The Tavern Knight Part 29

"The lad," returned Hogan, "must be himself a dupe. He can have had no suspicion of the message he carried. Let me read it to you; it will make all clear."

Hogan drew a taper nearer, and spreading the paper upon the table, he smoothed it out, and read:

HONOURED SIR,

The bearer of the present should, if he rides well, outstrip another messenger I have dispatched to you upon a fool's errand, with a letter addressed to one Mr. Lane at the sign of the Anchor. The bearer of that is none other than the notorious malignant, Sir Crispin Galliard, by whose hand your son was slain under your very eyes at Worcester, whose capture I know that you warmly desire and with whom I doubt not you will know how to deal. To us he has been a source of no little molestation; his liberty, in fact, is a perpetual menace to our lives. For some eighteen years this Galliard has believed dead a son that my cousin bore him. News of this son, whom I have just informed him lives--as indeed he does--is the bait wherewith I have lured him to your address. Forewarned by the present, I make no doubt you will prepare to receive him fittingly. But ere that justice he escaped at Worcester be meted out to him at Tyburn or on Tower Hill, I would have you give him that news touching his son which I am sending him to you to receive. Inform him, sir, that his son, Jocelyn Marleigh...

Hogan paused, and shot a furtive glance at Galliard. The knight was leaning forward now, his eyes strained, his forehead beaded with perspiration, and his breathing heavy.

"Read on," he begged hoa.r.s.ely.

His son, Jocelyn Marleigh, is the bearer of this letter, the man whom he has injured and who detests him, the youth with whom he has, by a curious chance, been in much close a.s.sociation, and whom he has known as Kenneth Stewart.

"G.o.d!" gasped Crispin. Then with sudden vigour, "Oh, 'tis a lie," he cried, "a fresh invention of that lying brain to torture me."

Hogan held up his hand.

"There is a little more," he said, and continued:

Should he doubt this, bid him look closely into the lad's face, and ask him, after he has scrutinized it, what image it evokes. Should he still doubt thereafter, thinking the likeness to which he has been singularly blind to be no more than accidental, bid them strip the lad's right foot. It bears a mark that I think should convince him. For the rest, honoured sir, I beg you to keep all information touching his parentage from the boy himself, wherein I have weighty ends to serve. Within a few days of your receipt of this letter, I look to have the honour of waiting upon you. In the meanwhile, honoured sir, believe that while I am, I am your obedient servant,

JOSEPH ASHBURN

Across the narrow table the two men's glances met--Hogan's full of concern and pity, Crispin's charged with amazement and horror. A little while they sat thus, then Crispin rose slowly to his feet, and with steps uncertain as a drunkard's he crossed to the window. He pushed it open, and let the icy wind upon his face and head, unconscious of its sting. Moments pa.s.sed, during which the knight went over the last few months of his turbulent life since his first meeting at Perth with Kenneth Stewart. He recalled how strangely and unaccountably he had been drawn to the boy when first he beheld him in the castle yard, and how, owing to a feeling for which he could not account, since the lad's character had little that might commend him to such a man as Crispin, he had contrived that Kenneth should serve in his company.

He recalled how at first--aye, and often afterwards even--he had sought to win the boy's affection, despite the fact that there was naught in the boy that he truly admired, and much that he despised. Was it possible that these his feelings were dictated by Nature to his unconscious mind? It must indeed be so, and the written words of Joseph Ashburn to Colonel Pride were true. Kenneth was indeed his son; the conviction was upon him. He conjured up the lad's face, and a cry of discovery escaped him. How blind he had been not to have seen before the likeness of Alice--his poor, butchered girl-wife of eighteen years ago.

How dull never before to have realized that that likeness it was had drawn him to the boy.

He was calm by now, and in his calm he sought to a.n.a.lyse his thoughts, and he was shocked to find that they were not joyous. He yearned--as he had yearned that night in Worcester--for the lad's affection, and yet, for all his yearning, he realized that with the conviction that Kenneth was his offspring came a dull sense of disappointment. He was not such a son as the rakeh.e.l.ly knight would have had him. Swiftly he put the thought from him. The craven hands that had reared the lad had warped his nature; he would guide it henceforth; he would straighten it out into a n.o.bler shape.

Then he smiled bitterly to himself. What manner of man was he to train a youth to loftiness and honour?--he, a debauched ruler with a nickname for which, had he any sense of shame, he would have blushed! Again he remembered the lad's disposition towards himself; but these, he thought, he hoped, he knew that he would now be able to overcome.

He closed the window, and turned to face his companion. He was himself again, and calm, for all that his face was haggard beyond its wont.

"Hogan, where is the boy?"

"I have detained him in the inn. Will you see him now?"

"At once, Hogan. I am convinced."

The Irishman crossed the chamber, and opening the door he called an order to the trooper waiting in the pa.s.sage.

