CHAPTER V--LIFE IN THE CASTLE



From that day forth the life of these three persons in the ruin ran
very smoothly.  Mr. Archer now sat by the fire with a book, and now
passed whole days abroad, returning late, dead weary.  His manner
was a mask; but it was half transparent; through the even tenor of
his gravity and courtesy profound revolutions of feeling were
betrayed, seasons of numb despair, of restlessness, of aching
temper.  For days he would say nothing beyond his usual courtesies
and solemn compliments; and then, all of a sudden, some fine
evening beside the kitchen fire, he would fall into a vein of
elegant gossip, tell of strange and interesting events, the secrets
of families, brave deeds of war, the miraculous discovery of crime,
the visitations of the dead.  Nance and her uncle would sit till
the small hours with eyes wide open:  Jonathan applauding the
unexpected incidents with many a slap of his big hand; Nance,
perhaps, more pleased with the narrator's eloquence and wise
reflections; and then, again, days would follow of abstraction, of
listless humming, of frequent apologies and long hours of silence.
Once only, and then after a week of unrelieved melancholy, he went
over to the 'Green Dragon,' spent the afternoon with the landlord
and a bowl of punch, and returned as on the first night, devious in
step but courteous and unperturbed of speech.

If he seemed more natural and more at his ease it was when he found
Nance alone; and, laying by some of his reserve, talked before her
rather than to her of his destiny, character and hopes.  To Nance
these interviews were but a doubtful privilege.  At times he would
seem to take a pleasure in her presence, to consult her gravely, to
hear and to discuss her counsels; at times even, but these were
rare and brief, he would talk of herself, praise the qualities that
she possessed, touch indulgently on her defects, and lend her books
to read and even examine her upon her reading; but far more often
he would fall into a half unconsciousness, put her a question and
then answer it himself, drop into the veiled tone of voice of one
soliloquising, and leave her at last as though he had forgotten her
existence.  It was odd, too, that in all this random converse, not
a fact of his past life, and scarce a name, should ever cross his
lips.  A profound reserve kept watch upon his most unguarded
moments.  He spoke continually of himself, indeed, but still in
enigmas; a veiled prophet of egoism.

The base of Nance's feelings for Mr. Archer was admiration as for a
superior being; and with this, his treatment, consciously or not,
accorded happily.  When he forgot her, she took the blame upon
herself.  His formal politeness was so exquisite that this
essential brutality stood excused.  His compliments, besides, were
always grave and rational; he would offer reason for his praise,
convict her of merit, and thus disarm suspicion.  Nay, and the very
hours when he forgot and remembered her alternately could by the
ardent fallacies of youth be read in the light of an attention.
She might be far from his confidence; but still she was nearer it
than any one.  He might ignore her presence, but yet he sought it.

Moreover, she, upon her side, was conscious of one point of
superiority.  Beside this rather dismal, rather effeminate man, who
recoiled from a worm, who grew giddy on the castle wall, who bore
so helplessly the weight of his misfortunes, she felt herself a
head and shoulders taller in cheerful and sterling courage.  She
could walk head in air along the most precarious rafter; her hand
feared neither the grossness nor the harshness of life's web, but
was thrust cheerfully, if need were, into the briar bush, and could
take hold of any crawling horror.  Ruin was mining the walls of her
cottage, as already it had mined and subverted Mr. Archer's palace.
Well, she faced it with a bright countenance and a busy hand.  She
had got some washing, some rough seamstress work from the 'Green
Dragon,' and from another neighbour ten miles away across the moor.
At this she cheerfully laboured, and from that height she could
afford to pity the useless talents and poor attitude of Mr. Archer.
It did not change her admiration, but it made it bearable.  He was
above her in all ways; but she was above him in one.  She kept it
to herself, and hugged it.  When, like all young creatures, she
made long stories to justify, to nourish, and to forecast the
course of her affection, it was this private superiority that made
all rosy, that cut the knot, and that, at last, in some great
situation, fetched to her knees the dazzling but imperfect hero.
With this pretty exercise she beguiled the hours of labour, and
consoled herself for Mr. Archer's bearing.

Pity was her weapon and her weakness.  To accept the loved one's
faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain,
and this pity it was which, lying nearer to her heart, lent the one
element of true emotion to a fanciful and merely brain-sick love.

Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the 'Green Dragon'
and brought back thence a letter to Mr. Archer.  He, upon seeing
it, winced like a man under the knife:  pain, shame, sorrow, and
the most trenchant edge of mortification cut into his heart and
wrung the steady composure of his face.

'Dear heart! have you bad news?' she cried.

But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and when,
later on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her on the
threshold, as if with words prepared beforehand.  'There are some
pains,' said he, 'too acute for consolation, or I would bring them
to my kind consoler.  Let the memory of that letter, if you please,
be buried.'  And then as she continued to gaze at him, being, in
spite of herself, pained by his elaborate phrase, doubtfully
sincere in word and manner:  'Let it be enough,' he added
haughtily, 'that if this matter wring my heart, it doth not touch
my conscience.  I am a man, I would have you to know, who suffers
undeservedly.'

He had never spoken so directly:  never with so convincing an
emotion; and her heart thrilled for him.  She could have taken his
pains and died of them with joy.

