A Gentleman Player Part 15

"Willingly, an thou'lt engage to sing in thy turn," he replied.

She gave her promise, thinking she would not have to keep it; for when a gentleman in wine becomes vocally inclined, he is apt to go on like a wound-up clock till he be stopped, or till he run down into slumber.

So Hal began, with Shakespeare's "O mistress mine, where are you roaming?" as a song whose line, "That can sing both high and low," was appropriate to their recent subject. And this led naturally to the song "It was a lover and his la.s.s," which in turn called up Ben Jonson's song on a kiss, from the masque of "Cynthia's Revels." Then something gave a convivial shift to Hal's thoughts, and he offered King Henry VIII.'s "Pastime with good company," from which he went to the old drinking song from "Gammer Gurton's Needle."

Mistress Hazlehurst, having perceived that singing hindered his drinking, though each lapse between songs was filled with a hasty draught, was now willing enough to keep her promise; and she made bold to remind him of it. He was quite eager to hear her, though it should require silence on his own part. She sang Shakespeare's "When icicles hang by the wall," in a low and melodious voice, of much beauty in a limited range,--a voice of the same quality as her ordinary speaking tones. Seeing that Hal, who gazed in admiration, broke his own inaction by constant applications to the flagon, which the clever Francis had succeeded in filling at the bar, she followed this song immediately with "Blow, blow, thou winter wind."

Hal was now ready to volunteer with "Under the greenwood tree," but she cut him short, and drove him to repeated uses of the cup, by starting John Heywood's song of "The green willow," which she selected as suiting her purpose by reason of its great length.

When this was at last finished, Hal, who had been regarding her steadily with eyes that sometimes blinked for drowsiness, opened his mouth to put in practice a compliment he had for some minutes been meditating,--that of singing "Who is Sylvia?" in such manner as should imply that Mistress Hazlehurst embodied all the excellences of her who "excelled each mortal thing upon the dull earth dwelling." She silenced him at the outset by taking up Heywood's "Be merry, friends," at which, despite how much he admired her face and was thrilled by her voice, he sat back in resignation; for the old song she had this time hit upon was as nearly endless as it was monotonous. Hal's nurse had many times droned him to sleep with it, in his infancy.

And now its somnolent effect was as great as ever. Save for her voice, in the unvarying rhythm of the countless four-line stanzas marked by the refrain. "Be merry, friends!" at the end of each, and for a frequent moan or whine of the wind without, the utmost stillness reigned. Francis had effaced himself on a high-backed seat in a dark corner of the fireplace. The candles burned dimly for want of snuffing, and they were just so far from Hal's arm that, in his drowsy state, it was too great an effort to reach them. Indeed, it had now become too great an effort to draw the wine flagon toward him. His brain swam a little. He sat back limp in his oaken settle, his head fell more and more heavily toward his breast. Things became vaguer and vaguer before him; the face from whose lips the soporific melody proceeded was blended more and more with the ambient shadows. His eyelids closed.

She continued the song more softly, a triumphant light slowly increasing in her eyes. At last her voice was still. The supposed Sir Valentine moved not, lifted not his head, opened not his eyes. Only his regular breathing, the heavy breathing of vinous stupor, was heard in the room.

Mistress Hazlehurst rose without noise.

"He will not be in riding mood for ten hours to come," she said, quietly, to Francis. "An his men waken him, he'll be for calling them hard names, and off to sleep again! G.o.d-'a'-mercy, what an ocean of wine hath he swallowed in three short hours! Come. Francis, we may sleep with ease of mind to-night. He is stayed beyond even the will to go on. And I thank heaven, for I am well-nigh as drowsy, and as loath to ride in this weather, as he must be!"

It was sleepily indeed that she stepped, with as little sound as could be, over the crackling rushes to the door. To keep her enemy in the drinking mood, and to dissemble her purpose, she had taken an unusual quant.i.ty of wine herself. Ladies did not drink as much in Elizabeth's outwardly decent reign as they came to drink a few years later, under Scottish Jeames, when, if Sir John Harrington lied not in 1606, those of the court did "abandon their sobriety" and were "seen to roll about in intoxication." And Mistress Hazlehurst was the last woman in the world to violate the prevalent seemliness under the virgin queen. But she had sipped enough to augment the languor induced by her recent exertions.

