exploding not far off, the stunning report of which was followed by heartrending wails, drove her again on her fate. She had not far to look, for hard on the foot followed a troop of dragoons. The horses, excited by the fire and the explosion, were plunging in every direction; and even as the crazed woman's eyes alighted on them one fell and threw its rider. It seemed to her that she saw her doom; and, darting from the wall, she flung herself before them.

What was one woman on such a night, in such an inferno? The torrent of iron, remorseless, unchecked, thundered over her and drove on along the street. It seemed impossible that she should have escaped. Yet when some came to look to the fallen soldier--whose neck was broken--the woman beside him rose unhurt and without a scratch, and staggered to the wall. There she leaned one moment to recover her breath and shake off her giddiness, and a second to think; then with a new expression on her face, an expression between hope and fear, she took her way weakly along the street. The first turning on the right, the second on the left brought her unmolested--for the enemy were quelling the last resistance in the Square--to the front of the House on the Wall. She looked up eagerly and saw that the windows were dark; looked at the door, and by the light of the distant fire saw that it was closed.

Still she scarcely dared to hope that the thing was true; that thing which her miraculous escape had suggested to a mind almost unhinged. It took her more than a minute to mount the steps and push the heavy door open, and satisfy herself that in the outer room at least all was as she had left it. A spark of fire still glowed on the hearth; she groped her way to it, and blew it into a flame; and with shaking hands she lit a spill of wood and waved it above her head, then held it.

Yes, here all was as she had left it. But in the farther room--_the_ room? What would she find there? She stared at the door and dared not open it; then with a desperate hand tore it open, and stood on the threshold.

Yes, and here! Here, too, all was as she had left it. She waved the little brand above her head heedless of the sparks, waved it until it flamed high and cast a light into every corner. But the searcher's eyes sought only one thing, saw only one thing, and that was the mask of brickwork that blocked the great window.

It was untouched! It was untouched! She had hoped as much for the last five minutes; for everything, the closed door, the unchanged room had pointed to it. Yet now that she was a.s.sured of it, and knew for certain that she had not done the thing--that guilty as she had been in will, not one life lost that night lay at her door, not one outrage, she fell on her face and wept--wept, though it was the sweetest moment of her life, prayed though she sought nothing but to thank G.o.d--prayed and wept with childish cries of grat.i.tude, until the light at her side went out and left her in darkness, and through a rift in the masonry a single star peered in at her.

In Huymonde there was wailing enough that night; ruin and loss, and a broadcasting of lifelong sentences of penury. One fell to the Burgomaster's lot; and had she still aught against him--but she had not--the score was paid. And many prayed, and a few, when morning came, and showed their roofs still standing, gave thanks. But to this woman prostrate through the hours on the floor of the forsaken House on the Wall, all that night was one long prayer and thanksgiving. For she had pa.s.sed through the fire, the smell of the singeing was on her garments, and yet she was saved.

HUNT, THE OWLER

(1696)

Something more than two centuries ago--and just two years after Queen Mary's death--when William the Third had been eight years on the throne, and the pendulum of public sentiment, accelerated by the brusqueness of his manners and no longer r.e.t.a.r.ded by his consort's good nature, was swinging surely and steadily to the Stuart side, the discovery of a Jacobite plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate the King on his return from hunting set back the balance with a shock which endured to the end of his reign.

It was the King's habit to go on Sat.u.r.days in his coach to Richmond Park, returning to Kensington in the evening; and the scheme, laid bare, was to fall upon him in a narrow lane leading from the river to Turnham Green, where the miry nature of the ground rendered his progress slow.

For complicity in this plot nine persons, differing much in rank, from Sir John Fenwick, who had been Colonel of King Charles's Life Guards, to Keyes, a private in the Blues, suffered on the scaffold; and for a time all England rang with it. The informers, Porter and Goodman, were viewed with an abhorrence hardly less than that which the plot itself excited in honest circles; and in this odium a man shared in some small degree, who, though he had not been a party to the plot, had stooped, under the stress of confinement and the fear of death, to give some evidence.

This was James Hunt, the Owler, or smuggler, a name forgotten now, famous then. For years his house, in a lonely situation in the dreariest part of Romney Marsh, had been the favourite house of call for Jacobites bound for St. Germains or returning thence. At regular intervals, if wind and tide served, a packet-boat ran between it and the French coast, and between whiles the hiding-places in his rambling old house, which had been originally contrived to hold runlets of Nantz and bales of Lyons, lodged men whose faces were known in the Mall and St. James's, and whose t.i.tles were not less real because for the nonce they wore them, with their stars, in their pockets. Naturally, in the general break-up consequent on the discovery of the Turnham Green plot, these practices came to light, the lonely house in the marshes was entered, and Hunt was himself seized and conveyed to London under a strong guard.

There he lay in the Marshalsea until, by discovering the names of certain persons who had used his hiding-places, he was permitted to ransom his life.