Meanwhile she was left without support.  Jonathan now swore by his
lodger, and lived for him.  He was a fine talker.  He knew the
finest sight of stories; he was a man and a gentleman, take him for
all in all, and a perfect credit to Old England.  Such were the old
man's declared sentiments, and sure enough he clung to Mr. Archer's
side, hung upon his utterance when he spoke, and watched him with
unwearing interest when he was silent.  And yet his feeling was not
clear; in the partial wreck of his mind, which was leaning to
decay, some after-thought was strongly present.  As he gazed in Mr.
Archer's face a sudden brightness would kindle in his rheumy eyes,
his eye-brows would lift as with a sudden thought, his mouth would
open as though to speak, and close again on silence.  Once or twice
he even called Mr. Archer mysteriously forth into the dark
courtyard, took him by the button, and laid a demonstrative finger
on his chest; but there his ideas or his courage failed him; he
would shufflingly excuse himself and return to his position by the
fire without a word of explanation.  'The good man was growing
old,' said Mr. Archer with a suspicion of a shrug.  But the good
man had his idea, and even when he was alone the name of Mr. Archer
fell from his lips continually in the course of mumbled and
gesticulative conversation.



CHAPTER VI--THE BAD HALF-CROWN



However early Nance arose, and she was no sluggard, the old man,
who had begun to outlive the earthly habit of slumber, would
usually have been up long before, the fire would be burning
brightly, and she would see him wandering among the ruins, lantern
in hand, and talking assiduously to himself.  One day, however,
after he had returned late from the market town, she found that she
had stolen a march upon that indefatigable early riser.  The
kitchen was all blackness.  She crossed the castle-yard to the
wood-cellar, her steps printing the thick hoarfrost.  A scathing
breeze blew out of the north-east and slowly carried a regiment of
black and tattered clouds over the face of heaven, which was
already kindled with the wild light of morning, but where she
walked, in shelter of the ruins, the flame of her candle burned
steady.  The extreme cold smote upon her conscience.  She could not
bear to think this bitter business fell usually to the lot of one
so old as Jonathan, and made desperate resolutions to be earlier in
the future.

The fire was a good blaze before he entered, limping dismally into
the kitchen.  'Nance,' said he, 'I be all knotted up with the
rheumatics; will you rub me a bit?'  She came and rubbed him where
and how he bade her.  'This is a cruel thing that old age should be
rheumaticky,' said he.  'When I was young I stood my turn of the
teethache like a man! for why? because it couldn't last for ever;
but these rheumatics come to live and die with you.  Your aunt was
took before the time came; never had an ache to mention.  Now I lie
all night in my single bed and the blood never warms in me; this
knee of mine it seems like lighted up with rheumatics; it seems as
though you could see to sew by it; and all the strings of my old
body ache, as if devils was pulling 'em.  Thank you kindly; that's
someways easier now, but an old man, my dear, has little to look
for; it's pain, pain, pain to the end of the business, and I'll
never be rightly warm again till I get under the sod,' he said, and
looked down at her with a face so aged and weary that she had
nearly wept.

'I lay awake all night,' he continued; 'I do so mostly, and a long
walk kills me.  Eh, deary me, to think that life should run to such
a puddle!  And I remember long syne when I was strong, and the
blood all hot and good about me, and I loved to run, too--deary me,
to run!  Well, that's all by.  You'd better pray to be took early,
Nance, and not live on till you get to be like me, and are robbed
in your grey old age, your cold, shivering, dark old age, that's
like a winter's morning'; and he bitterly shuddered, spreading his
hands before the fire.

'Come now,' said Nance, 'the more you say the less you'll like it,
Uncle Jonathan; but if I were you I would be proud for to have
lived all your days honest and beloved, and come near the end with
your good name:  isn't that a fine thing to be proud of?  Mr.
Archer was telling me in some strange land they used to run races
each with a lighted candle, and the art was to keep the candle
burning.  Well, now, I thought that was like life:  a man's good
conscience is the flame he gets to carry, and if he comes to the
winning-post with that still burning, why, take it how you will,
the man's a hero--even if he was low-born like you and me.'

'Did Mr. Archer tell you that?' asked Jonathan.

'No, dear,' said she, 'that's my own thought about it.  He told me
of the race.  But see, now,' she continued, putting on the
porridge, 'you say old age is a hard season, but so is youth.
You're half out of the battle, I would say; you loved my aunt and
got her, and buried her, and some of these days soon you'll go to
meet her; and take her my love and tell her I tried to take good
care of you; for so I do, Uncle Jonathan.'

Jonathan struck with his fist upon the settle.  'D' ye think I want
to die, ye vixen?' he shouted.  'I want to live ten hundred years.'

This was a mystery beyond Nance's penetration, and she stared in
wonder as she made the porridge.

'I want to live,' he continued, 'I want to live and to grow rich.
I want to drive my carriage and to dice in hells and see the ring,
I do.  Is this a life that I lived?  I want to be a rake, d' ye
understand?  I want to know what things are like.  I don't want to
die like a blind kitten, and me seventy-six.'

'O fie!' said Nance.

