Sir John Constantine Part 16

"You treated him with all respect, I hope?"

"With all the respect in the world, sir. But it scarcely matters, since he has cast me off, and without a penny."

"Why, then, you can come too!" cried my father, gripping him by the hand. "Bravo, Prosper! that makes five; and with Billy Priske, when we can find him, six; and that leaves but one to find before dinner-time." He pulled out his watch. "Lord!" he cried, "and 'tis high time to feel hungry, too. If this lady now will repeat her hospitable offer--"

I thought at the moment, and I thought once or twice during the meal downstairs, that my father was taxing this poor woman's hospitality.

I doubted that he, himself so carelessly hospitable, might forget to offer her payment; and lingered after the others had trooped into the pa.s.sage, with purpose to remind him privately.

"Come," said he, and made a notion to leave, still without offering to pay. On the threshold I had almost turned to whisper to him when the woman came after and touched his arm.

"Nay, Sir John," said she, eagerly, in a low hoa.r.s.e voice, "let the lad hear me thank you. He is old enough to understand and clean enough to profit. Shut the door, child. You know me, Sir John?"

My father bent his head. "I never forget a face," said he, quietly.

"Take notice of that, boy. Your father remembers me, whom to my knowledge he never saw but once, and then as a magistrate, when he sat to judge me. Never mind the offence, lad. I am a sinful woman, and the punishment was--"

"Nay, nay!" put in my father, gently.

"The punishment was," she continued, hardening her voice, "to strip me to the waist and whip me in public. The law allowed this, and this they would have done to me. But your father, being chairman of the bench--for the offence lay outside the borough--would have none of it, and argued and forced three other magistrates to give way.

Little good he did, you may say, seeing that my name is such in Falmouth that, only by entering my door, the Mayor just now did what all his cleverness could never have done--stopped a riot by a silly brutal laugh--the chief magistrate taking shelter with Moll Whiteaway! You can't get below that for fun, as the folk will take it; and yet I say your father did good, for he saved me from the worst. And to-day of his goodness he has not remembered my sins, but treated me as though they were not; and today, as only a good man can, he goes from my house, no man thinking to laugh except at his simplicity, even though it were known that I kissed his hand.

G.o.d bless you, Sir John, and teach your son to be merciful to women!"

My father was ever so shy of his own kind actions that, when detected by chance or painfully tracked out in one, he kept always a quotation ready to justify what pure impulse had prompted. So now, as we hurried across the deserted Market Strand to catch up with the other three, he must needs brazen things out with the authority of Bishop Jeremy Taylor.

"It was a maxim of that excellent divine," said he, "that Christian censure should never be used to make a sinner desperate; for then he either sinks under the burden or grows impudent and tramples upon it.

A charitable modest remedy, says he, preserves that which is virtue's girdle-fear and blushing. Honour, dear lad, is the peculiar counsellor of well-bred natures, and these are few; but almost in all men you will find a certain modesty toward sin, and were I a king my judges should be warned that their duty is to chasten; whereas by punishing immoderately they can but effect the exact opposite."

We found our trio waiting for us on the far side of the square; and, having fetched our horses and left an order at the inn for Billy Priske on his return to mount and follow us, wended our way out of the town. The streets on this side were deserted and mournful, the shopkeepers having fastened their shutters for fear of the mob, of whose present doings no sound reached us but a faint murmuring hubbub borne on the afternoon air from the northward--that is, from the direction of the Green Bank and the Penryn Road.

My father led the way at a foot's pace, and seemed to ride pondering, for his chin was sunk on his chest and he had pulled his hat-brim well over his eyes (but this may have been against the July sun).

After him tramped Mr. Fett in eager converse with the little p.a.w.nbroker, now questioning him, now halting to regard him, as a man who has dug up a sudden treasure and for the moment can only gaze at it and hug himself. Nat and I brought up the rear, he striding at my stirrup and pouring forth the tale of his adventures since we parted.

A dozen times he rehea.r.s.ed the scene of the parental quarrel, and interrupted each rehearsal with a dozen anxious questions. "Ought he to have given this answer?--to have uttered that defiance? Did I think he had shown self-control; Had he treated the old gentleman with becoming respect? Would I put myself in his place? Suppose it had been my own father, now--"

"But yours, lad, is a father in a thousand," he broke off bitterly.

"I had never a notion that father and son could be friends, as are you and he. He is splendid--splendid!"

I glanced at him quickly and turned my face aside, suspecting that he took my father for a madman, and was kindly concealing the discovery.

Nevertheless I hardened my voice to answer--

"You will say so when you know him better. And my Uncle Gervase runs him a good second."

"Faith, then, I wish you'd persuade your uncle to adopt me. I'm not envious, Prosper, in a general way, but your luck gives me a duced orphanly feeling. Have I been over-hasty? That is the question; whether 'twas n.o.bler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of accusing conscience or to up and have it out with the old man."