She put a hand upon the door-post to support herself as she approached it.

There was a wild, swift beating of horses' hoofs on the road outside; an abrupt stoppage just before the inn; a shrill whistle, and this shout from Anthony Underhill:

"What, ho! Halloo, halloo!"

Hal raised his head, and looked drowsily around with blinking eyes.

There was a noise overhead of a heavy tread,--that of Captain Bottle, responding to the alarm. In a trice old Kit was heard clearing the stairs at a bound, and then seen dashing through the pa.s.sage and out into the darkness. He had unbarred the outer door with a single movement.

Hal stared inquiringly at Mistress Hazlehurst. Her eyes had a glow of confident expectation. That was her blunder.

Her look told him all,--that she had supped with him, sung for him, incited him to drink, in order that he might be unfit for flight or action. He sprang to his feet, clapped on his hat, threw off his tipsiness with one backward jerk of the shoulders; was himself again, with clear eyes and strong, steady limbs.

"To horse, madam, if you would still ride with us!" he cried. "I have some thirty miles or so to go to-night!"

And he strode past her, and out after Kit Bottle.

"'Tis Barnet's men, methinks, by the sound of the horses yonder," said Anthony, composedly, pointing southward, as Hal rose into the saddle.

Hal looked back toward the open door of the inn. In a moment Anne came out with Francis, who ran at once to the shed wherein her horses were.

In the doorway between parlor and pa.s.sage she had undergone a moment of sickening chagrin. Not only had she failed ridiculously a second time, but she must now abandon her clutch upon her enemy, or face with him that thirty miles of night ride in biting weather! Francis looked at her for commands. She tightened her lips again, imitated Hal's own motion of casting away la.s.situde, drew her cloak close around her, put up her hood, and hastened out to the windy night.

Hal made great stir with his horses before moving off, that the inn people might be awakened and some of them note which road he took. This precaution, used for the benefit of Roger Barnet, gave Anne time to join Hal's party.

When the pursuivant and his fellows rode up, soon afterward, on half dead horses, that stumbled before the inn, the fugitives were well forward on the Nottingham road. It was a bitter, black night.

"Fellow travellers still!" quoth Master Marryott, to the dark figure that rode galloping, with flying cloak, beside him.

"And shall be till I see you caught, though I must ride sleepless till I drop!" was the reply.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CONSTABLE OF CLOWN.

"I am a wise fellow; and, which is more, an officer; ... and one that knows the law, go to."--_Much Ado about Nothing._

It was one hour after midnight, when the fellow travellers left the lone inn near the Newark cross-road. They had arrived there at eight o'clock in the evening. During their stay, Hal had obtained no sleep but that which he had taken at the table, and which had lasted but a few minutes.

Anne had slept perhaps an hour before going down to the parlor. The reader will remember the fatigued condition in which both had come to the inn. Their next rest could not be had until a long and hard ride should achieve for them a probable gain of some hours over the hors.e.m.e.n whom Anthony Underhill had heard. For this gain, Hal counted on the fact that Barnet's horses, more recently ridden, could not be as fresh as his own, and on Barnet's constant necessity of pausing at each branching of the road, to make inquiries. Such were the conditions under which the second full day of the flight began.

It was now a time for drawing on that reserved energy which manifests itself only in seasons of strait. Hal was aware, from past experience, of this stored-up stock of endurance, that serves its possessor on occasions of extremity. To Anne, its existence within her must have come as a new disclosure. Hal, as a man of gentle rearing, had for her a man's compa.s.sion for a woman to whom this discovery is made by hardship undergone for the first time. And yet, so does human nature abound in apparent contradictions, he had a kind of satisfaction, almost gleeful, at the toils she had brought upon herself by attempting to overreach him. For, had she used in sleep the time she had spent in that attempt, had she not taken sufficient of the wine to enervate herself somewhat, she would now have been in fresh vigor for the wearing ride before her.