The old man thrust out his jaw at her, with the grimace of an
irreverent schoolboy.  Upon that aged face it seemed a blasphemy.
Then he took out of his bosom a long leather purse, and emptying
its contents on the settle, began to count and recount the pieces,
ringing and examining each, and suddenly he leapt like a young man.
'What!' he screamed.  'Bad?  O Lord!  I'm robbed again!'  And
falling on his knees before the settle he began to pour forth the
most dreadful curses on the head of his deceiver.  His eyes were
shut, for to him this vile solemnity was prayer.  He held up the
bad half-crown in his right hand, as though he were displaying it
to Heaven, and what increased the horror of the scene, the curses
he invoked were those whose efficacy he had tasted--old age and
poverty, rheumatism and an ungrateful son.  Nance listened
appalled; then she sprang forward and dragged down his arm and laid
her hand upon his mouth.

'Whist!' she cried.  'Whist ye, for God's sake!  O my man, whist
ye!  If Heaven were to hear; if poor Aunt Susan were to hear!
Think, she may be listening.'  And with the histrionism of strong
emotion she pointed to a corner of the kitchen.

His eyes followed her finger.  He looked there for a little,
thinking, blinking; then he got stiffly to his feet and resumed his
place upon the settle, the bad piece still in his hand.  So he sat
for some time, looking upon the half-crown, and now wondering to
himself on the injustice and partiality of the law, now computing
again and again the nature of his loss.  So he was still sitting
when Mr. Archer entered the kitchen.  At this a light came into his
face, and after some seconds of rumination he dispatched Nance upon
an errand.

'Mr. Archer,' said he, as soon as they were alone together, 'would
you give me a guinea-piece for silver?'

'Why, sir, I believe I can,' said Mr. Archer.

And the exchange was just effected when Nance re-entered the
apartment.  The blood shot into her face.

'What's to do here?' she asked rudely.

'Nothing, my dearie,' said old Jonathan, with a touch of whine.

'What's to do?' she said again.

'Your uncle was but changing me a piece of gold,' returned Mr.
Archer.

'Let me see what he hath given you, Mr. Archer,' replied the girl.
'I had a bad piece, and I fear it is mixed up among the good.'

'Well, well,' replied Mr. Archer, smiling, 'I must take the
merchant's risk of it.  The money is now mixed.'

'I know my piece,' quoth Nance.  'Come, let me see your silver, Mr.
Archer.  If I have to get it by a theft I'll see that money,' she
cried.

'Nay, child, if you put as much passion to be honest as the world
to steal, I must give way, though I betray myself,' said Mr.
Archer.  'There it is as I received it.'

Nance quickly found the bad half-crown.

'Give him another,' she said, looking Jonathan in the face; and
when that had been done, she walked over to the chimney and flung
the guilty piece into the reddest of the fire.  Its base
constituents began immediately to run; even as she watched it the
disc crumbled, and the lineaments of the King became confused.
Jonathan, who had followed close behind, beheld these changes from
over her shoulder, and his face darkened sorely.

'Now,' said she, 'come back to table, and to-day it is I that shall
say grace, as I used to do in the old times, day about with Dick';
and covering her eyes with one hand, 'O Lord,' said she with deep
emotion, 'make us thankful; and, O Lord, deliver us from evil!  For
the love of the poor souls that watch for us in heaven, O deliver
us from evil.'



CHAPTER VII--THE BLEACHING-GREEN



The year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter keen
from the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on the river
dell.  The mire dried up in the closest covert; life ran in the
bare branches, and the air of the afternoon would be suddenly sweet
with the fragrance of new grass.

Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter 'S.'
The lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high and steep
projection which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed
a lawny promontory, fringed by thorn and willow.  It was easy to
reach it from the castle side, for the river ran in this part very
quietly among innumerable boulders and over dam-like walls of rock.
The place was all enclosed, the wind a stranger, the turf smooth
and solid; so it was chosen by Nance to be her bleaching-green.

One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to
wring and lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on
the far side, drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence
on the grass.  Nance looked up to greet him with a smile, but
finding her smile was not returned, she fell into embarrassment and
stuck the more busily to her employment.  Man or woman, the whole
world looks well at any work to which they are accustomed; but the
girl was ashamed of what she did.  She was ashamed, besides, of the
sun-bonnet that so well became her, and ashamed of her bare arms,
which were her greatest beauty.

'Nausicaa,' said Mr. Archer at last, 'I find you like Nausicaa.'

'And who was she?' asked Nance, and laughed in spite of herself, an
empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer's ears,
indeed, like music, but to her own like the last grossness of
rusticity.

'She was a princess of the Grecian islands,' he replied.  'A king,
being shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore.  Certainly I,
too, was shipwrecked,' he continued, plucking at the grass.  'There
was never a more desperate castaway--to fall from polite life,
fortune, a shrine of honour, a grateful conscience, duties
willingly taken up and faithfully discharged; and to fall to this--
idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.'  He seemed to have
forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her again.  'Nance,'
said he, 'would you have a man sit down and suffer or rise up and
strive?'

'Nay,' she said.  'I would always rather see him doing.'

'Ha!' said Mr. Archer, 'but yet you speak from an imperfect
knowledge.  Conceive a man damned to a choice of only evil--
misconduct upon either side, not a fault behind him, and yet naught
before him but this choice of sins.  How would you say then?'

'I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,' returned
Nance.  'I would say there was a third choice, and that the right
one.'

