[Transcriber's note: The source book had variant page headers. These have been changed to Sidenotes, positioned at the paragraph that seemed most pertinent.]
RUMSEY'S GUILT REVEALED TO THE KING—[Page 272]
Traitor or Patriot?
A Tale of the Rye-House Plot
BY
MARY C. ROWSELL
Author of "Thorndyke Manor" "The Pedlar and his Dog"
"Fisherman Grim" &c.
ILLUSTRATED BY C. O. MURRAY
AND C. J. STANILAND
BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW DUBLIN BOMBAY
PREFACE.
This story is for the most part a romantic rendering of a very obscure episode in the story of the reign of Charles the Second. It does not pretend to more historical accuracy than belongs to other romances which are spun from a thread of fact on a spool of fiction, but it may be mentioned that the scenes and the actors are mostly real, and it should be remembered that the story of the Rye-house Plot (1683) as told in authentic records is strangely vague. That there was a plot—that the King's house at Newmarket was burnt, or at least that part of it containing the royal apartments was on fire—and that Charles escaped, are the certain points of the story. The details are left very much to imagination, and as fancy is free, "one story is good till another is told."
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. ["Queen Ruth"]
II. [How a Mysterious Coal Barge came to the "King's Arms"]
III. [Maudlin Sweetapple]
IV. [The Old Rye House]
V. [How Master Rumbold told Lawrence Lee what the very Air might not hear]
VI. [Something in the Water]
VII. [Mistress Sheppard does not care for her Guests]
VIII. [Moonrakers]
IX. [In the Malt-yard]
X. [The Meeting on the Foot-bridge]
XI. ["He Died for his King"]
XII. [Mother Goose's Tales]
XIII. [The Sliding Panel]
XIV. [In the Warder's Room]
XV. [The Plot Thickens]
XVI. [A Little Difference of Opinion]
XVII. ["Dead Men tell no Tales"]
XVIII. ["God Save the King!"]
XIX. ["Stars and Garters"]
XX. ["A Friend in Need,"]
XXI. ["A Friend Indeed"]
XXII. [Our Sovereign Lord the King]
XXIII. ["Did you not Know?" she said]
XXIV. [Lawrence Sleeps on it]
XXV. [Supper at the "Silver Leopard"]
XXVI. ["Fire! Fire!"]
XXVII. ["In the Night all Cats are Gray"]
XXVIII. [Father and Daughter]
XXIX. [A Welcome Home]
XXX. [A Traveller from Newmarket]
XXXI. [Rumsey meets his Match]
XXXII. ["So, bring us to our palace; where we'll show
What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know"]
ILLUSTRATIONS.
[Rumsey's Guilt revealed to the King] ... Frontispiece
[Ruth and Lawrence succour Sheriff Goodenough]
[Lawrence Lee encounters Mr. Flippet]
TRAITOR OR PATRIOT?
A TALE OF THE RYE-HOUSE PLOT.
CHAPTER I.
"QUEEN RUTH."
May-day! None of your raw, drizzling, windy, nineteenth-century May-days, when folks, chilled to their marrow-bones, draw their old cloaks and coats about them and beg for a cozy blaze in place of the smart new "ornament for the fire-stove." No; a right-down, unmistakable, fine old English first of May, with a fine old English sun, gradually assuming roseate hues, and setting the heavens in a glow as he slopes westward behind the trees of Epping Forest, casting long shadows athwart the smooth-shaven grass-plot which carpets the forecourt of a fine old many-gabled Hertfordshire farm-house; while his dying brilliancy gilds the broken summits of the ruined gate-house overshadowing it, and illumines the fresh tints of the cowslips, and earliest summer flower-garlands, festooned with many a gay ribbon-knot about a May-pole towering to the cloudless sky. Around this a group of young folks are merrily footing it to the tune of "Phillida flouts me," which the fifers and fiddlers, mounted on a table beneath the big spreading yew-tree, are braying out with a will.
Spring-tide.
And the Queen of the May? Well, there she is; that—. But no; what differs more than taste on these points? and you must decide for yourself concerning the value of her claims on beauty. To you it may seem that many of those bright eyes, and laughing lips, and all the rest of it, rival the charms of Queen Ruth, Young Mistress Ruth Rumbold, the only child of Master Richard Rumbold of the Rye House, whose embattled gate-tower roof just shows yonder through the trees, with its gilded vane gleaming in the setting sun-rays. But then you do not know Ruth as all these good people have known her for fifteen years turned last Martlemas-tide, when she was left a motherless three months old babe to the care of Nurse Maudlin—Maudlin Sweetapple. Therefore it is hardly possible for you to conceive how entirely she has won the affection, even of creatures commonly reported to be destitute of it; such as Gammer Grip, the miserly old hunks who lives in the tumble-down hut over against the crossways, and of Growler and Grab, the Nether Hall watch-dogs and terrors of the neighbourhood.
The maltster's daughter.
So possibly it has come to pass, that love has clothed little Mistress Ruth about with a beauty strangers might not be able to see. For you, the gray eyes so frankly meeting yours from beneath their long dark lashes and the well-defined brows might be too grave and thoughtful, though indeed, quite to decide, you should wait till she speaks. The tip of that little nose, to please your classical notions, ought not possibly to assert its right of way as it does, in just the slightest of upward directions. Neither is her mouth of the "button-hole" or "two-cherries-on-one-stalk" order; though it is a handsome, sweet-tempered mouth enough, with its resolute yet mobile curves when the red lips part to speak or to smile. Then again, her hair is neither sunny nor raven-black, as it behoves heroines' hair to be; but then she did not look to be a heroine, this Hertfordshire maltster's daughter. Nor was it of the tawny red the fine ladies of those Merry Monarch days delighted to dye their locks; but just of an ordinary middling shade of brown, with the faint ripple of a natural curl on her white forehead, and something of the sort which defied the silken snood, and saucily insisted on straying at pleasure about the nape of her slender neck. As to her hands, they were as well moulded and serviceable a little pair as you might wish to see; and if they were a trifle browner than modish maidens might have considered altogether the thing, the sun, and the churn, and the delicious home-made bread, and such like things, were possibly responsible; but an ocean of milk of roses itself, could not have been so soft and sweet as their touch, if you needed help from them in any pain or trouble befalling you.
Doubtless as pretty a pair of feet as hers were to be found in the shire; but if Cinderella's own were smaller—IF they were—they could not have been prettier; and let her wear what she might, those partial people who knew her, declared that Ruth Rumbold's clothes always became her. Be that as it may, very certain it is that that kirtle of flowered chintz looped above the pink-and-white striped tiffany petticoat marvellously becomes her trim figure, and matches bravely with the red and snow white hawthorn wreath crowning her shapely head; and never, declare her loving lieges, was fairer Queen of May than this Queen Ruth.
The master of Nether Hall.
Her Majesty's partner in the dance now being so spiritedly carried on, is the lord of those May-day revels, Lawrence Lee, the young master of the Nether Hall farm. The natural order of the festivities would assign him the distinction; but in this particular instance it is no empty one. Left to his choosing, he would in every probability have invited Ruth, queen or no queen, to dance with him, for the two were fast friends; and such they had been since first Madam Lee, Lawrence's mother, had gone with her own five-year-old boy toddling beside her, across the fields to the Rye House; and there, taking the motherless baby Ruth in her kind arms, she had tenderly kissed the winsome face; and the little boy saw with wondering awe how some tears were left shining, bright as dewdrops on daisy flowers, upon the placid sleeping eyelids as she laid the little creature down again in its cradle. "We must love her dearly, for she has no mother," murmured Madam Lee; and so faithfully had Lawrence backed up her proposition from that day forward, that his affection had gone on growing with his own inches; and if he loved Ruth when he paddled, a barefooted urchin, along with the ducks about the reedy shallows of the moat, inveigling her to the like unlawful courses, she was every whit as dear to him now that he stood a good five feet eleven in his buff boots.
As handsome a young fellow as you were likely to meet on a long summer day's journey, with his lithe figure, dark eyes, and crisp locks, was this young master, now in fact and in right, of the Nether Hall farm and its broad acres, since he became turned of twenty-one last Shrovetide, as for quite two years before he had been to all intents and purposes; for his farming genius was inborn, and he was never happier than when he was busy among his barns and his hayfields.