"Pardon me, gentlemen"--Mr. Fett wheeled about suddenly on the road ahead of us--"but it was by accident that I overheard you, and by a singular coincidence at that moment I happened to be discussing the same subject with Mr. Badc.o.c.k here."

"What subject?"

"Missiles, sir. It appears that, when his blood is up, Mr. Badc.o.c.k finds himself absolutely careless of missiles. He declares that, with a sense of smell as acute as most men's, he was unaware to-day of having been struck with a rotten egg until I, at ten paces'

distance, drew his attention to it. Now, that is a degree of courage--insensibility--call it what you will--to which I make no pretence. The cut and thrust, gentlemen, the couched lance, even, within limits, the battering ram, would have, I feel confident, comparatively few terrors for me. But missiles I abominate.

Drawing, as I am bound to do, my antic.i.p.ations of the tented field from experience gathered--I say it literally, gathered--before the footlights, I confess to some sympathy with the gentleman who a.s.sured Harry Percy that but for these vile guns he would himself have been a soldier. You will not misunderstand me. I believe on my faith that as a military man I was born out of my time. The scythed chariots of Boadicea, for instance, must have been d.a.m.ned inconvenient; yet I can conceive myself jumping 'em. But a stone, as I learnt in my boyhood--a stone, sirs, and _a fortiori_ a bullet--"

"Hist!" broke in my father, at the same moment reining up.

"Prosper, what do you make of that noise, up yonder?"

I listened. "It sounds to me like a heavy cart--"

"Or a waggon. To my hearing there are two horses."

"And runaway ones, by the shouting."

We had reached a point of the road, not far from home, where a steep lane cut across it: a track seldom used but scored with old ruts, sunk between hedges full sixteen feet high, leading down from a back gate of Constantine and a deserted lodge to a quay by the waterside.

Not once in three months, within my remembrance, did cart or waggon pa.s.s along this lane, which indeed grew a fine crop of gra.s.s and docks between the ruts.

"Nay," said my father, after a few seconds, "I gave you a false alarm, gentlemen. The shouting, whatever it means, is over.

Your pardon, Mr. Fett, that I interrupted you."

"Sir," said Mr. Fett, stepping put him to reconnoitre the lane, "I was but remarking what a number of the wise have observed before me, that a stone which has left the hand is in the hands of the dev--"

He ducked his head with a cry as a stone whizzed past him and within a foot of it. On the instant the loud rattle and thunder of cartwheels broke forth again, and now but a short distance up the lane; also a voice almost as loudly vociferating; and, almost before Mr. Fett could run back to us, a whole volley of stones flew hurtling across the road.

"Hi, there! Halt!" My father struck spur and rode forward, in time to catch at and check the leader of two horses slithering downhill tandem-fashion before the weight of a heavy cart. "Confound you, sir! What the devil d'you mean by flinging stones in this manner across the middle of the King's highway."

The man--he was one of the seamen of the _Gauntlet_--stood up in the cart upon a load of stones and grinned. In one hand he gripped the reins, in the other a fistful of flints.

"Your honour's pardon," said he, lifting his forearm and drawing the back of it across his dripping brow, "but the grey mare for'rad won't pull, and the whip here won't reach her. I couldn't think upon no better way."

"You mean to tell me you have been pelting that poor brute all down the lane?"

"I couldn't think upon no better way," the seaman repeated wistfully, almost plaintively. "She's what you might call sensitive to stones."

"Intelligent beast!" commented Mr. Fett. "And I bought that mare only six months ago!" (In truth my father had found the poor creature wandering the roads and starving, cast off by her owner as past work, and had purchased her out of mere humanity for thirty shillings.)

"But what business have you to be driving my cart and horses?" he demanded. "And what's the meaning of these stones you're carting?"

"Ballast, your honour."

"Ballast?"

"I don't know how much of it'll ever arrive at this rate," confessed the seaman, dropping the handful of flints and scratching his head.

"Tis buying speed at a terrible cost of jettison. But Cap'n Pomery's last order to me was to make haste about it, if we're to catch to-morrow's tide."

"Captain Pomery sent you for these stones?"

"Why, Lord love your honour, a vessel can't discharge two dozen Papist monks and cattle and implements to correspond without wantin'

_something_ in their place. Nice flat stones, too, the larger-sized be, and not liable to shift in a sea-way."

But here another strange noise drew our eyes up the lane, as an old man in a smock-frock--a pensioner of the estate, and by name John Worthyvale--came hobbling round the corner and down the hill towards us, using his long-handled road hammer for a staff and uttering shrill tremulous cries of rage.

"Vengeance, Sir John! Vengeance for my l'il heap o' stones!"