A Gentleman Player Part 11

"All's one for that," said Hal, curtly. "But, certes, as far as a matchless face and a voice of music are angelical, I speak as aptly when I name this Mistress Anne an angel of a woman! It went against me to leave her in the road thus, in a huddle of bleeding servants and runaway horses."

"Tis a huddle that will block the way for Roger Barnet a while," put in Captain Bottle.

"Doubtless he and his men have ridden up to her by now," replied Marryott. "I'd fain see what is occurring betwixt them." Then lapsing into silence. Hal and his two attendants rode on, pa.s.sing through slumbering Stevenage, and continuing uninterruptedly northward.

Barnet's party had indeed come up to Mistress Hazlehurst's, and the scene now occurring between them was one destined to have a strange conclusion.

Anne's followers,--raw serving men without the skill or decision to have used rightly their numerical superiority over the three fugitives,--all were more or less hurt, except two,--the slight one who had personally s.h.i.+elded her, and the lantern-bearer, who had been taken out of the fray by the intractability of his horse. Not only was her escort useless for any immediate pursuit of the supposed Sir Valentine, but the condition of its members required of her, as their mistress and leader, an instant looking to. The necessity of this forbade her own mad impulse to ride unaided after the man who had escaped her, and whom she was the more pa.s.sionately enraged against because of his victory over her and of his treatment of her servants. Nothing could have been more vexatious than the situation into which she had been brought; and she was bitterly chafing at her defeat, while forcing herself to consider steps for the proper care of her injured servants, when Barnet's troop came clattering up the road.

Mistress Hazlehurst's horses, except the runaway, had now been got under command; some of her men, merely bruised in body or head, stood holding them; others, worse hurt, lay groaning at the roadside, whither she had ordered their comrades to drag them. Anne herself sat her horse in the middle of the road, the little fellow, still mounted, at her left hand.

Such was the group that caused Barnet and his men to pull up their horses to an abrupt halt. Peering forward, with eyes now habituated to the darkness, the royal pursuivant swiftly inspected the figures before him, perceived that Sir Valentine and his two attendants were not of them, wondered what a woman was doing at the head of such a party, dismissed that question as none of his business, and called out:

"Madam, a gentleman hath pa.s.sed you, with two men. Did he keep the road to Stevenage, or turn out yonder?"

"Sir Valentine Fleetwood, mean you?" asked Anne, with sudden eagerness.

"The same. Way to pa.s.s, please you. And answer."

Roger Barnet was a man of middle height; bodily, of a good thickness and great solidity; a man with a bold, square face, a frown, cold eyes, a short black beard; a keeper of his own counsel, a man of the fewest possible words, and those gruffly spoken. Anne, because her mind was working upon other matter, took no offence at his sharp, discourteous, mandatory style of addressing her. Without heeding his demand for way, she said:

"Sir Valentine hath indeed pa.s.sed! See how he dealt with my servants when I tried to stay him! Are you magistrate's men?"

"I am a messenger of the queen," said Barnet, deigning an answer because, on looking more closely at her horses, a certain idea had come to him.

"In pursuit of Sir Valentine?" she asked.

"With a warrant for his apprehension," was the reply.

"What! For my brother's death? Hath her Majesty heard--"

"For high treason; and if these be your horses, in the queen's name--"

But Mistress Hazlehurst cut short his speech, in turn.

"High treason!" she cried, with jubilation; and this thought flashed through her mind: that if taken for high treason, her enemy, a Catholic of long residence in France, was a doomed man; whereas a judicial investigation of his quarrel with her brother might absolve Sir Valentine from guilt or blame. True, the state's revenge for an offence against itself would not, as such, be her revenge for an offence against her family, and would not in itself afford her the triumph she craved; but Sir Valentine was in a way to escape the State's revenge; she might be an instrument to effect his capture; in being that, she would find her own revenge. She could then truly say to her enemy, "But for me you might be free; of my work, done in retaliation for killing my brother, shall come your death; and so our blood, as much as the crown, is avenged." All this, never expressed in detail, but conceived in entirety during the time of a breath, was in her mind as she went on:

"G.o.d's light, he shall be caught, then! He went toward Stevenage. I will ride with you!"