A secret.
Possibly Lawrence Lee carries his liking for hard work so far, that holiday-making bores him. At all events, let him succeed as he may in cheating his guests generally into admiration of his high spirits, his efforts at gaiety are so exaggerated and fitful that Ruth is not for an instant to be imposed upon by them. And when at last the dance is done, and the syllabub is being handed round, and the two stroll away into the hornbeam maze, which brings you, if you are acquainted with its mysteries, to the field-path leading straight to the river's brink, the good folks would stare to see—or can it be the leafy shadows which so heavily darken those two young faces? Nay; the shadows are from within, as if black care were busy at their hearts. Yet with a difference; for while Lawrence's brow is brooding and abstracted, Ruth's eyes are full of wistful anxiety; and with her little hand tight in his clasp the two silently thread the maze, until suddenly the fiddles and fifes strike up afresh; and this time their tune is "Begone Dull Care."
"Let us go back," said Lawrence, breaking from his moody silence into a laugh of forced merriment, "and enjoy ourselves while we can. Come, Ruth, one more dance," and he seized her by both hands.
"No," she answered. "I must go, Lawrence; and at once. It will be almost dark now before I am home, and father will be angry."
On the River Lea.
Lee's brow fell again; but he only said, "As you will;" and they walked on till they reached the river's brink, where a small boat, newly painted, and decked with ribbon-tied cowslip and daisy posies, lay moored to a stout stake.
Lawrence's customary mode of transplanting Ruth from dry land to his little craft, was to catch her light figure in his stalwart arms and seat her in the stern "before she knew where she was," as she would say with terrific frowns. To-night, however, he soberly—did she fancy it was even a trifle absently?—assisted her in with his right hand. That this new order of things had not escaped her notice, some look in her face made him uncomfortably conscious.
"Is your majesty well placed?" he asked, affecting to laugh as he took the sculls and paddled out into mid-stream.
"We should be so," she replied with mock gravity, drawing up the rudder cords. "Thanks to your lordship's ceremony in seating us."
"That," returned he, breaking into a smile of unfeigned amusement at her lofty air, "is no more than what is due to your majesty's supreme rank from your majesty's most loyal subject."
"We find that good hearing," said Queen Ruth, "since we are convinced that my Lord Lawrence Lee always feels in his heart what his speech professes."
A troubled heart.
Her words were jestingly uttered; but the young man bit his lip hard; and his cheek grew white, as if some sharp sudden pain had stung him.
"Lawrence!" cried Ruth, starting and bending forward, "what is the matter? You are ill."
"Not I, dear heart," replied he, sweeping one hand hurriedly across his face.
"You are so pale," she insisted.
"Tired," laconically said he, vigorously plying his oars. "With that last measure, you know," he added in explanatory tones, as she opened her eyes rather contemptuously.
"For my part," she said, "I am not so delicate, and could have danced on till daylight again. Though in that case, 'tis clear, I should have had to be beholden to another partner," she added, with saucy composure.
"Not while I had a leg to stand on," briskly returned he. "But the fact is—well, I must be getting old, eh Ruth?"
"A whole quarter of a century. In four years more," interrupted she, with a ringing laugh.
"And that is ever so far on towards the half of a lifetime," he murmured thoughtfully to himself, "even supposing one is let live it through in peace. Well," he added, in a louder key, "'tis certain age brings a peck of cares, Ruth."
"Tell me some of yours," said she coaxingly, "so that I may share the burden of them. Shall I not?" she pleaded on in gentle earnest tones.
"Heaven forbid!" fervently ejaculated the young man. "Heaven forbid you should ever do that, child! There must come never a cloud to darken little Ruth's days."
Cross-purposes.
"And yet I think mine can scarce be all sunshine if yours are—mind! mind! There you go! Running right into the mudbank!"
"Then must my steerswoman be to blame," laughed he. "Pull to the right, Ruth."
"I hate secrets," she pouted, doing as he directed.
"There are some things," rejoined the superior creature, "girls can't understand."
"Then, to be sure, I think they cannot be good for boys—we crave your lordship's pardon—MEN we should have said;" and Ruth hemmed a little correcting cough—"to meddle with; And— There you are again. All in the osier tangle now!"
"Confound it! and whose fault but yours?" he cried petulantly. "Didn't I bid you keep to the right?"
"And how am I to see what I'm doing, pray, if you will bob your head about in that fashion?" retorted she, irately knitting her brows. "Lawrence, dear, what's your mighty secret?" she added, in honey-sweet tones.
"Who said I had one?" flashed he. "How stupid and disagreeable you are to-night, Ruth! What is it you want?"
"Only for you to be nice again. Dear, nice, happy, old Lawrence."
Stillness but not peace.
"Nice! happy! psha! bah! hang it! A fellow's nowhere with you girls if he isn't always up in the seventh heaven!" grunted Lawrence, and then he rowed on in sulky silence between the low-lying meadow banks, where the quiet oxen stood plunged knee-deep in the fresh young buttercup-studded grass, lazily sniffing in the fragrant evening air, all translucent with the greenish golden tints of mingled young moon-beams, and the last rays of the setting sun. Save the low chirp, chirp, twee of the birds settling to their nests among the pollard willows, and the ripple of the water about the boat's prow, not a sound broke the stillness, till a somewhat sharp bend of the river brought them in sight of a wooden bridge, overshadowed to its right by a thicket of tall beeches and brushwood; while leftwards, a narrow road threaded on across it to a second bridge, spanning another stream that gleamed gray and still as glass between straight high-lying banks scarcely twenty yards beyond; and so winding on, over a waste of level common land, till it was lost in distance.
Dimly discernible through the copse to the right of the first bridge were the walls of a quaintly-timbered, many-gabled, two-storied house, whose latticed casements and trellised porch gleamed in the night's soft radiance; whilst a huge sign, bearing the royal arms, swung in its carved oaken framework, which projected from between the windows of the upper storey, right across the narrow road above the lofty wall of red brick which ran facing the inn for some distance.
Master Rumbold on the watch
Close down on a tiny landing-stage, by the nearer bridge's foot, a man stood watching the approach of the boat with his one available eye. The other, blurred and blemished apparently past all service, aggravated the naturally stern and sinister expression of features passable and even handsome, to which his puritanical pot-hat, leathern-belted, black, close-fitting doublet and plain white linen collar lent no relief. Neither did the knitting of his sombre brows relax, but rather gathered more heavily, as Lee made fast the boat and Ruth sprang lightly to the bank.
CHAPTER II.
HOW A MYSTERIOUS COAL BARGE CAME TO THE "KING'S ARMS."
"You are late, girl," he said gloomily.
"Nay, father," answered Ruth, glancing from his face towards the still brilliant westward horizon. "'Tis not yet seven o'clock."
"Tush!" he rejoined impatiently. "I'll have no more of these gaddings. And hark you, young mistress, no more of these vanities neither;" and he looked as he spoke, in angry contempt at her dainty skirts. "In with you at once and lay them away. Or better still, cast them into the kitchen fire. And as for this," he went on, roughly clutching at her hawthorn wreath, and dragging it from her head, he flung it into the water, "Let that settle it."
A gloomy end to May-day.
Tears of grief and indignation sparkled into Ruth's eyes, as she watched the beautiful flowers whirled by the eddying tide into deep water; but by a strong effort she restrained herself, and only said in tones of gentle reproach, "'Twas my crown, father. They made me Queen of May."
"Queen! crown! forsooth! did they so?" he said, with a bitter smile. "How is it the very stones do not cry out against this restoring in our unhappy country of these mummings and pagan holidays? Is it not enough to be having queens—ay, and kings—of flesh and blood wantoning it at Whitehall, but we must be seeing modest maidens aping their antics, and behaving in this fashion?"
"Nay, Master Rumbold," said Lee, "our people desired to do Ruth an honour; and I think you should be proud."
"I should be prouder," returned Rumbold, turning irefully on the young man, "to see her in her winding-sheet, a pale white—Marry! and let me look at your face now, Mistress," he went on, snatching her roughly by the chin. "Ha! red as your gaudy flowers there! So! I guessed as much. And there has been romping, has there?"
"Nay, father; just a little turn or two at Hoodman Blind, and Hunt the Slipper."
"What next?" said Rumbold groaningly, and turning up his eye.
