Long before dawn he was far beyond the countryside of which he had any knowledge. He had been given Ernshawbank by the Spainneach as the second point to make for, and had assumed that there, if not before, he would fall in with Sir John. Yet when he came to a village about cockcrow, and learned from a sleepy carter that it was Ernshawbank, he did not find his quarry. But at the inn he had news of him. A man answering his description had knocked up the landlord two hours before, drunk a gill of brandy, eaten a crust, and bought for a guinea the said landlord’s cocked grey beaver, new a month ago at Leek Fair. Two hours! The man was gaining on him! It appeared that he had ridden the path for lower Dovedale, as if he were making for Staffordshire and Trentside.
The two breakfasted at an ale house below Thorp Cloud, when a grey December morning was breaking over the leafless vale and the swollen waters of Dove. Their man had been seen, riding hard, with a face blue from cold and wet, and his fine clothes pitifully draggled with the rain. He had crossed the river, and was therefore bound for Staffordshire, and not Nottinghamshire, as Alastair had at first guessed. A minute’s reflection convinced him of the reason. Sir John was specially concerned with cutting off the help coming to the Prince from the West, and therefore went to join those, like the Duke of Kingston, who were on that flank, rather than the army which lay between Derby and London. The reflection gave him acute uneasiness. Nottinghamshire was distant, so there was a chance to overtake the fugitive on the way. But, as it now was, any hour might see the man in sanctuary. The next village might hold a patrol of the Duke’s. … He cut short the meal, which Mr. Johnson had scarcely tasted, and the two were again on their weary beasts pounding up the steep lanes towards Ershalton and my lord Shrewsbury’s great house.
The mist cleared, a wintry sun shone, and the sky was mottled with patches of watery blue. Mr. Johnson’s teeth began to chatter so violently that Alastair swung round and regarded him.
“You will without doubt catch an ague, sir,” he said, and at the next presentable inn he insisted on his toasting his small-clothes before the kitchen fire, drinking a jorum of hot rum, and borrowing a coat of the landlord’s till his own was dry. For suddenly the panic of hurry was gone out of Alastair, and he saw this business as something predestined and ultimate. Fate was moving the pieces, and her iron fingers did not fumble. If it was written that he and Sir John should meet, then stronger powers than he would set the stage. He was amazed at his own calm.
The rum made his companion drowsy, and as they continued on the road he ceased to groan, and at the next halting-place did not stare at him with plaintive hangdog eyes. As for Alastair he found that his mind had changed again and that all his resolution was fluid.
His hatred of the pursued was ebbing, indeed had almost vanished, for with the sense of fatality which was growing upon him he saw the man as no better than a pawn; a thing as impersonal as sticks and stones. All the actors of the piece—Kyd, Norreys, the Spoonbills, Edom, the sullen Johnson, grew in his picture small and stiff like marionettes, and Claudia alone had the warmth of life. Once more she filled the stage of his memory, but it was not the russet and pearl of her and her witching eyes that held him now, but a tragic muse who appealed from the brink of chasms. She implored his pity on all she loved, on the casket where she had hid her heart.
With a start he recognised that this casket was no other than Sir John Norreys.
He might shatter it and rescue the heart, but how would the precious thing fare in the shattering? Her eyes rose before him with their infinite surrender. Was Johnson right and was she of the race of women that give once in life and then utterly and forever? If so, his errand was not to succour, but to slay. His sword would not cut the bonds of youth and innocence, it would pierce their heart.
He forced his mind to reconstruct the three occasions when she had faced him—not for his delectation, but to satisfy a newborn anxiety. He saw her at Flambury, a girl afire with zeal and daring, sexless as a child, and yet always in her sweet stumbling phrases harping on her dear Sir John. He saw her in the Brown Room at the Sleeping Deer, a tender muse of memories, but imperious towards dishonour, one whose slim grace might be brittle but would not bend. Last he saw her set up in the great bed at Brightwell, one arm round the neck of Duchess Kitty, the other stretched towards him in that woman’s appeal which had held him from Derby and the path of duty.
There is that in hard riding and hard weather which refines a man’s spirit, purging it of its grosser humours. The passion of the small hours had gone utterly from Alastair, and instead his soul was filled with a tempestuous affection, not of a lover but of a kinsman and protector. The child must at all costs be sheltered from sorrow, and if she pined for her toy it must be found for her, its cracks mended and its paint refurbished. His mood was now the same as Johnson’s, his resolution the same. He felt an odd pleasure in this access of tenderness, but he was conscious, too, that the pleasure was like a thin drift of flowers over dark mires of longing and sorrow. For his world had been tumbled down,