"Nay, madam, there are enough of us. But your horses are fresher than ours. I take some of yours, in the queen's name, and leave mine in your charge." And he forthwith dismounted, ordering his men to do likewise.

But ere he made another movement, his hand happening to seek his pouch, he uttered an oath, and exclaimed:

"The queen's letters! There's delay! They must be delivered to-night.

Madam, know you where Sir William Crashaw's house is? And Mr. Richard Brewby's?"

"Both are down the first road to the right."

"Then down the first road to the right I must go, and let Sir Valentine Fleetwood gain time while I am about it. Which is your best horse, mistress? And one of your men shall guide me to those gentlemen's houses." And, resigning his horse to a follower, he strode into the midst of the Hazlehurst group.

"But why lose this time, sir?" said Anne. "Let my man himself bear these letters."

"When I am charged with letters," replied Roger Barnet, "they pa.s.s not from me save into the hands for which they are intended. I shall carry these letters, and catch this traitor. By your leave, I take this horse--and this--and this. Get off, fellow! Hudsdon, bring my saddle, and saddle me this beast. Change horses, the rest of you."

"But will you not send men after this traitor, while you bear the letters?" queried Anne, making no protest against the pressing of her horses into the queen's service,--a procedure in which no attempt was made to include the horse she herself was on.

Barnet gave a grunt of laughter, to which he added the words, "My men go with me!" Perhaps he dared not trust his men out of his sight, perhaps he wished no one but himself to have the credit of taking the fugitive, perhaps he needed the protection of his complete force against possible attack.

"But, man," cried Anne, sharply, "you will lose track of Sir Valentine!

You will take two hours, carrying those letters!"

"Why, mistress," replied Barnet, as the change of horses from one party to the other went rapidly on, "will not people in farmhouses and villages hear his three horses pa.s.s?" Though he a.s.sumed a voice of confidence, there was yet in it a tone betraying that he shared her fears.

"He ought to be followed while he is yet scarce out of hearing," said Anne, "and overtaken, and hindered one way or another till you catch up."

Barnet cast a gloomy look at her, as if pained at the mention of a course so excellent, but in the present case so impossible.

"My horse is the best in the county," she went on. "I can catch him,--hang me if I cannot! I can delay him, too, if there be any way under heaven to do so! d.i.c.kon, look to thy wounded fellows! See them taken home, and show this gentleman the way to Sir William Crashaw's and Mr. Brewby's. Come, Francis!"--this to the small attendant who kept always near her--"G.o.d be praised, you are well-mounted, too!" And she turned her horse's head toward Stevenage.

"But, Mistress Anne," cried d.i.c.kon, in dismay, "you will be robbed--killed! Ride not without company!"

"Let go, d.i.c.kon, and do as I bid! I shall ride so fast, the fiend himself cannot catch me, till I fall in with that traitor; and then I shall have him and his men for company till this officer come up to him.

Master Messenger, for mine own reasons I promise to impede Sir Valentine; to be a burden, a weight, and a chain upon him, holding him back by all means I can devise, till you bear your letters and o'ertake him. d.i.c.kon, heed my orders! Follow me. Francis! Ods-daggers, must I be a milksop, and afraid o' nights, because I wasn't born to wear hose instead of petticoats?" And having by this time got her horse clear of the group in the road, she made off toward Stevenage, followed by her mounted page. Francis.

"It may turn out well for us that Sir Valentine Fleetwood happened to kill her brother," was the only comment of Roger Barnet, as he mounted the horse his man Hudsdon had newly saddled. He had seen much and many, in his time, and was not surprised at anything, especially if it bore the shape of a woman.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FIRST DAY OF THE FLIGHT.

"That wench is stark mad, or wonderful froward."--_The Taming of the Shrew._

The object of this double chase, Master Marryott, rode on with his two men, through the night, beyond Stevenage, at what pace it seemed best to maintain. The slowness, incredible to a bicyclist or horseman who to-day follows the same route, was all the greater for the darkness; but slowness had good cause without darkness. English horse-breeding had not yet shown or sought great results in speed. An Elizabethan steed would make a strange showing on a twentieth century race-track; for the special product of those days was neither horses nor machines, but men.