"And—and a measure," faltered the truthful Ruth.
"Dancing!" and now the stern eye glared.
"Only round—round the Maypole, father."
Rumbold's lips parted with a jerk, as if he was about to break into still sharper rebuke; but as his eye caught the expression of Lawrence's face he contented himself with reiterating his dismissal.
"Good night, father," said Ruth, lifting her face to his, but Rumbold did not, or affected not to see. He was standing absorbed in watching the approach of a big black coal-laden barge which now hove lumbering in sight through the middle span of the bridge.
The queen's crown goes down.
As the boat cleared into open stream again her huge black bows came athwart the poor drowning May garland, and swirled it deep down under water.
Whether the unfortunate wreath's destruction afforded Rumbold special pleasure, or that some other cause originated the grim smile slowly breaking on his gloomy lips, who shall say? The look at all events roused Lee's ire, and he said in tones of indignant reproach, which he seemed at small pains to conceal, "Your daughter bids you good-night, Master Rumbold."
The maltster started from his abstraction, and imprinting a cold kiss on Ruth's upturned brow, waved her away with a gesture of impatience, and resumed his contemplation of the barge.
Now, in Ruth's eyes coal-laden barges were things as ugly almost as they were common up and down their little silver Lea; and the rapt interest her father appeared to be taking in this one and particular specimen of its class, attracted her wonder and curiosity.
To her the boat seemed only more than a usually hideous one, by reason of its cruel destruction of her May crown; and partly in search of sympathy, partly in good-night, she stole a glance at Lawrence Lee. Alack! He had seemingly forgotten her very existence, so absorbed was he also in following the course of the barge. "And this," thought Ruth, swallowing back a rising lump in her throat, was "the end of the delightfullest day she had ever spent!" Truly, as once she had read somewhere in some dusty fusty old book, "a merry going out makes a mournful coming in," and she turned with lagging and sorrowful step up the grassy slope, pausing, however, within a few yards of the road, which was fringed with a thick growth of bracken and bramble, to cast one more wistful glance at Lawrence, and to see whether the odious barge had taken itself out of sight.
Nothing of the sort. There stood the young man with folded arms, and brows gloomily knit, watching the boat, which was now turning from midstream. A minute more, and it floated up to a standstill alongside of the water steps, near the bottom of the inn garden.
Mysterious visitors.
The willow boughs interlace and hang so heavily over the white wooden paling which skirts the garden by the water's edge, and cast such bewildering shadows in the now fast gathering darkness, that Ruth cannot be certain of the precise number of figures all wearing broad-brimmed slouch hats and long black cloaks, which rise, as she looks, from the depths of the barge, and springing in hot haste to the bank, as quickly disappear in the direction of the inn yard.
Two—three—five—seven, and Ruth, despite her chagrins, was beginning to smile at the vision she has conjured up of Mistress Sheppard's face when she should see this concourse of barge-men, coal-heavers, or whatever they might be, besieging her kitchen door. "A scurvy lot, quotha!" could not Ruth hear her grumbling over it all as plain as if she really spoke? "A scurvy lot! Each of them, of course, looking for his cup of her home-brewed cider for their invaluable aid of landing a few coals."
Suddenly the lean, thread-paper body of Mistress Sheppard's husband showed among the gooseberry bushes, describing, as it neared the steps, the acute angles which always marked his fashion of welcoming distinguished guests to his hostelry.
Strange cargo.
"Here!" at the same moment said a voice from the barge in low tones, but of which every syllable was audible to Ruth through the utter silence around. "Lend a hand, can't you?" and then rose up another figure, habited like the rest, but with the folds of his mantle flung far back over his shoulders, leaving his arms free to encompass a load covered with a large piece of tarry canvas. This man's burden, judging by his swaying gait, must have been of no light weight, "They're not feathers," he growled, as he laboured with it to the broad top of the barge's sides.
"All right!" eagerly said the voice of Rumbold as he advanced to the steps. "Come along in, quick, Colonel. We'll unload presently."
"That's as you please," returned the other. "But by your leave we'll be having these under cover at once. They were tempered Venice way; and your own pretty daughter wouldn't get so much harm from the night dews, as they would. By the by,—little Mistress Ruth, she is safe indoors and abed?"
"Ay," sullenly grunted Rumbold. "That's my affair, I doubt, Colonel Rumsey."
"No offence," returned the other. "I just ventured to ask the question, because I had a notion that I caught a glimpse of young Farmer Lee's brown jerkin among the yew trunks yonder as we were clearing the bridge."
"And what if you did? Isn't he one of us?" said the maltster, casting a careless glance round.
A startling accident.
"True," answered Rumsey, in rather lagging tones. "He's a necessary evil, as you explained, for the use his premises may be to us; but I'd as lief he'd been out of the bargain if't had been possible. He's but a stripling; and old heads are the only ones for our sort of work, depend upon't. There's what one may call a kind of touch-and-go slipperiness"— The rest of what the speaker might be having to say was lost in a deafening clash of steel, while he himself disappeared totally from Ruth's range of sight, in what seemed a flash of blue lightning.
"Lookye, Colonel!" said Rumbold, when, after a brief interval, he had succeeded, with Master Sheppard's aid, in hauling Rumsey to his feet again and landing him safe on the top of the steps. "Half an inch more and you'd have been under water."
"'Twas those confounded nettles," growled the discomfited Rumsey, rubbing himself all over, and glaring vindictively behind him at the dank weed tangle all crushed into greenish mud under his heavy weight, while Rumbold and Sheppard busied themselves in hastily collecting the scattered contents of the fallen load. "Have you got them all?"
"Ay, ay," answered Rumbold. "Come along, Colonel. They're waiting for us."
"There were twelve," said Rumsey.
"Well, well, we can make another search presently," impatiently returned Rumbold. "There's no fear. The place hereabouts is haunted, the credulous yokels will tell you; and they'd sooner die than set foot in it after nightfall. So come. Have with you, Master Sheppard."
And followed by Sheppard the two walked towards the house.
Lawrence Lee hesitates.
And Lawrence? What has been his share in this unexpected scene? Hardly that of an amazed spectator, Ruth thinks, while she watches the hurried, half-stealthy nod of recognition bestowed on him by the new-comer, as the three men pass within a few yards of the spot where he is standing. Gloomily the young man returns their greeting, but he remains motionless as any stone statue, making no attempt to join them; and when they have disappeared he casts a wistful glance at his own little craft, where she lies moored in a fall flood of moonlight, and sighing so heavily that Ruth can hear the sound of it ever so distinctly in the silence, for not so much as a leaf is stirring now Then he turns, and, taking the narrow footpath leading to the front porch of the inn, is lost in its shadows.
The postern gate.
Ruth rose from her hiding-place, listening intently. All quiet at last; and gathering the tiffany skirts close about her, she sped like a lapwing through the brushwood towards a little postern-gate in the red wall, and tapped at it softly.
CHAPTER III.
MAUDLIN SWEETAPPLE.
"Marry! and so here you be at last, child!" said a half-glad, half-chiding, cracked, treble voice, as a brown withered hand unfastened the door from within. "Have you seen your father?"
"Let me come in, Maudlin, dear. Quick!" was all Ruth's response as she hurriedly slipped inside; and then, carefully closing the postern, she seized Maudlin by the elbow, and dragged her along the gravel path till they stood under a groined arch, in whose recesses two stout nail-studded oaken doors faced each other.
Pushing open the one to the right, which stood ajar and yielded at once to her touch, Ruth lifted a curtain of tapestry hanging on its inner side, and entered a spacious oak-wainscoted chamber, whose handsome but old-fashioned and well-worn furniture showed dimly in the light of the log-fire burning on the hearth.
"Yes," she said, at last answering the old woman's question. "He was down by the bridge."
"That's well," said Maudlin, heaving a sigh of relief, as she sank into a big comfortable armed chair beside the hearth, "for he seemed main put about that you tarried so late. Tho', as I said to him: 'Tis but once in our lives we're young, Master Rumbold,' I said. And have you had a good time of it, dear heart? Marry! you've been as blithe as a cricket, I'll warrant; and Master Lee, did he row thee along home in his boat, lady-bird?"
"Of course he did," replied Ruth, stooping down over the hearth, and busying herself with mending the fire with the stray bits of smouldering log.