'I tell you,' said Mr. Archer, 'the man I have in view hath two
ways open, and no more.  One to wait, like a poor mewling baby,
till Fate save or ruin him; the other to take his troubles in his
hand, and to perish or be saved at once.  It is no point of morals;
both are wrong.  Either way this step-child of Providence must
fall; which shall he choose, by doing or not doing?'

'Fall, then, is what I would say,' replied Nance.  'Fall where you
will, but do it!  For O, Mr. Archer,' she continued, stooping to
her work, 'you that are good and kind, and so wise, it doth
sometimes go against my heart to see you live on here like a sheep
in a turnip-field!  If you were braver--' and here she paused,
conscience-smitten.

'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself.
'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand?
Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of;
that does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty?  I
to fail there, I wonder?  But what is courage, then?  The constancy
to endure oneself or to see others suffer?  The itch of ill-advised
activity:  mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient?  To
inquire of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we
seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand still is
the least heroic.  Nance,' he said, 'did you ever hear of Hamlet?'

'Never,' said Nance.

''Tis an old play,' returned Mr. Archer, 'and frequently enacted.
This while I have been talking Hamlet.  You must know this Hamlet
was a Prince among the Danes,' and he told her the play in a very
good style, here and there quoting a verse or two with solemn
emphasis.

'It is strange,' said Nance; 'he was then a very poor creature?'

'That was what he could not tell,' said Mr. Archer.  'Look at me,
am I as poor a creature?'

She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all her
hours; the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the spotless
ruffles, the slim hands; the long, well-shapen, serious, shaven
face, the wide and somewhat thin-lipped mouth, the dark eyes that
were so full of depth and change and colour.  He was gazing at her
with his brows a little knit, his chin upon one hand and that elbow
resting on his knee.

'Ye look a man!' she cried, 'ay, and should be a great one!  The
more shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before the fire.'

'My fair Holdaway,' quoth Mr. Archer, 'you are much set on action.
I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.'  He continued, looking at her
with a half-absent fixity, ''Tis a strange thing, certainly, that
in my years of fortune I should never taste happiness, and now when
I am broke, enjoy so much of it, for was I ever happier than to-
day?  Was the grass softer, the stream pleasanter in sound, the air
milder, the heart more at peace?  Why should I not sink?  To dig--
why, after all, it should be easy.  To take a mate, too?  Love is
of all grades since Jupiter; love fails to none; and children'--but
here he passed his hand suddenly over his eyes.  'O fool and
coward, fool and coward!' he said bitterly; 'can you forget your
fetters?  You did not know that I was fettered, Nance?' he asked,
again addressing her.

But Nance was somewhat sore.  'I know you keep talking,' she said,
and, turning half away from him, began to wring out a sheet across
her shoulder.  'I wonder you are not wearied of your voice.  When
the hands lie abed the tongue takes a walk.'

Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the water's
edge.  In this part the body of the river poured across a little
narrow fell, ran some ten feet very smoothly over a bed of pebbles,
then getting wind, as it were, of another shelf of rock which
barred the channel, began, by imperceptible degrees, to separate
towards either shore in dancing currents, and to leave the middle
clear and stagnant.  The set towards either side was nearly equal;
about one half of the whole water plunged on the side of the
castle, through a narrow gullet; about one half ran ripping past
the margin of the green and slipped across a babbling rapid.

'Here,' said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time at the
fine and shifting demarcation of these currents, 'come here and see
me try my fortune.'

'I am not like a man,' said Nance; 'I have no time to waste.'

'Come here,' he said again.  'I ask you seriously, Nance.  We are
not always childish when we seem so.'

She drew a little nearer.

'Now,' said he, 'you see these two channels--choose one.'

'I'll choose the nearest, to save time,' said Nance.

'Well, that shall be for action,' returned Mr. Archer.  'And since
I wish to have the odds against me, not only the other channel but
yon stagnant water in the midst shall be for lying still.  You see
this?' he continued, pulling up a withered rush.  'I break it in
three.  I shall put each separately at the top of the upper fall,
and according as they go by your way or by the other I shall guide
my life.'

'This is very silly,' said Nance, with a movement of her shoulders.

'I do not think it so,' said Mr. Archer.

'And then,' she resumed, 'if you are to try your fortune, why not
evenly?'

'Nay,' returned Mr. Archer with a smile, 'no man can put complete
reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.'

By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall, and,
bidding her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the middle of
the intake.  The rusty fragment was sucked at once over the fall,
came up again far on the right hand, leaned ever more and more in
the same direction, and disappeared under the hanging grasses on
the castle side.

'One,' said Mr. Archer, 'one for standing still.'

But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging for a
while about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily approached the
bleaching-green and danced down the rapid under Nance's eyes.

'One for me,' she cried with some exultation; and then she observed
that Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on the rock, with
his hand raised like a person petrified.  'Why,' said she, 'you do
not mind it, do you?'

'Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune hangs?'
said Mr. Archer, rather hoarsely.  'And this is more than fortune.
Nance, if you have any kindness for my fate, put up a prayer before
I launch the next one.'

'A prayer,' she cried, 'about a game like this?  I would not be so
heathen.'

'Well,' said he, 'then without,' and he closed his eyes and dropped
the piece of rush.  This time there was no doubt.  It went for the
rapid as straight as any arrow.

'Action then!' said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; 'and then God
forgive us,' he added, almost to himself.

'God forgive us, indeed,' cried Nance, 'for wasting the good
daylight!  But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so serious I
shall begin to think you was in earnest.'

