"How will you gain by that? you can only leave me here.You cannot make me go to the Gubbings, if I do not choose."Amyas uttered sotto voce an anathema on Jesuits, Gubbings, and things in general.He was in a great hurry to get to Bideford, and he feared that this business would delay him, as it was, a day or two.He wanted to hang Parsons, he did not want to hang Eustace;and Eustace, he knew, was well aware of that latter fact, and played his game accordingly; but time ran on, and he had to answer sulkily enough:
"Well then; if you, Eustace, will go and give my message to your converts, I will promise to set Mr.Parsons free again before we come to Lydford town; and I advise you, if you have any regard for his life, to see that your eloquence be persuasive enough; for as sure as I am an Englishman, and he none, if the Gubbings attack us, the first bullet that I shall fire at them will have gone through his scoundrelly brains."Parsons still kicked.
"Very well, then, my merry men all.Tie this gentleman's hands behind his back, get the horses out, and we'll right away up into Dartmoor, find a good high tor, stand our ground there till morning, and then carry him into Okehampton to the nearest justice.
If he chooses to delay me in my journey, it is fair that I should make him pay for it."Whereon Parsons gave in, and being fast tied by his arm to Amyas's saddle, trudged alongside his horse for several weary miles, while Yeo walked by his side, like a friar by a condemned criminal; and in order to keep up his spirits, told him the woful end of Nicholas Saunders the Legate, and how he was found starved to death in a bog.
"And if you wish, sir, to follow in his blessed steps, which Iheartily hope you will do, you have only to go over that big cow-backed hill there on your right hand, and down again the other side to Crawmere pool, and there you'll find as pretty a bog to die in as ever Jesuit needed; and your ghost may sit there on a grass tummock, and tell your beads without any one asking for you till the day of judgment; and much good may it do you!"At which imagination Yeo was actually heard, for the first and last time in this history, to laugh most heartily.
His ho-ho's had scarcely died away when they saw shining under the moon the old tower of Lydford castle.
"Cast the fellow off now," said Amyas.
"Ay, ay, sir!" and Yeo and Simon Evans stopped behind, and did not come up for ten minutes after.
"What have you been about so long?"
"Why, sir," said Evans, "you see the man had a very fair pair of hose on, and a bran-new kersey doublet, very warm-lined; and so, thinking it a pity good clothes should be wasted on such noxious trade, we've just brought them along with us.""Spoiling the Egyptians," said Yeo as comment.
"And what have you done with the man?"
"Hove him over the bank, sir; he pitched into a big furze-bush, and for aught I know, there he'll bide.""You rascal, have you killed him?
"Never fear, sir," said Yeo, in his cool fashion."A Jesuit has as many lives as a cat, and, I believe, rides broomsticks post, like a witch.He would be at Lydford now before us, if his master Satan had any business for him there."Leaving on their left Lydford and its ill-omened castle (which, a century after, was one of the principal scenes of Judge Jeffreys's cruelty), Amyas and his party trudged on through the mire toward Okehampton till sunrise; and ere the vapors had lifted from the mountain tops, they were descending the long slopes from Sourton down, while Yestor and Amicombe slept steep and black beneath their misty pall; and roaring far below unseen, "Ockment leapt from crag and cloud Down her cataracts, laughing loud."The voice of the stream recalled these words to Amyas's mind.The nymph of Torridge had spoken them upon the day of his triumph.He recollected, too, his vexation on that day at not seeing Rose Salterne.Why, he had never seen her since.Never seen her now for six years and more! Of her ripened beauty he knew only by hearsay; she was still to him the lovely fifteen years' girl for whose sake he had smitten the Barnstaple draper over the quay.
What a chain of petty accidents had kept them from meeting, though so often within a mile of each other! "And what a lucky one!" said practical old Amyas to himself."If I had seen her as she is now, I might have loved her as Frank does--poor Frank! what will he say?
What does he say, for he must know it already? And what ought I to say--to do rather, for talking is no use on this side the grave, nor on the other either, I expect!" And then he asked himself whether his old oath meant nothing or something; whether it was a mere tavern frolic, or a sacred duty.And he held, the more that he looked at it, that it meant the latter.
But what could he do? He had nothing on earth but his sword, so he could not travel to find her.After all, she might not be gone far.Perhaps not gone at all.It might be a mistake, an exaggerated scandal.He would hope so.And yet it was evident that there had been some passages between her and Don Guzman.
Eustace's mysterious words about the promise at Lundy proved that.
The villain! He had felt all along that he was a villain; but just the one to win a woman's heart, too.Frank had been away--all the Brotherhood away.What a fool he had been, to turn the wolf loose into the sheepfold! And yet who would have dreamed of it?...
"At all events," said Amyas, trying to comfort himself, "I need not complain.I have lost nothing.I stood no more chance of her against Frank than I should have stood against the Don.So there is no use for me to cry about the matter." And he tried to hum a tune concerning the general frailty of women, but nevertheless, like Sir Hugh, felt that "he had a great disposition to cry."He never had expected to win her, and yet it seemed bitter to know that she was lost to him forever.It was not so easy for a heart of his make to toss away the image of a first love; and all the less easy because that image was stained and ruined.
"Curses on the man who had done that deed! I will yet have his heart's blood somehow, if I go round the world again to find him.