"Of course he did," mimicked Maudlin, her little bead-black eyes twinkling merrily. "Marry, come up! Hark at that now! And left Madam Lee, poor lady, to entertain her company as she might! That's what comes o being Queen o' May. Heigho! When douce King Jamie, as his own Scots folk used to call him, sat on his gold throne," went on Maudlin, spreading her withered hands out in the brightening blaze and looking hard into it, "they made May Queen o' me. Well, well, and Master Lawrence is gone home again now—eh, child?"
"No," said Ruth, with a slight start. "Oh, yes—I mean no—I mean—that is, how should I know?"
"How should you know?" echoed Maudlin testily; "because you've got eyes and ears, I suppose. Is the child gone silly?"
"It's you're silly," retorted Ruth crossly, "asking such stupid questions;" and then she, too, set to staring moodily into the fire.
"Fretty!" inwardly commented the old nurse, as she stole a cornerwise glance at Ruth's pale face. "Fretty as any teazle burr. And 'tisn't once in a six month she's that, poor dear. Tired out; that's what 'tis. As tired out, I'll warrant, with her bit o' pleasurin' as ever our old Dobbin is with his plough work, and as ready as he is for his feed o'—What'll you like for supper, lady-bird?"
"Nothing."
"Eh, naught's a sorry supper indeed. Naught? when there's syllabub sweet as your own Colley's milk can make it; and the hot-spiced cake"—
"Ah! how you do plague! I'm not a bit hungry. It's been eat, eat, eat, all day down at the Hall," said Ruth, still half cross, and yet half apologizing for her most unusual shortcoming.
"Madam Lee is main an' hospitable, to be sure," said Maudlin, "and likes folks, rich and poor, to be havin' their fill. God bless her!"
"Ay," nodded Ruth, and a faint smile of pleasure flitted across her grave face.
"And poor old Maudlin," slyly went on the old nurse, "would a'most be finding it in her heart to be jealous of her, if she wasn't quite sure—"
"Only she is," smiled Ruth, turning and twining her arms round her friend's neck. Then she drew down the old face, as brown and shrivelled as any russet apple, and kissed it. "She knows that I love her best in all the wide, wide world."
"Ay, ay, for sure. Does she now?" contentedly laughed the old woman. "Well, well, Maudlin'll do to count with maybe. But this junketing's done thee no good, Ruth," she went on, considering the upturned face with real anxiety. "You're pale as pale, child."
"Tired just a bit," answered Ruth, again striving to evade Maudlin's gaze. "Maudlin, dear, Master Sheppard was taking in sea-coal."
"Ay. Yesterday forenoon. I know."
"Nay, to-night. Just now, as I came by."
"Just now! What nonsense is the child's tongue talking? Sea-coal again, quotha? when Mistress Sheppard was ratin' of him fast as any mill-clapper but this very morning only in my hearing, for having more sea-coal in than the 'King's Arms' can use this side o' Yule-tide, if all the king's horses, and all the king's men, and the king himself into the bargain, should come an' put up. An' main and put about is Mistress Sheppard with his craze, as she calls it. 'Just like men,' says she. 'An' no wonder,' says I, 'for sarteny there's no denyin' you may have too much o' the best o' God's gifts. And what with Sheppard's sea-coal extravagance, and what with his oysters—"
"Oysters!" exclaimed Ruth.
"Ay. Nasty slippy things. Two big boatloads o' them's landed within this se'nnight. 'Travellers,' says Master Sheppard, ''ll swallow as many as you please to set afore 'em.' 'Maybe. Worse taste theirs,' says Mistress Sheppard. 'But they won't eat the shells, I reckon; and three parts on 'em's just empty shells, she was tellin' of me; and as she says, says she, 'a groat a year paid for 'em quarterly 'd be a main sight more'n they're worth.' No, no, ladybird, you must ha' mistook. Like as not 'twas only the barge comin' to a standstill by the gate. Got stuck in the mud. The water thereabouts doesn't lie as thick as a six-pence."
"Will father be in soon, did he say, Maudlin?"
"He bid us not wait up for him; and to lock all but the postern-gate hard an' fast. He might be late, he said, havin' business to settle across at the 'King's Arms' with some dealers."
"In what?"
"Lord! how inquisitive the child is to-night. In grain, I reckon."
"From where?"
"Bless us! Ay, from Ware, for aught I know. Come, Ruth, an' you won't touch bit nor sup, let's to bed," and Maudlin rose yawning from her chair, and crossed with the aid of her stout silver-headed staff to the foot of a broad oaken staircase at the other end of the apartment. "Ho, you! Barnaby lad. A light here!" she cried in shrill tones, rapping the end of her stick vigorously on the bare polished floor. "A light here, I say! Plague seize Sleepyhead!" she grumbled on, when no response was forthcoming; "Snorin' away in his owl's roost a'ready, I'll dare swear. Barnaby! Barnaby!"
"Nay," said Ruth, pointing up the staircase, to where the moonbeams streaming in through the criss-cross mullioned panes, flooded all the length of a long gallery to almost the clearness of day, "We want no light but that;" and followed at a more sober pace by Maudlin, she tripped up the stairs towards a door opening into a circular stone chamber, whose vaulted roof was supported in its centre by a huge pillar of roughly-hewn stone, graced about its base with rusty iron rings, and remnants of chain, whilst a concourse of plethoric-looking sacks lay stacked about the floor, which was of grayish flags seamed and worn as if by the ceaseless tread of feet, especially round the pillar.
Icy chill the air struck in this place; and with no little shivering and shuddering old Maudlin hurried on through it as fast as her rheumatic twinges permitted. "'Tis a cruel shame!" she muttered, and the observation was by no means a novel one in her mouth, "that you can't get snug between the sheets without first catchin' your death o' cold; and havin' your wits all terrified out o' you with passin' through that gruesome den." Not, however, till she was well clear of the vaulted chamber, and had gained the corridor beyond, did Maudlin indulge in the latter part of her running commentary. "Marry! I come goose-flesh from top to toe when I think of all the poor souls those walls have seen die an' rot."
"Nay," said Ruth, "but that was only the Debtors' Prison, where the poor creatures were kept when they couldn't pay their rents and their tithes to the great lords and barons who used to live here. The state prison—"
"Lord forgive us!" shuddered Maudlin, "and state that poor skeleton Master Lockit says they found there was in, you may depend. Every bone rheumatics and lumbago, I doubt Ugh! Yes, I know. It lies down below water-mark, and opens into the underway that runs to Nether Hall."
"Ah! nonsense, Maudlin," laughed Ruth. "That's an old wives' tale."
"And what if it be, quotha?" bridled Maudlin. "What if it be? Aren't old wives' tales as good as young maids' tittle-tattle? I tell thee, child, as sure as we stand here there's a clear way beneath us; though it may have as many twists and crinkum crankums, I grant ye, as a half-scotched adder—all the mile and a half to Nether Hall. But him that's a mind for tryin' o't, 'll find himself when he's done, in the cellar beneath the ruined tower that's nearest the Hall, an' turnin', as one may call it, head to tail about, he'll be back again by the moat dungeon-door, down just under our feet Unless he likes to stop short by the deep black hole in the wall, which Master Lockit has it—and, as times go, he's a fair truthbider, though his tales are a'most as long as our cat's—Master Lockit has it, opens up into your father's sleeping chamber. But hark ye, Ruth, now don't you be telling young Lee about all that, mind; or he'll be for tryin' of it There's not a venturesomer harebrain than he in all the shire, let him once set his mind to a thing."
"I doubt," carelessly smiled Ruth, "he knows the fine tale well enough."
"Tale! Tale again! Well, well, and he's pleased to think it so 'tisn't Maudlin 'd have him taught better. More by token that there's death in it."
"Death!" echoed Ruth, her smiles fading.
"Choked," answered Maudlin, slowly nodding her head up and down, "with smoke-damp that'd stifle all the breath out of your body before you were six yards in."
It was Ruth's turn to shudder. "Well, what does it matter?" she said, when having closed and bolted the door of the little bedchamber they had now entered she put her arms round Maudlin's neck and kissed her, "while there's our darling little river and Lawrence's boat. By the way, Maudlin, he's christened her the 'Queen Ruth!'"