'Nay,' he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile; 'but
is not this good advice?  I have consulted God and demigod; the
nymph of the river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-
eyed Minerva.  Both have said the same.  My own heart was telling
it already.  Action, then, be mine; and into the deep sea with all
this paralysing casuistry.  I am happy to-day for the first time.'



CHAPTER VIII--THE MAIL GUARD



Somewhere about two in the morning a squall had burst upon the
castle, a clap of screaming wind that made the towers rock, and a
copious drift of rain that streamed from the windows.  The wind
soon blew itself out, but the day broke cloudy and dripping, and
when the little party assembled at breakfast their humours appeared
to have changed with the change of weather.  Nance had been
brooding on the scene at the river-side, applying it in various
ways to her particular aspirations, and the result, which was
hardly to her mind, had taken the colour out of her cheeks.  Mr.
Archer, too, was somewhat absent, his thoughts were of a mingled
strain; and even upon his usually impassive countenance there were
betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of exultation,
which the girl translated in terms of her own hopes and fears.  But
Jonathan was the most altered:  he was strangely silent, hardly
passing a word, and watched Mr. Archer with an eager and furtive
eye.  It seemed as if the idea that had so long hovered before him
had now taken a more solid shape, and, while it still attracted,
somewhat alarmed his imagination.

At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which was only
broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain on the stone
roof and about all that field of ruins; and they were all relieved
when the note of a man whistling and the sound of approaching
footsteps in the grassy court announced a visitor.  It was the
ostler from the 'Green Dragon' bringing a letter for Mr. Archer.
Nance saw her hero's face contract and then relax again at sight of
it; and she thought that she knew why, for the sprawling, gross
black characters of the address were easily distinguishable from
the fine writing on the former letter that had so much disturbed
him.  He opened it and began to read; while the ostler sat down to
table with a pot of ale, and proceeded to make himself agreeable
after his fashion.

'Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,' said he.  'I haven't been
abed this blessed night.'

Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr. Archer,
who was reading his letter with a face of such extreme indifference
that she was tempted to suspect him of assumption.

'Yes,' continued the ostler, 'not been the like of it this fifteen
years:  the North Mail stopped at the three stones.'

Jonathan's cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked with a
great splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the noise, made
so sudden a movement that one corner of the sheet tore off and
stayed between his finger and thumb.  It was some little time
before the old man was sufficiently recovered to beg the ostler to
go on, and he still kept coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes.
Mr. Archer, on his side, laid the letter down, and, putting his
hands in his pocket, listened gravely to the tale.

'Yes,' resumed Sam, 'the North Mail was stopped by a single
horseman; dash my wig, but I admire him!  There were four insides
and two out, and poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard.  Tom showed
himself a man; let fly his blunderbuss at him; had him covered,
too, and could swear to that; but the Captain never let on, up with
a pistol and fetched poor Tom a bullet through the body.  Tom, he
squelched upon the seat, all over blood.  Up comes the Captain to
the window.  "Oblige me," says he, "with what you have."  Would you
believe it?  Not a man says cheep!--not them.  "Thy hands over thy
head."  Four watches, rings, snuff-boxes, seven-and-forty pounds
overhead in gold.  One Dicksee, a grazier, tries it on:  gives him
a guinea.  "Beg your pardon," says the Captain, "I think too highly
of you to take it at your hand.  I will not take less than ten from
such a gentleman."  This Dicksee had his money in his stocking, but
there was the pistol at his eye.  Down he goes, offs with his
stocking, and there was thirty golden guineas.  "Now," says the
Captain, "you've tried it on with me, but I scorns the advantage.
Ten I said," he says, "and ten I take."  So, dash my buttons, I
call that man a man!' cried Sam in cordial admiration.

'Well, and then?' says Mr. Archer.

'Then,' resumed Sam, 'that old fat fagot Engleton, him as held the
ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to, picks up his
cattle, and drives off again.  Down they came to the "Dragon," all
singing like as if they was scalded, and poor Tom saying nothing.
You would 'a' thought they had all lost the King's crown to hear
them.  Down gets this Dicksee.  "Postmaster," he says, taking him
by the arm, "this is a most abominable thing," he says.  Down gets
a Major Clayton, and gets the old man by the other arm.  "We've
been robbed," he cries, "robbed!"  Down gets the others, and all
around the old man telling their story, and what they had lost, and
how they was all as good as ruined; till at last Old Engleton says,
says he, "How about Oglethorpe?" says he.  "Ay," says the others,
"how about the guard?"  Well, with that we bousted him down, as
white as a rag and all blooded like a sop.  I thought he was dead.
Well, he ain't dead; but he's dying, I fancy.'

'Did you say four watches?' said Jonathan.

'Four, I think.  I wish it had been forty,' cried Sam.  'Such a
party of soused herrings I never did see--not a man among them bar
poor Tom.  But us that are the servants on the road have all the
risk and none of the profit.'

'And this brave fellow,' asked Mr. Archer, very quietly, 'this
Oglethorpe--how is he now?'

'Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang through
him,' said Sam.  'The doctor hasn't been yet.  He'd 'a' been bright
and early if it had been a passenger.  But, doctor or no, I'll make
a good guess that Tom won't see to-morrow.  He'll die on a Sunday,
will poor Tom; and they do say that's fortunate.'

