Four days ago she had departed in her coach, fresh horsed from Brightwell, attended by Mr. Johnson and Edom Lowrie. Since then he had seen no sign of the party. The old house had swallowed them up, and neither taking the air in the park nor riding on the highway had any one of them emerged to the outer world. The mystery of the place grew upon him, till he came to look on the bleak house lying in the sparkling amphitheatre of hill as the enchanted castle of a fairy tale. It held a princess and it held a secret—the secret, he was convinced, most vital to his Prince’s cause. He need not scour the country; in that one dwelling he could read the riddle.
On this, the fourth night of his reconnaissance, he returned to the inn assured that the first part of his task was over. He must find some way of entering Brightwell and growing familiar with the household, and his head was busy with plans as he slipped into the millhouse in the early dark, and climbed the dusty wooden ladder to the loft which gave on his attic. In his bedroom stood the landlord.
“I heard ye come in by the mill,” he said, “and I’m here because I’ve news ye may like to hear. There’s a famous gentleman coming here tonight. Ye’ll have heard o’ General Oglethorpe, him that’s been fighting in Ameriky? He’s coming to his supper, no less. His regiment is lying down the vale, and an officer rides here this afternoon and says the General will be to sup sharp at seven o’clock. After that he’s to meet a friend here and wants to be left quiet. He needs no bed, for he’s riding back to his camp when he’s done his business. Now, what d’ ye make of that, sir?”
“Where does he sup?” Alastair asked.
“In the Brown Room, the one my lady had.”
“When he arrives pray give him a message from me. Say that one who had the happiness to oblige him a week back is in the house, and will do himself the honour of waiting on him if he will name the hour. Is that clear? Now fetch me some hot water, for I must make a toilet.”
He got rid of his soaked clothes and assumed his old habit—chocolate coat and green velvet waistcoat, stockings and buckled shoes, and a tie-wig new dressed by the landlord. The exposure of the past days had darkened his skin, and it was a hard-bitten face that looked back at him from the cracked mirror. Before completing his toilet he lay down on the truckle bed and stared at the ceiling. Oglethorpe was friendly to him, and might give him news of moment—he had the name himself of a Jacobite or at any rate of a lukewarm Hanoverian. But the man the General was to meet? He had no doubt it was Sir John and he chuckled at the chance which Fortune had offered him.
As he lay his thoughts roamed wide but always returned to one centre, the Brown Room at the inn. But it was not Oglethorpe or Sir John that he saw there, but a slim girl with eyes now ardent, now laughing, now misty, and a voice that stammered adorably and sang “Diana” like a linnet. Sometimes he saw Brightwell and its chilly hall, but he saw no human personage other than the girl, a little forlorn and lost now, but still happy and dreaming. … He pulled himself up sharply. For the first time in his life a woman’s face was filling the eye of his mind—he, the scorner of trivialities whose whole being was dedicate to a manly ambition! He felt irritated and a little ashamed, and began laboriously to examine himself to prove his resolution. Now in the very crisis of his fate he could least afford a whimsy.
The landlord disturbed him when he had become drowsy.
“The gentleman is here—General Oglethorpe. I give him your message, and he says, pleasant-like, ‘I can guess who the gentleman is. Tell him that my gratitude is not exhausted and that I will be happy if he will add to his obligations by giving me his company at supper.’ Ye’d better hasten, sir, for supper is being dished up.”
Alastair followed the landlord through the cobwebby back regions of the storeroom and out to the gallery at the head of the stairs whence the Brown Room opened. He noticed that the dusky corridor was brightly lit just opposite the room door because of the lamps in the hall below which shone up a side passage. This glow also revealed in full detail the map which he had studied on his first night there. As he glanced at it, the two great roads from the north seemed to stand out like blood, and Brightwell, a bloodred name, to be the tollhouse to shut or open them.
The Brown Room was bright with candles and firelight, and warming his back at the hearth stood a tall man in military undress. He was of a strong harsh aquiline cast of countenance; his skin was somewhat sallow from the hot countries he had dwelt in, but he carried his forty-odd years lightly, and, to Alastair’s soldier eye, would be a serious antagonist with whatever weapon of hand or brain. His face relaxed at the