"Has he now?" delightedly smiled Maudlin. "That's main pretty of him. Though I doubt Master Rumbold'll be none so pleased. Red rags at a bull's much the same as talk about kings an' queens to him. He's all for lord protectors and cattle o' that colour. But never you fear, sweetheart; there'll be none o' them ever set up while Lawrence Lee's above ground, and he'd send all the lord protectors ever hatched flyin' before they set foot within a hundred miles o' Hoddesdon. He's like his father before him, rest his soul; and all for King Charles."
"You think so?" said Ruth brightly.
"Ay; that's my own blithe ladybird at last," cheerily cried the old woman. "Sunshine makes pretty maids' eyes sweeter than 'clouds, let me tell thee. And for the red roses instead o' white ones—hark!" went on the housekeeper, as the gate tower-clock chimed eight. "There's a long spell o' beauty sleep to be got yet. So have with thee. Say thy prayers, and then shut fast thine eyes, and I'll answer for it we'll be having all the red roses back the morn."
And then returning Ruth's embrace, Maudlin dismissed the young girl to her chamber, which lay immediately beyond.
CHAPTER IV.
THE OLD RYE HOUSE.
When the Rye House was built, or at least its gate-tower wing of which we are now speaking, and which was as old as the time of King Henry the Sixth, probably no dwelling of any importance, with the exception of Nether Hall, a still more ancient baronial structure, stood within miles of it.
Strong as rocks were its fortified outer walls; and in many parts its interior walls were three feet thick. This was the case with the old "Debtors' Prison," lying at the older wing's extreme end, and forming the angle connecting it with the new wing, which dated only from the time of Queen Elizabeth. In this debtors' prison Master Rumbold, as we have seen, now stored his malt. The wall separating Maudlin Sweetapple's little sleeping chamber from the more spacious one occupied by Ruth, was of at least equal strength and solidity with the walls of this storing room; but while in the one case the surface showed the bare hewn stone, polished only by the hand of time, panellings carved in many a quaint device, and reaching half-way to the flat oak-timbered ceiling, lined the "Lady's Bower," as time beyond all count, Ruth's room had been called.
Ruth's bower.
Here she held sway undisputed; spending in it hours of her lonely days when her father was absent from home, as of late she noted he so frequently had been. So she sat strumming on the broken and half-stringless virginal, or spelling out the crabbed type of several worm-eaten books, chiefly poems—long winded, wordy things enough. Still she cared for them in a fashion; and one volume, whose title-page set forth that its contents were from the pen of one William Shakespeare, a play-actor, took her mightily. Line after line she would tell you of many of the long speeches and odd sayings it contained; though she kept her studies to herself, for Maudlin had not very much of a turn for book-learning, and Master Rumbold always said, if it had not been for the Bible, and that godly person Mr. Foxe's Book of Martyrs, child of his should not have been taught to read at all. Then as to writing, he was near never speaking one word more to Madam Lee after one fine day when he made the frightful discovery that she had been teaching the little girl so successfully to make pot-hooks and hangers, that long before Lawrence was out of the alphabet Ruth had been writing on her own responsibility, and in unmistakeable fair round hand: "Fear God. Honour the King." Wroth indeed was Master Rumbold over the "fine surprise" thus prepared for him by instructress and pupil. The knowledge, however, could not be unlearned; and such a penwoman as Ruth remained till the day of her death you might go a hundred miles and not find.
And so with her wheel and her tapestry-frame for her father's company, and her graver accomplishments for the solitude of the Lady's Bower, Ruth contrived to live as happily as any princess. Solitude is, however, no term to connect with the spot where the birds sang their sweet music the livelong day amid the beechen branches which swept the panes of the old painted oriel window, and the wind sighed gently in the long summer evenings through the ivy trails and creepers which Ruth trained about its carved stone-cornices, or in his rougher moods snarled and blustered, like the tyrant he can be, round the ancient house. But in Ruth's eyes the broad look-out from that window always wore a beauty, and with all her fifteen years' experience she had not been able to determine whether that expanse of lowly undulating meadow-land and winding waters looked loveliest in its spring and summer garb of green, tented over with cloudless blue, or in autumn's grays and russets, or clad in its pure white winter snow robe; nor even whether golden sunlight, or the moon's silvery sheen, as to-night she stood gazing on it, pleased her best.
Rumbold's chamber.
Master Rumbold himself slept on the ground-storey, in a room immediately beneath his stored malt-sacks. This chamber, tradition said, contained in its stone flooring a trap-door opening upon a ladder which conducted into the fearsome dungeons underground, where prisoners used to be thrust, bidding hope and the blessed air and daylight farewell for ever. The subject was, however, one rarely touched upon in the maltster's presence by those who best knew his humours; for he would either smile in bitter contempt, or—and indeed that more generally happened—frown angrily; and, let his mood be the one or the other, always turned the conversation at last with some half-uttered remark that so might it, or might it not be, and that he had simply occupied the room ever since he had been master of the place, because it commanded a watch on both wings of the house. The quaintly timbered walls of the new wing contained the malting-house; while its gabled roof stretching up stiff as cat's ears, afforded sleeping accommodation for the domestic servants and the few workpeople living on the premises.
The malting house.
The handsome guest-chamber, or keeping-room as it was called, was not reserved merely for high days and holidays, for Richard Rumbold had no liking for such vain settings apart of time; but was used as the general sitting-room, and extended from end to end of the ground-storey. Its three windows fronted the great square smooth-shaven grass-plot, which by tradition and courtesy was called "the pleasaunce." In the middle stood one solemn big yew-tree, clipped, beehive-shape, and surmounted by a leafy monstrosity which Maudlin said was meant for a peacock. Never a flower, however, save the poor little buttercups and daisies, whose heads were chopped off in a twinkling, if they did venture to peer forth, ever starred that dreary pleasaunce, for the maltster said he had other uses for his money than to be wasting it on gaudy nonsenses like flowers.
But returning now to the old wing, let us peep in for a moment on old Adam Lockit, the gatehouse keeper, in his sanctum deep hidden in the recesses of the vaulted archway piercing the tower, and giving on its outer side upon the drawbridge, which was still let down at dawn, and drawn up at sunset, by the massive old iron chains working through the wall.
Barnaby Diggles.
Not a snugger corner in the whole establishment than this of Master Lockit's. Within the last year or so, since he has not been so young as he used to be, and the dragging at those heavy chains has come to be a bit of a pull upon him, though he is a hale enough man for his threescore and ten, he has condescended to accept the assistance of a lad, employed originally as a Jack-of-all trades in the malting-yard, but promoted to the dignity of domestic factotum by reason of sundry excellent qualities. Foremost among these stand unimpeachable honesty and placid temper. A characteristic less distinguishing Barnaby Diggles, for so the lad was named, was animal courage. He was, in other words, an arrant coward; in the matter at all events of hobgoblins and things of the sort. He was, however, but just turned of sixteen; and time as yet had never tried his mettle with any real and substantial danger. Meanwhile, nothing so much charmed him as having his imagination tortured with ghost stories by the village gossips; unless, indeed, it was to sit and incline his ears to the hundred and one yarns of all countries and ages that Adam Lockit loved at least as much to spin.
The gatehouse room.
When Barnaby is not to be found after his day's work for love nor money, you are safe to run him to earth in the gatehouse room. A Sindbad's valley it is to him, a Hassan's cave, with all its treasures of crossbows and battle-axes, and catapult relics; its bits of chain-armour, its battered helmets, stags' antlers, and hunting-horns, for all and each of which Adam had his story to tell, as vividly as if he had been honoured by the personal acquaintance of Joan of Arc and William Rufus, or gone a buck-hunting in Hainault Forest with the merry monks of Waltham or bluff King Hal.
What gruesome tales too, Master Lockit, sitting of bitter winter nights in his warm ingle neuk. could tell you between the whiffs of his pipe, about yonder spiral staircase, "There, just behind you," which goes winding up past the nail-studded iron clamped door, shutting in the old wing's upper storey. Ever so high, aloft to the tower roof, with the spiked vane atop of its tall twisted chimney. "But he was speakin' mainly," he was, Adam would say, "of where it went round an' round, an' down an' down to what was just wine and wood cellars now, but 'twas no such honest end as that they were scooped out for hunnerds and hunnerds, if so be 'twarn't thousands o' years agone. And Master Rumbold might say what he pleased, an' deny it you as he liked, 'twere just for all the world a honeycomb o' cells an' passages, openin' right an' left into dungeons, till you come out by the weir, over against the ruins o' Nether Hall."
