Prisoners of Hope Part 25

Her glance fell upon Landless's face, and there came to her a sudden realization that there were those in the world, to whom life was not one sweet, bright gala day. She gazed at him with troubled eyes.

"I hope you care to live," she said. "Death is very dreadful."

"I do not think so," he answered. "At least it would be forgetfulness."

She shuddered. "Ah! but to leave the world, the warm, bright, beautiful world! To die on your bed, when you are old--that is different. But to go young! to go in storm and terror, or in horror and struggling as did that man who was murdered! Oh, horrible!"

The thought of the murdered man brought another thought into her mind.

"Do you think," she said, "that we had better tell that we saw the murderer at the first house to which we come, or had we best wait until we reach Verney Manor?"

Landless gave a great start. "You will tell Colonel Verney that?"

She opened her eyes widely. "Why, of course! What else should we do? Is not the country being scoured for him? My father is most anxious that he should be captured. Justice and the weal of the State demand that such a wretch should be punished." She paused and looked at him gravely as he walked beside her with a clouded face. "You say nothing! This man is guilty, guilty of a dreadful crime. Surely you do not wish to s.h.i.+eld him, to let him escape?"

"Not so, madam," said Landless in desperation. "But--but--"

"But what?" she asked as he stopped in confusion.

He recovered himself. "Nothing, madam. You are right, of course. But I would not speak before reaching Verney Manor."

"Very well."

Landless walked on, bitterly perplexed and chagrined. The strife and danger of the night, the intoxicating sweetness of the morning hours when he knew himself believed in and pitied by the woman beside him, had driven certain things into oblivion. He had been dreaming, and now he had been plucked from a fool's paradise, and dashed rudely to the ground. Yesterday and the life and thoughts of yesterday, which had but now seemed so far away, pressed upon him remorselessly. And to-morrow!

He did not want Roach to be taken. Always there would have been danger to himself and his a.s.sociates in the capture of the murderer, but now when the vindictive wretch would a.s.suredly attribute his disaster to the man to whom the lightning flash had revealed his presence on the sh.o.r.es of the bay, the danger was trebled. And it was imminent. He had little doubt that another night would see Roach in custody, and he had no doubt at all that the scoundrel would make a desperate effort to save his neck by betraying what he knew of the conspiracy--and thanks to G.o.dwyn's lists he knew a great deal--to Governor and Council.

Patricia began to speak again. "It imports much that men should see that there is no weakness in the arm the law stretches out to seize and punish offenders. My father and the Governor and Colonel Ludlow believe that there is afoot an Oliverian plot-- What is the matter?"

"Nothing, madam."

"You stood still and caught your breath. Are you ill, faint?"

"It is nothing, madam, believe me? You were saying?"

"Oh! the Oliverians! Nothing definite has been discovered as yet, but there is thunder in the air, my father says, and I know that he and the Governor and the rest of the council are very watchful just now. But yesterday my father said that those few hundred men form a greater menace to the Colony than do all the Indians between this and the South Sea."

They walked on in silence for a few moments, and then she broke out.

"They are horrible, those grim, frowning men! They are rebels and traitors, one and all, and yet they stand by and shake curses on the heads of true men. They slew the best man, the most gracious sovereign; they trampled the Church under foot, they made the blood of the n.o.ble and the good to flow like water, and now when they receive a portion of their deserts, they call themselves martyrs! They, martyrs! Roundhead traitors!"

"Madam," interrupted Landless with a curious smile upon his lips, "did you not know that I was, that I am, what you call a Roundhead?"

"No," she said, "I did not know," and stood perfectly still, looking straight before her down the long vista of trees. He saw her face change and harden into the old expression of aversion. The slaves came up to them, and Regulus asked if 'lil Missy wanted anything. "No, nothing at all," she answered, and walked quietly onward.

Landless, an angry pain tugging at his heart, kept beside her, for they were pa.s.sing through a deep hollow in the wood where the gnarled and protruding roots of cypress and juniper made walking difficult, and where a strong hand was needed to push aside the wet and pendent ma.s.ses of vine. Regulus, fifty yards behind them, began to sing a familiar broadside ballad, torturing the words out of all resemblance to English.

The rich notes rang sweetly through the forest. Down from the far summit of a pine flashed a cardinal bird, piercing the gloom of the hollow like a fire ball thrown into a cavern. Landless held aside a curtain of glistening leaves that, mingled with purple cl.u.s.ters of fruit, hung across their path. Patricia pa.s.sed him, then turned impulsively. "You think me hard!" she said. "Many people think me so, but I am not so, indeed.... And there are good Puritans. Major Carrington, they say, is Puritan at heart, and he is a good man and a gentleman.... And you saved my life.... At least you are not like those men of whom I spoke. You would not plot against the good peace which we enjoy! You would not try to array servant against master?"

It was a direct question asked with large, straightforward eyes fixed upon his. He tried to evade it, but she asked again with insistence, and with a faint doubt lurking in her eyes, "If these men are plotting, which G.o.d forbid! you know nothing of it? You have great wrongs, but you would take no such dastard way to right them?"

Landless's soul writhed within him, but he told the inevitable lie that was none the less a lie that it was also the truth. He said in a low voice, "I trust, madam, that I will do naught that may misbecome a gentleman."

She was quite satisfied. He saw that he had regained the ground lost by his avowal of a few minutes before, and he cursed himself and cursed his fate.

Soon afterwards they emerged from the forest upon a tobacco patch, from the midst of which rose a rude cabin, in whose doorway stood a woman serving out bowls of loblolly to half a dozen tow-headed children.