The riders had a slight check at Nottingham, owing to a difference of opinion between Master Marryott and the watch, as to the propriety of their pa.s.sing through the town at such an hour of the night. Hal was in instant readiness for any outcry on the part of Mistress Hazlehurst. But he looked so resolute, Kit Bottle so formidable, Anthony Underhill so rigid with latent fighting force, that Anne doubtless saw little to be gained from a conflict between her enemy and the unaided dotards of the night watch. A gold piece, to reinforce a story explaining their early riding, proved the magic opener it commonly proves, and obtained a lantern from one of the watchmen, as well; and the fugitives rode free, northward into Sherwood forest.

It was lone riding, and toilsome, through the green-wood where Robin Hood and his outlaws had made merry, and past Newstead Abbey; and would have been next to impossible but for the lantern, with which the Puritan lighted up a few inches of the tree-roofed road ahead. Dawn found them near Mansfield, through which town they soon after pa.s.sed without stay, and proceeded into Derbyshire.

At seven o'clock, having covered twenty-nine miles in the six hours since their last setting out, and all but Kit Bottle being ready to fall from their saddles, they stopped before a humble hostelry at Scardiff.

They could get but one fresh horse here. Bottle took this one, upon which to ride back to a suitable spot for watching the road behind. The others of the party had to be content with giving their nearly used-up animals what rest might be had in saddle and bridle, and under a penthouse roof at one end of the inn. Hal, before entering the inn, bought the vigilance of a hostler toward keeping his horses in readiness for further going, and against any attempt on Anne's part, through Francis, to disable them while he slept; though, indeed, he saw little likelihood of her employing such means, both she and her page being in the utmost need of immediate sleep; and she unable to purchase treachery of the inn folk, for, as he observed when she paid the hostess in advance, her purse was now sadly fallen away. Hal foresaw, from this last circ.u.mstance, two things: a certainty of her resorting soon to desperate measures against him, and an opportunity for his chivalry to display itself in an offer to pay her charges while she continued with deadly purpose to accompany him.

As Hal was about to follow Anne into the house, he was greeted by a pleasant-eyed old fellow who had been sitting on a bench by the door, with a mug of ale at his side; an old fellow whose frieze jacket and breeches proclaimed a yeoman, and whose presence on the outer bench on so cold a morning betokened a lively curiosity as to the doings of his fellow-men.

"G.o.d save your worship!" said he, in a mild little voice, rising and bowing with great respect for gentility. "I dare say your honor hasna'

fell in with the rascals, on your worship's travels?"

Seeing but a rustical officiousness and news hunger in this speech, Hal paused, and asked:

"What rascals, goodman?"

"Them that ha' pestered travellers, and householders, too, so bad of late, on roads hereabout. Marry, 'tis well to go in plenty company, when robbers ride in such number together! They make parlous wayfaring for gentlefolk, your worship!"

"You mean that a band of highway robbers, more than common bold, hath been in the neighborhood?"

"Ay, and I would any man might say the rogues were yet out of it! They have terrified constables, and the justices sleep over the matter, and the sheriff hath his affairs elsewhere; so G.o.d look after honest travellers, say I, sir!"

"You say well," replied Marryott, casting a glance at Anne, who also had stopped to listen to the countryman's words. She took from Hal's countenance a sense of the further obligation she must needs be under for his protection, now that a particular known danger was at hand; but this sense only moved her to the inward resolve of ending alike that obligation and their northward travel, by some supreme effort to entrap him. He read her thought in her face, and his look defied her. She hastened to her room, he to his; she, attended by Francis, he by Anthony Underhill.

Marryott and Anthony soon despatched the scant meal brought to their chamber. Before placing himself for sleep, Harry looked into the pa.s.sage. The boy Francis was at his customary post outside his mistress's door.

Hal and the Puritan were asleep before eight o'clock. At ten, Hal awoke.

After he had glanced out of the window, and seen no one about the inn, something--he knew not what--impelled him to take another view of the pa.s.sage. He did so; and this time he beheld no Francis.

He awakened Anthony, and the two stepped softly into the pa.s.sage. They stood for an instant before Mistress Hazlehurst's door, but heard no sound from within. Down-stairs they went, surveying the public room of the house as they pa.s.sed out to the open air. The room was empty. They hastened to the shed where the horses were. The horses were now but two,--Marryott's and Anthony's. Those of Mistress Hazlehurst and her page were gone.

With Hal's quick feeling of alarm, there came also a chilling sense of sudden loneliness. A void seemed to have opened around him.