"Go on! go on!" Barnaby would gasp, writhing in ecstasy at the recital. "Slidikins! I'm all goose-flesh from top to toe! Master Lockit, go on!"
Master Lockit's word pictures.
"More idiot you," Adam would rejoin, puffing away with immeasurable but secret content in the effect produced by his word picture of their hidden surroundings. "What is it to the likes of us? An't such things all done with now? I'm speakin', I am, of the good old times when royal kings an' queens theirselves wasn't safe on their gold thrones, for blows in the dark."
"Happen it might come again," Barnaby would murmur, staring with hopeful rounded eyes into the blazing logs; but when the old belfry clock overhead boomed its warning to bed, Master Diggles stumbling half blind with terror to his sleeping-room in the gabled roof, was a sight not easily to be forgotten.
That same iron-clamped door atop of the tower staircase opened—if indeed one may so speak of a door which so rarely was put to its use—into a chamber called the Warder's Room. Not having been inhabited for a generation or two, it was of course reputed to be haunted by a "White Woman," and that was no more than truth and fact; for many an hour Ruth spent in it, weaving romances out of her own brain, for the mail-clad knights and wimpled ladies whose pictured forms gleamed dimly from the rich oak wainscoted walls, and the designs and quaint devices of their panellings which accorded with those on the walls of Ruth's room, lying immediately beyond.
Ruth romancing.
Ruth had a theory that this suite of rooms on the upper storey of the gatehouse wing had in olden times been occupied by the lord and lady of the ancient mansion; and the notion was probably a correct one, since in no part of the place were traces of such magnificence to be seen as here. Fragments of painted glass glowed in the mullioned windows, showing scraps of monstrous griffin-like heads and scaly tails, and enscrolled letters, of which only one word in one of the upper lights of Ruth's window remained entire—"Loyaulté."
Time and wear had so polished the wood of this chamber's richly-parqueted floor that its smooth surface reflected, like some quiet pool, the tall-backed chairs of tawny and gilt Cordovan leather, ranged stiffly against the walls, and about the long narrow oaken table covered with its faded velvet drapery; and the massive proportions of the huge carved oaken chest, capacious enough to shut in one of the mailed knights, or even portly brown-frocked Abbot Benedict Ogard of Waltham Abbey himself, who smiled, come fair weather come foul, come day come night, so unctuously down on you from his recess beside the loftily-coped fireplace.
Ruth could very well recall the time when the lower portion of the walls of this room had been hung with Flemish tapestry, embroidered with subjects from the Old Testament and early Grecian lore. One winter, however, when King Frost intruded so tyrannically in-doors that people shivered in their beds, Maudlin Sweetapple had stripped down the greater part of this tapestry to make curtains for Ruth's room. If in cutting away the tattered and hopelessly unmendable parts of it, she had patched the stuff together again in such fashion as to leave Solomon in all his glory turning a summersault on the extreme tip of Jonah's whale's nose, and Goliath's gory head frowned grimly from the neck of the Trojan horse, did it not all serve every whit as well for keeping the wind away?
The warder's room.
No doubt the situation of the Warder's Room, cut off as it was so completely from the rest of the house, had first obtained it its ghostly renown; one not likely to dwindle, by the knowledge that its outer door giving on the staircase was always kept locked. This, however, was no more than an ordinary precaution; since the room stood literally in the very portal of the whole house, though time had brought its changes, and various small doors in the new wing now admitted by the wicket the maltster's few visitors and his workpeople to the malt-yard.
A grim greeting.
The master of the house himself did not set foot inside the Warder's Room twice in a year; and when on that May morning, before starting for Nether Hall, Ruth entered it, according to her daily custom, to let a little fresh air and sunshine into its grim silence, she had been startled at perceiving her father standing with folded arms and sombre brows near the hearth, gazing into its cold blackness as if lost in moody thought. On becoming conscious of her presence, however, he had roused up from his abstraction, and with a hurried and absent "Good morrow, child," he turned and went out, locking the door behind him.
CHAPTER V.
HOW MASTER RUMBOLD TOLD LAWRENCE LEE
WHAT THE VERY AIR MIGHT NOT HEAR.
This recollection of the morning, troubles Ruth strangely now, as she sits in the broad window-seat of her own room, her eyes fixed indeed on the fair moon-lit scene before her, but for once seeing nothing of its beauty. Vague fears and suspicions and dread of coming evil weigh down her heart, as one by one she threads together the incidents of this May-day, which was to have been such a golden one. It is all in vain that she laughingly tells herself her father has every right to perambulate his own premises. All in vain she argues that Lawrence Lee may be as sulky as a bear with a sore head, if it gives him any pleasure; and no concern of hers. Certainly not. All the same too, of course, it is to her if a legion of coal-barges come their way, so long as it is not she who stands in Master Sheppard's shoes.
For her part, however, Ruth could not consider the landlady of the "King's Arms" at all a bad sort. On the contrary, she entertained a great liking for her. Folks were fond of saying that Mistress Sheppard had a shrewish tongue; but Ruth had never felt its edge. The good woman was as foolish as everybody else in the matter of spoiling the little mistress of the Rye House; and though she would as soon tell a prince of the blood a piece of her mind, as she would the stable-boy of her own establishment, if she saw fit, she would have vowed the old dun-cow to be white as milk, if it could have afforded Ruth any satisfaction; or declared that Master Richard Rumbold was the most urbane and delightful gentleman in all the country, though no love, to put it mildly, was lost between her and her opposite neighbour.
The hostess of the "King's Arms."
One reason for this among divers others, was their difference of opinion concerning the sign of her hostelry. What easier, the maltster always insisted, than to change it from the "King's Arms" to the "Commonwealth Arms?" or some such reasonable name? There could be no offence, he argued, to anybody in that. But Mistress Sheppard maintained there was, and much offence too. She would stand by and see no such senseless choppings and changings. There had never been anything common about the place, since place it was; and shouldn't be while she was above ground. And what did the man want of such notions? And Master Sheppard, if he could have answered that question, as perhaps he might, maintained a discreet silence, as indeed is the only safe course when one finds one's self betwixt two stools, as his lot in life placed him; for he was never certain whether he stood more in awe of his wife or of Master Rumbold. Once, it is true, he ventured so far as to hint to her, that for the good of the house, and the sake of peace, it might be well to think over Master Rumbold's suggestion, and that he, Sheppard, was agreeable, if so be—but having got thus far he was pulled up by Mistress Sheppard, who said she "was not agreeable; that those who didn't like the sign might spare their custom, and the good o' the house'd be none the worse for lack o' their company." And so the sign remained true to its colours, and an eyesore and a thorn in the flesh to roundhead Master Rumbold.
Smouldering fires.
Differences between neighbours were, however, unfortunately common enough in those troubled times; for troubled they were. It is true that the old quarrel between the king and the parliament, which had brought Charles the First to his sad death at Whitehall, had been patched up very neatly more than twenty years ago now, when his son, King Charles the Second, had been restored to the throne; but the feelings of the people were like smouldering fires, and ready as ever to break out in discontent. The country, moreover, was divided, not now, as then, into those who did approve of its being governed by a king and those who did not; but there were many loyal enough sober-minded folks, and holding quite varying forms of religious belief, who were sorely disappointed with the manner in which the king, whom they had helped to restore with so much expense of precious lives and of money, governed; or, more properly, neglected to govern. Yes, a careless "Merry Monarch"—all very well to call him so—but your merry men and women are frequently cruelly selfish ones, and contrive to bring tears into other people's eyes every time they are pleased to laugh.
Then, too, there were many who dreaded the day when Charles's brother, the Duke of York, should succeed him on the throne. There seemed hardly any doubt that he had adopted the Roman Catholic form of belief; and a strong impression prevailed that Charles was also greatly inclined to do the same.
The Merry Monarch.
How far this was true can, perhaps, never be fairly determined. The king's pleasures always interested him vastly more than religious questions of any kind, and the fears of those who dreaded to see England fall back under popish rule were probably exaggerated. It is very certain that these ideas were fed by dangerous men, who for their own selfish ends spread alarms of popish plots and conspiracies which existed nowhere but in their own mischievous brains; and many harmless peace-abiding Roman Catholics were hunted to prison and death, solely for the crime of being faithful to the creed they had been reared in. These did not, however, remain entirely unavenged, for the love of fair play and of justice triumphed in the end; and the wretches who had persecuted their fellow-men under the pretence of religion were many of them severely punished, and few pitied them.
