The light mouth, the easy paces, the smooth ripple of muscle under his knees told him that he was mounted on no common horse, but his head was still too full of his late experience to be very observant about the present. The nut-brown girl, the melodious voice with a stammer like a break in a nightingale’s song, seemed too delicious and strange for reality. And yet she was flesh and blood; he had felt her body warm against his when they sheltered behind the armoire: it was her doing that he was now at liberty and posting northward. Now he understood Mr. Johnson’s devotion. To serve such a lady he would himself scale the blue air and plough the high hills, as the bards sang.
The bemusement took him down the avenue till the trees thinned out and on the right came the ghostly glimmer of a white gate. He turned and found it open, and by it another horseman.
“The gentleman from Miss Claudy—beg y’r pardon—from m’lady?” a voice asked.
“The same,” Alastair replied. The speech was that of the gypsy he had met the day before.
The man shut the gate with his whip. “Then follow me close and not a cheep o’ talk. We’ve some cunning and fast journeying to do before the day breaks.”
They swept at a canter down a long lane, deeply rutted, and patched here and there with clumps of blackberries. Then they were on a heath, where the sky was lighter and the road had to be carefully picked round sandpits and quarry-holes. Alastair had no guess at direction, for the sky showed never a star, and though the dark was not impenetrable it was hopeless to look for landmarks. A strange madcap progress they made over every kind of country, now on road, now in woodland, now breasting slopes of heath with the bracken rubbing on the stirrups. Oftenest they were in forest land, where sometimes there was no path and Alastair found it best to give his horse its head and suffer it to do the steering. He had forgotten that England could be so wild, for these immense old boles and the miles of thicket and mere belonged surely to a primeval world. Again the course would be over fallow and new plough, and again in lanes and parish roads and now and then on the turnpike. The pace was easy—a light canter, but there were no halts, and always ahead over hedge and through gap went the slim figure of the gypsy.
The air was chilly but not cold, and soon the grey cloth of darkness began to thin till it was a fine veil dimming but not hiding objects, and the light wind blew which even on the stillest night heralds the dawn. The earth began to awake, lights kindled in farms and cottages, lanterns flickered around steadings. Movement through this world just struggling out of sleep was a joy and an exhilaration. It reminded Alastair of a winter journey from Paris to Beauvais—part of a Prince’s wager—when with relays of horses he had ridden down the night, through woods and hamlets dumb with snow, intoxicated with his youth, and seeing mystery in every light that glimmered out of the dark. Now he was in the same mood. His spirits rose at the signs of awaking humanity. That lantern by a brook was a shepherd pulling hay for the tups now huddled in the sheepcote. The light at that window was the goodwife grilling bacon for the farmer’s breakfast, or Blowselinda of the Inn sweeping the parlour after the night’s drinking. And through that homely ritual of morn he was riding north to the Wars which should upturn thrones and make nobles of plain captains. Youth! Romance! And somewhere in the background of his brain a voice sounded like a trill of music. “Adieu, sir. I pray God … I go to B-Brightwell under the P-Peak …”
The light had grown and he had his first view of Black Ben, and Ben of him. They jostled at a gate and stared at each other.
“We meet again,” he said.
“Happy meeting, my dear good gentleman. But you were on a different errand yesterday when my duty drove me the way of hot ashes. No offence took along of a poor man’s honesty, kind sir?”
“None,” said Alastair. He saw now the reason for the gypsy’s presence with the recruits. He was in Jacobite pay, hired to scatter Oglethorpe’s levies and so reduce Wade’s command. But none the less he disliked the man—his soft sneering voice, and the shifty eyes which he remembered from yesterday.
It was now almost broad day, about eight in the morning, and Alastair reckoned that they must have travelled twenty miles and be close on the Cheshire border. The country was featureless—much woodland interspersed with broad pastures, and far to the east a lift of ground towards a range of hills. The weather was soft and clear, a fine scenting morning for the hunt, and far borne on the morning air came the sound of a horn.
The gypsy seemed to be at fault. He stopped and considered for a matter of five minutes with his ear cocked. Then he plunged into a copse and emerged in a rushy bottom between high woods. Here the sound of the horn was heard again, apparently from the slopes at