Some minutes they waited, standing, with no word uttered between them.

At last steps sounded in the corridor, and a moment later Kenneth was rudely thrust into the room. Hogan signed to the trooper, who closed the door and withdrew.

As Kenneth entered, Crispin advanced a step and paused, his eyes devouring the lad and receiving in exchange a glance that was full of malevolence.

"I might have known, sir, that you were not far away," he exclaimed bitterly, forgetting for the moment how he had left Crispin behind him on the previous night. "I might have guessed that my detention was your work."

"Why so?" asked Crispin quietly, his eyes ever scanning the lad's face with a pathetic look.

"Because it is your way, I know not why, to work my ruin in all things.

Not satisfied with involving me in that business at Castle Marleigh, you must needs cross my path again when I am about to make amends, and so blight my last chance. My G.o.d, sir, am I never to be rid of you? What harm have I done you?"

A spasm of pain, like a ripple over water, crossed the knight's swart face.

"If you but consider, Kenneth," he said, speaking very quietly, "you must see the injustice of your words. Since when has Crispin Galliard served the Parliament, that Roundhead troopers should do his bidding as you suggest? And touching that business at Sheringham you are over-hard with me. It was a compact you made, and but for which, you forget that you had been carrion these three weeks."

"Would to Heaven that I had been," the boy burst out, "sooner than pay such a price for keeping my life!"

"As for my presence here," Crispin continued, leaving the outburst unheeded, "it has naught to do with your detention."

"You lie!"

Hogan caught his breath with a sharp hiss, and a dead silence followed.

That silence struck terror into Kenneth's heart. He encountered Crispin's eye bent upon him with a look he could not fathom, and much would he now have given to recall the two words that had burst from him in the heat of his rage. He bethought him of the unscrupulous, deadly character attributed to the man to whom he had addressed them, and in his coward's fancy he saw already payment demanded. Already he pictured himself lying cold and stark in the streets of Waltham with a sword-wound through his middle. His face went grey and his lips trembled.

Then Galliard spoke at last, and the mildness of his tone filled Kenneth with a new dread. In his experience of Crispin's ways he had come to look upon mildness as the man's most dangerous phase:

"You are mistaken," Crispin said. "I spoke the truth; it is a habit of mine--haply the only gentlemanly habit left me. I repeat, I have had naught to do with your detention. I arrived here half an hour ago, as the captain will inform you, and I was conducted hither by force, having been seized by his men, even as you were seized. No," he added, with a sigh, "it was not my hand that detained you; it was the hand of Fate."

Then suddenly changing his voice to a more vehement key, "Know you on what errand you rode to London?" he demanded. "To betray your father into the hands of his enemies; to deliver him up to the hangman."

Kenneth's eyes grew wide; his mouth fell open, and a frown of perplexity drew his brows together. Dully, uncomprehendingly he met Sir Crispin's sad gaze.

"My father," he gasped at last. "'Sdeath, sir, what is it you mean? My father has been dead these ten years. I scarce remember him."

Crispin's lips moved, but no word did he utter. Then with a sudden gesture of despair he turned to Hogan, who stood apart, a silent witness.

"My G.o.d, Hogan," he cried. "How shall I tell him?"

In answer to the appeal, the Irishman turned to Kenneth.

"You have been in error, sir, touching your parentage," quoth he bluntly. "Alan Stewart, of Bailienochy, was not your father."

Kenneth looked from one to the other of them.

"Sirs, is this a jest?" he cried, reddening. Then, remarking at length the solemnity of their countenances, he stopped short. Crispin came close up to him, and placed a hand upon his shoulder. The boy shrank visibly beneath the touch, and again an expression of pain crossed the poor ruffler's face.

"Do you recall, Kenneth," he said slowly, almost sorrowfully, "the story that I told you that night in Worcester, when we sat waiting for dawn and the hangman?"

The lad nodded vacantly.

"Do you remember the details? Do you remember I told you how, when I swooned beneath the stroke of Joseph Ashburn's sword, the last words I heard were those in which he bade his brother slit the throat of the babe in the cradle? You were, yourself, present yesternight at Castle Marleigh when Joseph Ashburn told me Gregory had been mercifully inclined; that my child had not died; that if I gave him his life he would restore him to me. You remember?"

Again Kenneth nodded. A vague, numbing fear was creeping round his heart, and his blood seemed chilled by it and stagnant. With fascinated eyes he watched the knight's face--drawn and haggard.

"It was a trap that Joseph Ashburn set for me. Yet he did not altogether lie. The child Gregory had indeed spared, and it seems from what I have learned within the last half-hour that he had entrusted his rearing to Alan Stewart, of Bailienochy, seeking afterwards--I take it--to wed him to his daughter, so that should the King come to his own again, they should have the protection of a Marleigh who had served his King."