The Watchers Part 5

"'Helen,' I cried, again. She paid no more heed to my prayers. 'What will you do? Where will you go?' I asked.

"'We shall go to London,' answered Cullen, 'where we shall do very well, and further to the best of our means Lieutenant Clutterbuck's advancement.'

"Humiliation and grief had overset my judgment or I should not have argued at this moment with Cullen Mayle. I flung out at him hotly, and like a boy.

"'When you are doing very well in London, Cullen Mayle, Lieutenant Clutterbuck will not be so far behind you.'

"'He will indeed be close upon my heels,' returned Cullen as pleasantly as possible, 'for most likely he will be carrying my valise.'

"With that he turned again to Helen, beckoned her to follow him, and strode towards the open door. She did follow him. Cullen was already in the doorway; in another second she would have crossed the threshold. But with a surprising agility Adam Mayle jumped down the stairs, ran across the hall, and caught the girl in his arms. She did not struggle to free herself, but she strained steadily towards Cullen. The old man's arms were strong, however.

"'Shut the door,' he cried, and I sprang forward and slammed it to.

"'Lock it! Bolt it!'

"Adam stood with his arms about the girl until the heavy bar swung down across the door and dropped into its socket with a clang. Now do you understand why I will not go down to Tresco? I can give you another reason if you are not content. When I spoke to Helen two days later, and taxed her with her pa.s.sion for Cullen,--would you believe it?--she was deeply pained and hurt. She would not have it said that she had so much as thought of following Cullen's fortunes. She outfaced me as though I had been telling her fairy tales, and not what my own eyes saw. No, indeed, I will not go down to Tresco! I am not the traveller who has ridden into your wood upon the Great West Road."

Lieutenant Clutterbuck took up his hat when he had finished his story,

"The girl, besides, is not worth a thought," said he.

"I am not thinking of her," said I. Of Lieutenant Clutterbuck, of myself, above all of d.i.c.k Parmiter, I was thinking, but not at all of Helen Mayle. I drew the map towards me. Clutterbuck stopped at the door, came back and again leaned over my shoulder.

"Has your traveller come out from that wood?" he asked.

"No," I answered.

"It is an allegory," said he. "The man who rides down on this business to the West will, in very truth, enter into a wood from which he will not get free."

CHAPTER V

THE ADVENTURE IN THE WOOD

A loud roll of drums beneath my windows, the inspiriting music of trumpets, the lively measured stamp of feet. The troops with General Amherst at their head were marching down St. James's Street on their way to embark for Canada, and the tune to which they marched sang in my head that day as I rode out of London. The beat of my horse's hoofs kept time to it, and at Brentford a girl singing in a garden of apple-trees threw me a s.n.a.t.c.h of a song to fit to it.

She sang, and I caught the words up as I rode past. The sparkle of summer was in the air, and an Indian summer, if you will, at my heart.

I slept that night at Hartley Row, and the next at Down House, and the third at a little inn some miles beyond Dorchester. A brook danced at the foot of the house, and sang me to sleep with the song I had heard at Brentford, and, as I lay in bed, I could see out of my window the starlight and the quiet fields white with a frost of dew and thickets of trees very black and still; and towards sunset upon the fourth day, I suddenly reined in my horse to one side and sat stone-still. To my left, the road ran straight and level for a long way, and nowhere upon it was there a living thing; on each side stretched fields and no one moved in them, and no house was visible. That way I had come, and I had remarked upon the loneliness. To my right, the road ran forward into a thick wood, and vanished beneath a roof of overhanging boughs.

It was the aspect of that wood which took my breath away, and it surprised me because it was familiar. There was a milestone which I recognised just where the first tree overhung the road; there was a white gate in the hedge some twenty paces this side of the milestone.

I knew that too. Just behind where I sat there should be three tall poplars ranged in a line like sentinels, the wood's outposts; I turned, and in the field behind me, the poplars reached up against the sky. I had no doubt they would be there, yet the sight of them fairly startled me. I had seen them--yes, but never in my life had I ridden along this road before. I had seen them only on the map in my lodging at St. James's Street.

The sun dropped down behind the trees, and the earth turned grey. I sat there in the saddle with I know not what superst.i.tious fancies upon me. I could not but remember that the traveller had ridden into the wood, and had not ridden out and down the open bank of gra.s.s upon the other side. "What if his horse has stumbled?" Clutterbuck had asked. "What if he is lying at the roadside under the trees?" I could see that picture very clearly, and at last, very clearly too, the rider's face. I looked backwards down the road with an instinctive hope that some other traveller might be riding my way in whose company I might go along. But the long level slip of white was empty. All the warmth seemed to have gone from the world with the dropping of the sun. A sad chill twilight crept over the lonely fields. A s.h.i.+ver caught and shook me; I gathered up the reins and rode slowly among the trees, where already it was night.