And such as the horses were, what were the roads they had to traverse!

When a horse put his foot down, the chances were that it would land in a deep rut, or slide crunching down the hardened ridge at the side thereof, or find lodgment in a soggy puddle, or sink deep into soft earth, or fall, like certain of the Scriptural seed, upon stony places.

It is no wonder, then, that on a certain occasion, when Queen Elizabeth was particularly impatient for a swift answer to a letter she caused sent to the keepers of Mary Stuart, the messenger's time from London to Fotheringay and back was at the rate of less than sixty miles a day. As for travel upon wheels, an example thereof will occur later in this narrative. But there was in those days one compensatory circ.u.mstance to fugitives flying with a rapidity then thought the greatest attainable: if they could not fly any faster, neither could their pursuers.

The night journey of our three riders continued in silence. As no sound of other horses now came from behind or from anywhere else, and as the objects pa.s.sed in the darkness were but as indistinct figures in thick ink against a ground of watered ink. Hal's senses naturally turned inward, and mainly upon what was then foremost in the landscape of his mind. This was the face of Mistress Anne Hazlehurst; and the more he gazed upon the image thereof, the more he sighed at having to increase the distance between himself and the reality. His reluctance to going from the neighborhood of her was none the less for the matter-of-fact promptness with which he did go therefrom. The face was no less a magnet to him for that he so readily and steadily resisted its drawing powers.

Those drawing powers would, of course, by the very nature of magnets, decrease as he went farther from their source; but as yet they were marvellously strong. Such is the charm exerted upon impressionable youth by a pair of puzzling eyes, a mysterious expression, a piquant contour, allied to beauty. All the effect of his first sight of that face was revived, and eked to greater magnitude by his strange confrontation with her, proud and wrathful in the poor lantern rays that fell intermittently and s.h.i.+ftingly upon her in the dark road.

He wondered what would be her subsequent proceedings that night; tried to form a mental panorama of her conduct regarding her wounded servants; of her actions now that she saw her design upset, the tenor of her life necessarily affected by this new catastrophe to her household. He pitied her, as he thought of the confused and difficult situation into which she had been so suddenly plunged. And then he came to consider what must be her feelings toward himself. Looking upon him as her brother's slayer, she must view him with both hate and horror. His violent treatment of her servants would augment the former feeling to a very madness of impotent wrath.

Yet it was not Hal Marryott that she hated,--it was the make-believe Sir Valentine Fleetwood; not the player, but the part he played. Still, a dislike of a character a.s.sumed by an actor often refuses to separate the actor from the character; moreover, she must necessarily hate him, should she ever come to know him, for having a.s.sumed that part,--for being, indeed, the aider of her enemy against herself. Hal registered one determination: should the uncertain future--now of a most exceeding uncertainty in his case--bring him in his own person into the horizon of this woman, he would take care she should not know he had played this part. What had pa.s.sed between them should be blotted out; should be as if indeed Sir Valentine, not Hal Marryott, had escaped her in the road.

And Hal bethought himself of one gain that the encounter had yielded him: it had acquainted him with the name and place of the previously unknown beauty. Some day, when he should have gone through with all this business, he might indeed seek her.

When he should have gone through with this business? The uncertain future came back to his thoughts. What would be the outcome of this strange flight? So strange, that if he should tell his friends in London of it, they would laugh at the tale as at a wild fiction. Fool a trained man-hunter, a royal messenger grown old in catching people for the council, and fool him by such a device as Hal had employed! Act a part in real life, even for a moment, to the complete deception of the spectator intended to be duped! To be sure, d.i.c.k Tarleton had done so, when he pretended in an inn at Sandwich to be a seminary priest, in order to be arrested and have the officers pay his score and take him to London, where, being known, he was sure to be discharged. But d.i.c.k Tarleton was a great comedian, and had essayed to represent no certain identifiable seminary priest; whereas Master Marryott, who had dared impersonate a particular known man, was but a novice at acting.