'Did Tom see him that did it?' asked Jonathan.

'Well, he saw him,' replied Sam, 'but not to swear by.  Said he was
a very tall man, and very big, and had a 'ankerchief about his
face, and a very quick shot, and sat his horse like a thorough
gentleman, as he is.'

'A gentleman!' cried Nance.  'The dirty knave!'

'Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,' returned the ostler;
'that's what I mean by a gentleman.'

'You don't know much of them, then,' said Nance.

'A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing.  I call my uncle
a better gentleman than any thief.'

'And you would be right,' said Mr. Archer.

'How many snuff-boxes did he get?' asked Jonathan.

'O, dang me if I know,' said Sam; 'I didn't take an inventory.'

'I will go back with you, if you please,' said Mr. Archer.  'I
should like to see poor Oglethorpe.  He has behaved well.'

'At your service, sir,' said Sam, jumping to his feet.  'I dare to
say a gentleman like you would not forget a poor fellow like Tom--
no, nor a plain man like me, sir, that went without his sleep to
nurse him.  And excuse me, sir,' added Sam, 'you won't forget about
the letter neither?'

'Surely not,' said Mr. Archer.

Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret of the
inn.  The rain soaked in places through the roof and fell in minute
drops; there was but one small window; the beds were occupied by
servants, the air of the garret was both close and chilly.  Mr.
Archer's heart sank at the threshold to see a man lying perhaps
mortally hurt in so poor a sick-room, and as he drew near the low
bed he took his hat off.  The guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-
looking soul with a thick lip and a broad nose, comically turned
up; his cheeks were crimson, and when Mr. Archer laid a finger on
his brow he found him burning with fever.

'I fear you suffer much,' he said, with a catch in his voice, as he
sat down on the bedside.

'I suppose I do, sir,' returned Oglethorpe; 'it is main sore.'

'I am used to wounds and wounded men,' returned the visitor.  'I
have been in the wars and nursed brave fellows before now; and, if
you will suffer me, I propose to stay beside you till the doctor
comes.'

'It is very good of you, sir, I am sure,' said Oglethorpe.  'The
trouble is they won't none of them let me drink.'

'If you will not tell the doctor,' said Mr. Archer, 'I will give
you some water.  They say it is bad for a green wound, but in the
Low Countries we all drank water when we found the chance, and I
could never perceive we were the worse for it.'

'Been wounded yourself, sir, perhaps?' called Oglethorpe.

'Twice,' said Mr. Archer, 'and was as proud of these hurts as any
lady of her bracelets.  'Tis a fine thing to smart for one's duty;
even in the pangs of it there is contentment.'

'Ah, well!' replied the guard, 'if you've been shot yourself, that
explains.  But as for contentment, why, sir, you see, it smarts, as
you say.  And then, I have a good wife, you see, and a bit of a
brat--a little thing, so high.'

'Don't move,' said Mr. Archer.

'No, sir, I will not, and thank you kindly,' said Oglethorpe.  'At
York they are.  A very good lass is my wife--far too good for me.
And the little rascal--well, I don't know how to say it, but he
sort of comes round you.  If I were to go, sir, it would be hard on
my poor girl--main hard on her!'

'Ay, you must feel bitter hardly to the rogue that laid you here,'
said Archer.

'Why, no, sir, more against Engleton and the passengers,' replied
the guard.  'He played his hand, if you come to look at it; and I
wish he had shot worse, or me better.  And yet I'll go to my grave
but what I covered him,' he cried.  'It looks like witchcraft.
I'll go to my grave but what he was drove full of slugs like a
pepper-box.'

'Quietly,' said Mr. Archer, 'you must not excite yourself.  These
deceptions are very usual in war; the eye, in the moment of alert,
is hardly to be trusted, and when the smoke blows away you see the
man you fired at, taking aim, it may be, at yourself.  You should
observe, too, that you were in the dark night, and somewhat dazzled
by the lamps, and that the sudden stopping of the mail had jolted
you.  In such circumstances a man may miss, ay, even with a
blunder-buss, and no blame attach to his marksmanship.' . . .




THE YOUNG CHEVALIER




PROLOGUE--THE WINE-SELLER'S WIFE



There was a wine-seller's shop, as you went down to the river in
the city of the Anti-popes.  There a man was served with good wine
of the country and plain country fare; and the place being clean
and quiet, with a prospect on the river, certain gentlemen who
dwelt in that city in attendance on a great personage made it a
practice (when they had any silver in their purses) to come and eat
there and be private.

They called the wine-seller Paradou.  He was built more like a
bullock than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour, and
with a hand like a baby for size.  Marie-Madeleine was the name of
his wife; she was of Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor
was any fairer than herself.  She was tall, being almost of a
height with Paradou; full-girdled, point-device in every form, with
an exquisite delicacy in the face; her nose and nostrils a delight
to look at from the fineness of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a
hair's-breadth inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid
on even like a flower's.  A faint rose dwelt in it, as though she
had been found unawares bathing, and had blushed from head to foot.
She was of a grave countenance, rarely smiling; yet it seemed to be
written upon every part of her that she rejoiced in life.  Her
husband loved the heels of her feet and the knuckles of her
fingers; he loved her like a glutton and a brute; his love hung
about her like an atmosphere; one that came by chance into the
wine-shop was aware of that passion; and it might be said that by
the strength of it the woman had been drugged or spell-bound.  She
knew not if she loved or loathed him; he was always in her eyes
like something monstrous--monstrous in his love, monstrous in his
person, horrific but imposing in his violence; and her sentiment
swung back and forward from desire to sickness.  But the mean,
where it dwelt chiefly, was an apathetic fascination, partly of
horror; as of Europa in mid ocean with her bull.