Half an hour later, Patricia, rested and refreshed, took her seat behind the oxen, which the owner of the cabin had harnessed up, with much protestation of his eagerness to serve the daughter of Colonel Verney, emptied her purse in the midst of the open-mouthed children, and bade kindly adieu to the good wife. Darkeih curled herself up in the bottom of the cart, and Landless and Regulus walked beside it.

In two hours' time they were at Verney Manor, where they found none but women to greet them, Rendered uneasy by the storm, Woodson had despatched a messenger to Rosemead, who had returned with the tidings that no boat from Verney Manor had reached that plantation. The overseer had ill news with which to greet the Colonel and Sir Charles when at midnight they arrived unexpectedly from Green Spring. Since then every able-bodied man had deserted the plantation. There were no boats at the wharf, no horses in the stables. The master and Sir Charles were gone in the Nancy, the two overseers on horseback. A Sabbath stillness brooded over the plantation, until a negro woman recognized the occupants of the ox-cart lumbering up the road. Then there was noise enough of an exclamatory, feminine kind. The shrill sounds penetrated to the great room, where, behind drawn curtains, surrounded by essences, and an odor of burnt feathers, with Chloe to fan her, and Mr. Frederick Jones to murmur consolation, reclined Mistress Lettice. As Patricia stepped upon the porch, Betty Carrington flew down the stairs and through the hall, and the two met with a little inarticulate burst of cries and kisses.

Mistress Lettice in the great room went into hysterics for the fifth time that morning.

CHAPTER XVIII

A CAPTURE

At noon the next day returned the search party, dispatched by the Colonel on receipt of his daughter's information, and headed by Woodson and Sir Charles Carew. In their midst, bound with ropes, and seated behind one of the mounted men, was Roach. His clothing hung from him in tatters, and witnessed, moreover, to the quagmires and mantled pools through which he had struggled; his arm had been injured, and was tied with a b.l.o.o.d.y rag; blood was caked upon his villainous face, scratched and torn in his breathless bursting through thickets; his red hair fell over his eyes in matted elf-locks; his lips were drawn back in a snarl over discolored fangs; he panted like a dog, his thick red tongue hanging out. He looked hardly human. The man behind whom he rode was Luiz Sebastian.

The party dismounted in the small square, in the midst of the quarters.

It being the noon rest, the entire servant population was on hand, and leaving its cabins and smoking messes of bacon and succotash, it hastened to a man to the square, where, beneath the dead tree and its sinister appendage, stood the master, listening to Woodson's account of the capture, and to Sir Charles's airy interpolations. Roach, dragged from the horse by a dozen officious hands, staggered with exhaustion.

Luiz Sebastian caught him by the arm and so held him during the ensuing interview.

When the unusual bustle, the neighing of the horses, and the excited voices of the crowd brought the news of the capture to Landless, sitting, sunk in anxious thought, within his cabin, he rose and began to pace to and fro in the narrow room. Past his door hurried men, women, and children on their way to the square. One or two beckoned him to follow, but he shook his head. "If he betray me," he thought, "my fate will come to me soon enough. I will not go to meet it."

In his restless pacing to and fro, he stopped before a shelf where, beside some coa.r.s.e eating utensils and the heap of tobacco pegs, the cutting of which occupied his spare moments, lay a little worn book. It had been G.o.dwyn's. He opened it at random, and read a few verses. With a heavy sigh he laid his arm along the shelf and rested his burning forehead upon it. "'Let not your heart be troubled,'" he said beneath his breath; and again, "'Let not your heart be troubled.'" He recommenced his pacing up and down the room. "'Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.'" Going to the doorway, he leaned against it and looked out into a world of suns.h.i.+ne, and up to where the topmost branches of a pine slept against the blue. "There may be peace beyond,"

he said. "I have not found it here."

Down the lane came a murmur of voices; then the overseer's harsh tones; then a light and mocking laugh. Seized by an uncontrollable impulse he left the cabin and directed his steps towards the square. As he pa.s.sed a cabin some doors from his own, a gaunt figure arose from the doorstep and joined itself to him.

"The murderer is here," said the sepulchral voice of Master Win-Grace Porringer. "Verily the blood hath been taken out of his mouth, and his abominations from between his teeth. Cursed be the shedder of innocent blood!"

"Amen," said Landless; then, "This capture is like to be our ruin. This wretch will not keep silence."

"But he has no proofs. Since you destroyed those lists there exists not a sc.r.a.p of writing about this affair. And we have covered our tracks as carefully as if we were the cursed heathen of the land upon the warpath. Let him say what he will. The Malignants, besotted fools! will think he lies to save his neck."

"A week ago they might have thought so," said Landless. "But not now.

Something has gotten abroad. Already Governor and Council think they smell a plot."

The Muggletonian caught his breath. "How do you know this?"

"No matter how: I know it."

Porringer raised his scarred face to heaven. "G.o.d," he said, "we are thy people! Save us! Let destruction come upon them unawares; let them go down a dark and slippery way to death; make them to be as blind and deaf adders that see not the foot of the destroyer! Yea, shake thy hand upon these Malignants and make them a spoil to their servants!" He turned his ghastly face and burning eyes upon Landless. "Curse them with me!" he cried.

Landless shook his head. "Thou, and I look not alike at things, friend,"

he said.

"Thou art a Laodicean!" cried the other wildly. "Thou hast not an eye single to the Lord's work as had thy father before thee. Thou wouldst not smite the Amalekites hip and thigh, root and branch! One damsel would thou save alive, and for her sake thy heart is soft towards the whole accursed brood! Look to it lest the Lord spew thee out of His mouth! Woe, woe, to him that putteth his hand to the plough and looketh back!" He laughed wildly and tossed out his arms.