I rode at first in the centre of the highway, and found the clatter of my horse's hoofs a very companionable sound. But in a little the clatter seemed too loud, it was too clear a warning of my approach, it seemed to me in some way a provocation of danger. I drew to one side of the road where the leaves had drifted and made a carpet whereon I rode without noise. But now the silence seemed too eerie--I heard, and started at, the snapping of every twig. I strained my ears to catch the noise of creeping footfalls, and I was about to guide my horse back to the middle of the road, when I turned a corner suddenly, and saw in front of me in a s.p.a.ce where the forest receded and let the sky through, lights gleaming in a window.

I set spurs to the horse and galloped up to the door. The house was an inn; the landlord was already at the threshold, and in a very short while I was laughing at my fears over my supper in the parlour.

"Am I your only guest to-night?" I asked.

"There is one other, sir," returned the landlord as he served me, and as he spoke I heard a footstep in the pa.s.sage. The door was pushed open, and a young man politely bowed to me in the entrance.

"You have a very pretty piece of horseflesh, sir," said he, as he came into the room. "I took the liberty of looking it over a minute ago in the stables."

"It is not bad," said I. There was never a man in the world who did not relish praise of his horse, and I warmed to my new acquaintance.

"We are both, it seems, sleeping here to-night, and likely enough we are travelling the same road to-morrow."

The young man shook his head.

"I could wish indeed," said he, "that we might be fellow-travellers, but though it may well be we follow the same road, we do not, alas, travel in the same way," and he showed me his boots which were thickly covered with dust. "My horse fell some half-a-dozen miles from here and snapped a leg. I must needs walk to-morrow so far as where I trust to procure another--that is to say," he continued, "if I do not have to keep my bed, for I have taken a devilish chill this evening," and drawing up his chair to the empty fireplace, he crouched over an imaginary fire and s.h.i.+vered.

Now since he sat in this att.i.tude, I could not but notice his boots, and I fell to wondering what in the world he had done with his spurs.

For he wore none, and since he had plainly not troubled to repair the disorder of his dress, it seemed strange that he should have gone to the pains of removing his spurs. However, I was soon diverted from this speculation by the distress into which Mr. Featherstone's cold threw him. Featherstone was his name, as he was polite enough to tell me in the intervals of coughing, and I told him mine in return. At last his malady so increased that he called for the landlord, and bidding him light a great fire in his bedroom said he must needs go to bed.

"I trust, however," he continued politely to me, "that you, Mr.

Berkeley, will prove a Samaritan, and keep me company for a while. For I shall not sleep, upon my word I shall not sleep a wink," and he was so positive in his a.s.surances that, though I was myself sufficiently tired, I thought it no more than kindness to fall in with his wishes.

Accordingly I followed him into his bedroom, where he lay in a great canopied bed, with a big fire blazing upon the hearth, and a bottle of rum with a couple of gla.s.ses upon a table at the bedside.

"It is an ague," said he, "which I caught upon the Gambia River, and from which I have ever since suffered many inconveniences;" he poured out the rum into the gla.s.ses, and wished me with great politeness all prosperity.

It was no doubt, also, because he had voyaged on the Gambia River that he suffered no inconvenience from the heat of the room. But what with the hot August night, and the blazing fire, and the closed window, I became at once so drowsy that I could hardly keep my eyes open, and I wished him good-night.

"But you will not go," said he. "We are but this moment acquainted, and to-morrow we shall wave a farewell each to the other. Let us, Mr.

Berkeley, make something of the meanwhile, I beg you."

I answered him that I did not wish to appear churlish, but that I should most certainly appear so if I fell asleep while we talked, which, in spite of myself, I was very likely to do.

"But I have a bottle of salts here," said he, with a laugh, as he reached out of bed and fumbled with his coat. "I have a bottle of salts here which will infallibly persuade you from any thought of sleep," and he drew out from the pocket of his coat a pack of cards.

"Well, what do you say?" he continued, as I did not move.

"It is some while since I handled a card," said I slowly.

"A game of picquet," he suggested.

"It is a good game," said I.

He flipped the edges of the cards with his thumb. I drew nearer to the bed.

"Well, one game then," said I.

"To be sure," said he, shuffling the cards.

"And the stakes must be low."

"I hate a gambler myself."