On the 10th November 1749 there sat two of the foreign gentlemen in
the wine-seller's shop.  They were both handsome men of a good
presence, richly dressed.  The first was swarthy and long and lean,
with an alert, black look, and a mole upon his cheek.  The other
was more fair.  He seemed very easy and sedate, and a little
melancholy for so young a man, but his smile was charming.  In his
grey eyes there was much abstraction, as of one recalling fondly
that which was past and lost.  Yet there was strength and swiftness
in his limbs; and his mouth set straight across his face, the under
lip a thought upon side, like that of a man accustomed to resolve.
These two talked together in a rude outlandish speech that no
frequenter of that wine-shop understood.  The swarthy man answered
to the name of Ballantrae; he of the dreamy eyes was sometimes
called Balmile, and sometimes MY LORD, or MY LORD GLADSMUIR; but
when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as if in
jesting, not without bitterness.

The mistral blew in the city.  The first day of that wind, they say
in the countries where its voice is heard, it blows away all the
dust, the second all the stones, and the third it blows back others
from the mountains.  It was now come to the third day; outside the
pebbles flew like hail, and the face of the river was puckered, and
the very building-stones in the walls of houses seemed to be
curdled with the savage cold and fury of that continuous blast.  It
could be heard to hoot in all the chimneys of the city; it swept
about the wine-shop, filling the room with eddies; the chill and
gritty touch of it passed between the nearest clothes and the bare
flesh; and the two gentlemen at the far table kept their mantles
loose about their shoulders.  The roughness of these outer hulls,
for they were plain travellers' cloaks that had seen service, set
the greater mark of richness on what showed below of their laced
clothes; for the one was in scarlet and the other in violet and
white, like men come from a scene of ceremony; as indeed they were.

It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their influence
on the scene which followed, and which makes the prologue of our
tale.  For a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the
wine-shop and eat a meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with
a comrade; more often alone, when he would sit and dream and drum
upon the table, and the thoughts would show in the man's face in
little glooms and lightenings, like the sun and the clouds upon a
water.  For a long time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart.
His sadness, the beauty of his smile when by any chance he
remembered her existence and addressed her, the changes of his mind
signalled forth by an abstruse play of feature, the mere fact that
he was foreign and a thing detached from the local and the
accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected her.  Kindness was
ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch of an occasion to
effervesce and crystallise.  Now Balmile had come hitherto in a
very poor plain habit; and this day of the mistral, when his mantle
was just open, and she saw beneath it the glancing of the violet
and the velvet and the silver, and the clustering fineness of the
lace, it seemed to set the man in a new light, with which he shone
resplendent to her fancy.

The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and continuity of
its outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon man's whole
periphery, accelerated the functions of the mind.  It set thoughts
whirling, as it whirled the trees of the forest; it stirred them up
in flights, as it stirred up the dust in chambers.  As brief as
sparks, the fancies glittered and succeeded each other in the mind
of Marie-Madeleine; and the grave man with the smile, and the
bright clothes under the plain mantle, haunted her with incongruous
explanations.  She considered him, the unknown, the speaker of an
unknown tongue, the hero (as she placed him) of an unknown romance,
the dweller upon unknown memories.  She recalled him sitting there
alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet she was sure he was not
stupid.  She recalled one day when he had remained a long time
motionless, with parted lips, like one in the act of starting up,
his eyes fixed on vacancy.  Any one else must have looked foolish;
but not he.  She tried to conceive what manner of memory had thus
entranced him; she forged for him a past; she showed him to herself
in every light of heroism and greatness and misfortune; she brooded
with petulant intensity on all she knew and guessed of him.  Yet,
though she was already gone so deep, she was still unashamed, still
unalarmed; her thoughts were still disinterested; she had still to
reach the stage at which--beside the image of that other whom we
love to contemplate and to adorn--we place the image of ourself and
behold them together with delight.

She stood within the counter, her hands clasped behind her back,
her shoulders pressed against the wall, her feet braced out.  Her
face was bright with the wind and her own thoughts; as a fire in a
similar day of tempest glows and brightens on a hearth, so she
seemed to glow, standing there, and to breathe out energy.  It was
the first time Ballantrae had visited that wine-seller's, the first
time he had seen the wife; and his eyes were true to her.

'I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty
tavern,' he said at last.

'I believe it is propinquity,' returned Balmile.

'You play dark,' said Ballantrae, 'but have a care!  Be more frank
with me, or I will cut you out.  I go through no form of qualifying
my threat, which would be commonplace and not conscientious.  There
is only one point in these campaigns:  that is the degree of
admiration offered by the man; and to our hostess I am in a posture
to make victorious love.'

'If you think you have the time, or the game worth the candle,'
replied the other with a shrug.

'One would suppose you were never at the pains to observe her,'
said Ballantrae.

'I am not very observant,' said Balmile.  'She seems comely.'