When all was told he was of no further use to the Government. He was released, and one fine morning in September, '96, he walked out of his prison a morose and lonely man. Resolute and daring by nature, but accustomed to live in the open, with the sound of the lark in his ears, it was only in the solitude of his cell that he had fallen below himself. Now, under the open sky, he paid the penalty in a load of shame and remorse. His feet carried him to the Jacobite house of call in Maiden Lane, whither he had directed his nag to be sent; but on his arrival at the inn his eye told him that the place was changed. The ostler, who had been his slave, looked askance at him, the landlord, once his obedient servant, turned his back. He was no longer Mr. Hunt, of Romney, but Hunt the Approver, Hunt the Evidence. Flinging down a crown and a curse he rode desperately out of the yard, and made haste to leave London behind him.

But in the country it was little better. At inns on the Dover road, where he had swaggered in old days the hero of a transparent mystery, and only less admired than the famous Mr. Birkenhead, the Jacobite post, whom even the Tower failed to confine--at these his reception was now cold and formal; and presently the man's heart and hopes went forward and settled hungrily on the two things left to him in this changed world, his home in the marshes and his girl. His heart cried home! The slighting looks of men who would have succ.u.mbed to a t.i.the of his temptations, would not reach him there; there--he had a reason for believing it--he would still read love and welcome in his child's eyes.

He was so far from having a turn for sentiment that the gibbet at Dartford, though he had lain down and risen up for weeks under the shadow of the gallows, caused him no qualms as he pa.s.sed under it; nor the man who hung in chains upon it. But when he rode up to the tavern at the last stage short of Romney and saw Trot Eubank, the Romney apothecary, loitering before the house, he drove an oath through his closed teeth.

The man of drugs was too distant to hear it; nevertheless he smiled, and not pleasantly. The apothecary had red cheeks and a black wig, and a splayed face that promised heartiness. His small fishy eyes, however, with a cast in them that was next door to a squint, belied the promise.

He came up to Hunt's stirrup and gave him joy of his freedom very loudly. "And you will find all well at home," he continued. "All well and hearty."

Hunt thanked him coldly, watered his horse, and drank a cup of ale with the landlord; who looked at him pitifully, as at a man once admirable and now fallen. Then he climbed into his saddle again and started briskly. But he had not ridden a hundred paces before Eubank, on his old white mare, was at his side. "My way is your way," said he.

Hunt grunted, and wondered how long that had been so; for New Romney, where the apothecary lived, lay to the right. But he said nothing.

"They have quartered three soldiers on you," Eubank continued, squinting out of the corner of one eye to mark the effect of his words, "and an officer."

The smuggler checked his horse. "As if I had not done enough for them!"

he cried bitterly.

"Umph!" said the apothecary, drily, and with meaning. "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth! Eh, Mr. Hunt?"

He spoke below his breath, but Hunt caught the words and turned on him, his face blazing with rage. "You dirty tar-mixer!" he cried, flinging caution to the winds. "What do you mean? And how dare you ride out to meet me? If you have anything to say, say it, and begone."

"Softly, softly, Mr. Hunt," Eubank answered, his face a shade paler.

"You know what I mean. There was a name wanting in your evidence--in your deposition. A name lacking, d'ye take me?"

"A name?"

"Ay, Mr. Fayle's. And Mr. Fayle is missing, too. But I don't think," the apothecary continued cunningly, his eyes gazing far apart, "that he is in France. I think that he is nearer Romney. And that is why they have quartered three soldiers on you."

"You villain!" Hunt cried, his voice shaking with pa.s.sion. "This is your work." And he raised his heavy riding-whip, and made as if he would ride the other down. The two were alone on the marsh.

But quick as thought Eubank lugged a pistol from his holster and levelled it.

"Softly, Mr. Hunt," he said. "Softly! I warn you, if anything happens to me, it is known who is with me. Besides, I mean you no harm."

"And no good," said the smuggler, between his teeth. "What do you want?"

"What I have always wanted," the other answered. "Is there any harm in wanting a wife?" he added, a whine in his voice.

"Yes, when she does not want you," Hunt retorted.

"She will want me--when the other is out of the way," the apothecary answered sullenly.

"Out of the way?"

"Ay; in France, or--there!"--and the apothecary nodded towards the gibbet on Dymchurch Flat, which they were just approaching. "It is for her to choose," he added softly. "This side or that!"

"How?"

"If she takes me, Fayle may go hang, or cross the water, or as you please, so that he go far enough. But if she will have him----"

"Well?" Hunt said; for Eubank paused, squinting horribly.

"She will marry him there!" the apothecary answered, pointing to the gibbet.

"Ay?"

"I know that he is here," Eubank continued, his voice low, "and he cannot escape me. She has bubbled the soldiers; they do not know him.

And for aught I know he goes out and in, and no one is the wiser. And the game may be played as long as you please. But from to-day I am there."

"You!" Hunt cried.

"To be sure," Eubank answered, letting his ill-concealed triumph appear.

"At the farm. I am the officer. Ah, would you? Mr. Hunt, back! Back, or I fire."

The smuggler, on the impulse of the moment, had gone near to striking him down; in face of the pistol and common-sense he lowered his hand, cursed him, and bade him keep his distance for the cur he was; and so with the width of the track between them the two rode on, like dogs ill-coupled, Eubank keeping a squinting watch on Hunt's movements, Hunt with his face hard set, and a gleam of fear in his eyes.