The father of Lawrence Lee had died, fighting for King Charles the First on Worcester field; while Richard Rumbold had lost his eye in the selfsame struggle, serving the Parliamentary forces.
A dark desire.
Rumbold hated the Stuart race; and when he used to hear Madam Lee teaching her little Lawrence to flourish his chubby hands and cry, "God save the king!" an ugly sneer would begin to gather about his lips, though he would hold them fast shut, for the Nether Hall folks were prosperous and well-to-do; and the maltster, if he could avoid it, never quarrelled with money. It was, besides, no easy matter to pick a dispute with this young Lee, who troubled his head so vastly little about the affairs of the nation, and whose whole mind was taken up in the management of his farm.
As to his heart, it was divided between his mother and his old playmate and constant friend Ruth; and though Ruth's play-days were fast ebbing away, and the old games were now frowned upon by her as silly and rompish, Lawrence cared for her every whit as much as ever; and Rumbold perceiving this, thought he saw in it a turn for the serving of his own purposes. And when one day, about the time of this story's opening, the maltster being in one of his gloomier moods, which, indeed, had grown so strangely frequent that he was rarely out of them, chanced to launch forth into one of his tirades against the king and his government, and said that "sooner than see daughter of his, wife of a man who loved a Stuart, be that Stuart Charles or James, or Tom, Dick, or Hal, he would see her in her coffin."
An angry altercation.
"Love!" replied Lee, turning a little pale as the maltster spoke, "is a strong word, Master Rumbold."
"Your father loved the first Charles Stuart," said Rumbold with knitted brows.
"Ay, to the death!" sighed the young man; "but I'll warrant 'tis little enough his present majesty remembers that."
Rumbold looked up quickly, and the dull glitter of his eye brightened into a glance of searching scrutiny as he fixed it on Lawrence. "An ungrateful race always, these Stuarts," he said with a shrug.
"Nay, I say not that," rejoined Lee. "Your poor bedesman may know every scratch and mark upon his little scraped-up hoard; but can your rich trader tell you one from another of his coffered guineas? And king's friends are so. Countless as the grain I sow in my fields."
"To be as soon scattered to the winds, and trod under foot," growled Rumbold. "Put not your trust in princes."
"I'd as lief trust one," smiled Lawrence, who knew his Bible too, "as any other child of man."
"You speak idly, as a parrot chatters," said Rumbold in displeased tones; "and, in truth, I have long taken you for a—"
He paused with a jerk. The word on his lips was scarcely one calculated to win over the young man to his ideas, and he substituted the milder epithet of "featherbrain."
"I thank you for your compliment, Master Rumbold," said Lawrence swelling a little, and glancing silently, but proudly, round on his neat barns and ricks, among which they chanced to be standing. "I flattered myself my brains were none so empty."
"Psha!" returned Rumbold; "a man may be a Mr. Worldly Wise, and still a fool and a beggar touching the treasure that waxeth not old. Think you that the storing of barns and the breeding of fat oxen will bring a man peace at the last?"
"It may help to it, I doubt," answered the young proprietor, "if it so be that that man uses bounteously the wealth his barns and his cattle bring him. Not hoarding it greedily, but sharing it with those who need it. Then heaven, I take it, is like to bless our store."
The maltster wagged his head impatiently.
Lawrence speaks out.
"Though in sooth," went on Lawrence, "I require not you to remind me, Master Rumbold, that though a man bestow all his goods to feed the poor, and hath not real charity, he is sounding brass indeed; and Heaven, that seeks pure gold only, will have none of him. I know, of course, as well as you do, that a clear conscience—"
"And what," interrupted Rumbold, wincing involuntarily as Lee uttered these last words, and gazing gloomily into the muddy duck-pool at his feet, "what may be your notion of that?"
"Of a clear conscience?" lightly laughed Lawrence. "Why, first and last, at all events, that its owner never do his neighbour any wrong."
A wrangle.
"And who is my neighbour?" muttered Rumbold, as if speaking to himself, and still keeping his eye moodily fixed on the turgid water. "Answer me that, Lawrence Lee."
"Who is not?" replied Lee, repressing a yawn, but with a cheery smile. "I take it, we're neighbours all. Everything that breathes; from old Shock here"—and he bestowed a friendly pull on the grizzled ears of the sheep dog, who stood poking his cold nose into his master's hand—"up to the king himself. What's the matter, Master Rumbold?" for the maltster started and bit his nether lip, as if in some sudden pain.
"Nothing, boy," he said. "What should be?"
"The king himself—God bless him!" continued Lee, waxing unusually eloquent, for ordinarily he was not a man of many words. "And that if we do—"
"Do, do!" cried Rumbold, wincing again. "The old story. Always with your sort. And faith may go to the wall. Well, if we do what forsooth?" he added, not without curiosity.
"Nay, if it please you better," answered Lawrence good-humouredly, "for it is all one;—if we don't do harm, and work no evil against any man:"—
"Upon him who doeth evil, evil must be done," said Rumbold in deep melancholy tones.
"That," returned Lawrence, recoiling a pace and gazing in perplexity at his companion, "that was not the teaching, Master Rumbold, of Him who died for all men. I doubt 'tis the same as if one should say, Evil must be done that good may come."
"Ay," muttered Rumbold, folding his arms upon his breast and setting his lips firmly, "it must."
"Why? Fie, now, fie!" laughed Lawrence, fixing his eyes with something of uneasy curiosity in their clear, dark depths, on Rumbold's face. "That, they say, is the Jesuits' watchword. Who would have thought to hear it from the lips of godly Master Rumbold?"
"You mock me," returned Rumbold; "I am the worst of sinners."
"Nay, nay, but I trust not," said Lee, getting really uncomfortable.
"You mock me, I say," reiterated Rumbold.
"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Lee. "It is rather that you mock me; for by my faith I do not understand you to-night, Master Rumbold."
The whisper of a conspirator.
"Listen," hoarsely said Rumbold, turning suddenly on Lee, and gripping him by the elbow; "you shall understand. I will explain, but not here," he went on, dropping his voice to a whisper, and casting a far-seeing, cautious glance round. "Not here: there may be eavesdroppers. Hark! what's that?"
"Only the beasts munching their supper in the stables," said Lee. "They will tell no tales."
"The very air must not hear," said Rumbold.
"Why, if it is so particular as all that, then," rejoined Lawrence, still half jestingly, but growing less and less light about his heart, "come this way." And pushing open a wicket, he conducted his companion along a rather miry slip of by-road towards the apple orchard, which stretched behind and around the ruined gatehouse, whose jagged outlines were beginning to stand out grim and gaunt in the sickly rays of the moon. Wading through the long grass so thickly carpeting the ground up to the tower, that its base was completely hidden, Lee conducted Rumbold to the top of a small flight of broken stone steps, so lost in an overgrowth of ivy trails and brambles as to be invisible to stranger eyes; but Lee, with a thrust of his hand, parted the leafy screen, and signed to Rumbold to follow him down the steps, which led to a low, iron-clamped and heavily padlocked door deeply sunken in the wall of the tower's foundations.
A secret vault.
"'Tis a well-screened spot, is it not?" said Lee, answering Rumbold's inquiring glances.
"Well secured," said the cautious Rumbold, who had not much opinion of mere unaided twigs as safeguards, and seemed more disposed to admire the huge iron padlock adorning its latch. "What do you store here?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"The place—except for a few bones, which may have been man's or sheep's for aught I know, or ever gave a thought to—is full of emptiness."
"Yet you keep it as sealed as if it shut in untold riches."
"As for the matter of that, it does, too, in a roundabout sort of way," said Lawrence smiling and colouring a little. "Or it may do so; for 'tis said—though I will not answer for the truth of it, that if you follow your nose far enough, the way it leads, you will find yourself in the vaults under your own gatehouse. Our houses—yours and mine—Master Rumbold, were built in queer times; when a man could not call his life his own. And when he dared not show his face above ground, slipped away as he could under it."
In darkness.