'You very dear and dull dog!' cried Ballantrae; 'chastity is the
most besotting of the virtues.  Why, she has a look in her face
beyond singing!  I believe, if you was to push me hard, I might
trace it home to a trifle of a squint.  What matters?  The height
of beauty is in the touch that's wrong, that's the modulation in a
tune.  'Tis the devil we all love; I owe many a conquest to my
mole'--he touched it as he spoke with a smile, and his eyes
glittered;--'we are all hunchbacks, and beauty is only that kind of
deformity that I happen to admire.  But come!  Because you are
chaste, for which I am sure I pay you my respects, that is no
reason why you should be blind.  Look at her, look at the delicious
nose of her, look at her cheek, look at her ear, look at her hand
and wrist--look at the whole baggage from heels to crown, and tell
me if she wouldn't melt on a man's tongue.'

As Ballantrae spoke, half jesting, half enthusiastic, Balmile was
constrained to do as he was bidden.  He looked at the woman,
admired her excellences, and was at the same time ashamed for
himself and his companion.  So it befell that when Marie-Madeleine
raised her eyes, she met those of the subject of her contemplations
fixed directly on herself with a look that is unmistakable, the
look of a person measuring and valuing another--and, to clench the
false impression, that his glance was instantly and guiltily
withdrawn.  The blood beat back upon her heart and leaped again;
her obscure thoughts flashed clear before her; she flew in fancy
straight to his arms like a wanton, and fled again on the instant
like a nymph.  And at that moment there chanced an interruption,
which not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last
consecration on her now articulate love.

Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the
last refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his
passage in the wind.  It was to be judged he had come from the same
formal gathering at which the others had preceded him; and perhaps
that he had gone there in the hope to meet with them, for he came
up to Ballantrae with unceremonious eagerness.

'At last, here you are!' he cried in French.  'I thought I was to
miss you altogether.'

The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings, laid
his hand on his companion's shoulder.

'My lord,' said he, 'allow me to present to you one of my best
friends and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount Gladsmuir.'

The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.

'Monseigneur,' said Balmile, 'je n'ai pas la pretention de
m'affubler d'un titre que la mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me
permet pas de porter comma il sied.  Je m'appelle, pour vous
servir, Blair de Balmile tout court.'  [My lord, I have not the
effrontery to cumber myself with a title which the ill fortunes of
my king will not suffer me to bear the way it should be.  I call
myself, at your service, plain Blair of Balmile.]

'Monsieur le Vicomte ou monsieur Bler' de Balmail,' replied the
newcomer, 'le nom n'y fait rien, et l'on connait vos beaux faits.'
[The name matters nothing, your gallant actions are known.]

A few more ceremonies, and these three, sitting down together to
the table, called for wine.  It was the happiness of Marie-
Madeleine to wait unobserved upon the prince of her desires.  She
poured the wine, he drank of it; and that link between them seemed
to her, for the moment, close as a caress.  Though they lowered
their tones, she surprised great names passing in their
conversation, names of kings, the names of de Gesvre and Belle-
Isle; and the man who dealt in these high matters, and she who was
now coupled with him in her own thoughts, seemed to swim in mid air
in a transfiguration.  Love is a crude core, but it has singular
and far-reaching fringes; in that passionate attraction for the
stranger that now swayed and mastered her, his harsh
incomprehensible language, and these names of grandees in his talk,
were each an element.

The Frenchman stayed not long, but it was plain he left behind him
matter of much interest to his companions; they spoke together
earnestly, their heads down, the woman of the wine-shop totally
forgotten; and they were still so occupied when Paradou returned.

This man's love was unsleeping.  The even bluster of the mistral,
with which he had been combating some hours, had not suspended,
though it had embittered, that predominant passion.  His first look
was for his wife, a look of hope and suspicion, menace and humility
and love, that made the over-blooming brute appear for the moment
almost beautiful.  She returned his glance, at first as though she
knew him not, then with a swiftly waxing coldness of intent; and at
last, without changing their direction, she had closed her eyes.

There passed across her mind during that period much that Paradou
could not have understood had it been told to him in words:
chiefly the sense of an enlightening contrast betwixt the man who
talked of kings and the man who kept a wine-shop, betwixt the love
she yearned for and that to which she had been long exposed like a
victim bound upon the altar.  There swelled upon her, swifter than
the Rhone, a tide of abhorrence and disgust.  She had succumbed to
the monster, humbling herself below animals; and now she loved a
hero, aspiring to the semi-divine.  It was in the pang of that
humiliating thought that she had closed her eyes.

Paradou--quick as beasts are quick, to translate silence--felt the
insult through his blood; his inarticulate soul bellowed within him
for revenge.  He glanced about the shop.  He saw the two
indifferent gentlemen deep in talk, and passed them over:  his
fancy flying not so high.  There was but one other present, a
country lout who stood swallowing his wine, equally unobserved by
all and unobserving--to him he dealt a glance of murderous
suspicion, and turned direct upon his wife.  The wine-shop had lain
hitherto, a space of shelter, the scene of a few ceremonial
passages and some whispered conversation, in the howling river of
the wind; the clock had not yet ticked a score of times since
Paradou's appearance; and now, as he suddenly gave tongue, it
seemed as though the mistral had entered at his heels.

'What ails you, woman?' he cried, smiting on the counter.