"And a fig then for his pursuers," said Rumbold, as he stepped into the vault, whose darkness was only lightened by the moon-rays feebly struggling in through the grating of a loophole high up in its walls. "A fig for them, hey?"
"As you say," said Lawrence, faintly echoing the low laugh of his companion, which reverberated far away, in mocking unearthly discords, as though challenging the pair to explore the place's long-forgotten intricacies. "I doubt they must have been as successful as if they sought needles in a bottle of hay."
"Shut the door!" said Rumbold.
Lawrence obeyed, and what further Richard Rumbold had to say was heard by no eavesdroppers save the slug and reptile creatures who had long made the place their own.
A change for the worse.
Some hours later the door opened again, and one of the two men reappeared. Peering first cautiously right and left, he locked the door behind him and stole hurriedly up the steps. The figure of this man is assuredly that of Lawrence Lee, but strangely unlike his light bright step is that stumbling, swaying gait; and can that ashen white face, those eyes startled and staring, as if they had met some fearful thing, indeed be his? And where is Rumbold?
CHAPTER VI.
SOMETHING IN THE WATER.
One thing only was quite certain, that the maltster was to be seen next morning at the usual hour among his men. As for Lawrence Lee, whatever Rumbold had confided to him remained a secret as far as the nature of it was concerned. To hide, however, from Ruth that something was amiss with him was a more difficult task, and he had failed in it.
During these last weeks, moreover, the Rye House had grown into a very prison of dulness. Rumbold, always a sombre and taciturn man, had come to be like a stone statue moving about the place, never speaking but when absolutely compelled.
The recollection of all this, and of the events of the past day, crowd bewilderingly now upon Ruth's mind, as she sits, with her chin resting upon her hand, gazing out into the night, from which the young May moon is slowly fading. Only a few stars cheer the surrounding darkness, excepting yonder where the yellow lamp-light streams through the close-drawn curtains of the guest-parlour window of the King's Arms.
A cure for care.
Many a summer evening, when Mistress Sheppard's guests tarried as late as this, Ruth could remember catching the echoes of merry laughter and snatches of songs from that window; but though the night was warm as a July one, not a sound was to be heard save the low hooting of the owls and the gurgling of the water in the moat.
She stretched her head from the window, to listen for the familiar sound of her father's heavy footfall up the wicket-path.
How late he stayed!
And Lawrence? had he gone home yet in his boat? Surely. And yet—ah! well. What was it all to her? Why vex her head about it? Why not go to sleep and forget her fancies? Fancy! were those dark cloaked figures fancy forsooth? Like some evil dreams, indeed, they haunted her mind. And that flash of cruel steel blue light? No fancy that. But what concern could it be of Ruth's? Why, a turn of her wheel would dispel it all. There is no remedy like a little bit of diligent work for troublesome thoughts, or even sad ones. How provoking that the stupid thing had not a shred of flax in it! There it stood in its corner, a beautiful wheel of ebony inlaid with ivory, her father's gift last birthday, but like a fair body without a soul, destitute of the flax. How she could have worked away by the light of the stars which were so brilliant that lamp-light would be an utter superfluity—if only the flax had been to hand!
Out in the moonlight.
Unluckily it all lay locked away, a splendid store, in the big oak linen press, atop of the keeping-room staircase; and just the least bit in the world of extra courage was indispensable for traversing those silent passages at this hour. And yet after all, a very little bit, for Ruth was no coward. The chief difficulty was to avoid disturbing Maudlin. It would be such a shame to do that. The old woman lay so comfortable—leagues away in the land of dreams. Ruth could see that, as she peeped at her through the half-open door. So soundly sleeping that she gathered courage, and stepped tiptoe across the floor, out into the corridors beyond, till she could see the sacks away at its furthermost end in the storeroom, all huddled together like hunchbacks under the dim starlight, or—like those cloaked men who had got out of the barge! and then Ruth shivered. But that was little to be wondered at, for the air of the store-room struck icy cold as she stole on—on into the corridor where the linen press stood.
Close beside it a small lattice afforded a glimpse of the river just beyond the bridge. There lay the barge! Still moored up alongside the bank; a huge black blot upon the silvery water.
And the "Queen Ruth?" Nay—as if it was likely to be there now. Why, her pretty little cat Tab had as much to do with the big elephant who lumbered by in the show yesterday, as the merry, graceful, little "Queen Ruth" could have with yonder ugly boat? And yet, and yet—ah! what a consolation it is to make sure of anything! to crush out one's absurd fancies—dead, past all coming to life again! And how temptingly easy in this case! Quite as easy anyhow, as to be standing there, dreaming and talking about it. Only just to steal down by the stairs and through the keeping-room, where the still smouldering fire cast a few dull gleams, and so out by the narrow path to the wicket. Then but a step—but softly, creep low for thy life, Ruth—in the high wall's shadow, and drag the cloak, snatched in haste from a peg, close and well about thy face and shoulders. And what if Rumbold should be returning now? But there is never a sound save the flapping of the bats' wings, that beat in her face, and bring her heart into her mouth.
Ruth goes exploring.
She was so near now to the gilded patch of light upon the black road before the inn parlour window, that had the pane been open, she must beyond all question have caught the voices of those within. But though just for one instant she paused, pressing her hand upon her beating heart to listen, not so much as an echo reached her; and she hurried on, towards the parapet of the bridge, where it wound down lower and lower to the little landing-stage—and leaned over.
Still tied to the stake lay the "Queen Ruth." The swift stream from the bridge gently swaying her bows, and her gay cowslip posies and ribbon knots fluttering in the breeze now fast springing up.
Ruth's heart sank. Past all doubt then, here was Lawrence hanging about, when he should have been back at Nether Hall an age ago. This, surely, was no night to be loitering with—with a parcel of coal-heavers; and Ruth shuddered. Pray Heaven their calling was such an honest one.
There she stood gazing with puzzled bent brows upon the barge, lying motionless and black as a funeral bier on the sluggish water, gleaming leaden gray in the sickly starlight.
footsteps on the bridge.
Slowly and sadly Ruth prepared to retrace her steps. Doubts and uncertainty would, after all, she thought, have been preferable to this sight, which did but strengthen her suspicions of she knew not what. Supposing—Hark! A shuffling of footsteps, and the sound of voices. It must be the inn party dispersing, and exchanging their good-nights. And Ruth turns to fly back to the wicket.
Too late. The tramp of feet was close upon her, heavy and measured, but it was approaching from the other side of the bridge; and Ruth dropped upon her knees, cowering down under cover of her cloak beneath the sheltering wall of the parapet, till she looked all one with a heap of dry rubbish of leaves and old straw swept up close beside her. In another instant these tramps will have passed on. For tramps doubtless they are, bound for Newmarket. Respectable travellers would of course, at this late hour, have put up for the night at Hoddesdon. What even if they should be footpads! and poor Ruth thinks longingly now of her comfortable little bedchamber. What guineas, if she owned them, would she give to find herself safe back in it! Hush! Hush! Already the span of the near bridge is resounding hollowly with their tread! Suddenly the sound ceases. The party has clearly come to a halt, and close upon her hiding-place; for though they speak in subdued and almost stealthy tones, every syllable is audible to her.
The conspirators.
"There it is," said one voice.
"Ay," muttered another. "Roight enough. Let's be gettin' for'ard."
"Wait!" peremptorily commanded a third voice in soldier-like tones. "Don't let us make any mistake."
"Oons!" impatiently grunted the second speaker; "I tell you, colonel, 'tis the spot, if I knows it, and I were born here. Yonder stands the Rye House 'telle'e, and yonder to to'ther side o' the road—"
"Road!" interrupted the military voice rather contemptuously, "you call it a road? Why 'tis scarce broad enough for a couple of broad-shouldered loons like you to walk abreast. Road forsooth!"
"King's highway, then," laughed the first speaker, whose accent was refined but disagreeably sarcastic.
A low chorus of laughter greeted this remark.
"That he'll be lying low enough upon," went on the first speaker, "before Oak Apple Day. And is yonder gabled house the King's Arms, friend?"
"Ay it be, my Lord Howard."
Something in the water.
"Forward then. Come, Walcot, if you've done mooning. What ails you, man? Staring at the water as if you saw your own double in it!"
"Do you see that?" hurriedly returned the soldier.