Martin Hyde (23 page)

"I hope you enjoyed your breakfast, sir," she said.

"Yes, thank you, very much indeed," I answered.

"Squire will be down d'reckly, sir," she said. "If you will please to make yourself at home." I made myself at home, as she desired, while she, after a few minutes, took away the soiled plates, leaving all the other things on the side-board, ready for dinner. I noticed that she smiled in a rather strange way as she drew to the door behind her.

I loitered away about half an hour, waiting for the squire to come. As he did not come, I turned over the books on the shelves, mostly volumes of plays, the Spanish Tragedy, the Laws of Candy, Love lies a Bleeding, etc., four plays to a volume in buckram covers. I was just getting tired of All for Love, when I heard a footstep in the passage outside. I thought that I
would ask the passenger, whoever it might be, for how much longer the squire would keep me waiting. I was anxious about getting back to the army. It was dangerous to straggle too far from the Duke's camps when unbeaten armies followed on both his wings. So I went to the door to learn my fate at once. To my great surprise I found that I could not open it. It was locked on the outside. The great heavy iron lock had been turned upon me. I was a prisoner in the room there. Thinking that it had been done carelessly, I beat upon the door to attract the man who passed down the passage, calling to him to turn the key for me so that I might get out. The footsteps did not pause. They passed on, down the corridor, as though the man were deaf. After that a fury came upon me. I beat upon the door for five minutes on end, till the house must have rung with the clatter; but no one paid any attention to me, only, far away, I heard a woman giggling, in an interval when I had paused for breath. The door was a heavy, thick oak door, bound with iron. The lock was a bar of steel at least two inches thick; there was no chance of getting it open. Even firing into the lock with my little pistol would not have helped me; it would only have jammed the tongue of steel in its bed. I soon saw the folly of trying to get out by the door; so I turned to the window, which was more difficult still, or, if not more difficult, more tantalizing, since it showed me the free garden into which one little
jump would suffice to carry me. But the closely placed piers of stone made it impossible for me to get through the window. It was no use trying to do so. I should only have stuck fast, midway. I began at once to pick out the mortar of the pier stones with my knife point. It was hopeless work, though, for the old monks had used some cement a good deal harder than the stones which it bound together. I could only dig away a little dust from its surface. That way also was barred to me. Then I went down to the bathing-chamber, hoping that there would be some way of escape for me there. I hoped that the escape pipe of the bath might be a great stone conduit leading to a fish-pond in the garden. It was nothing of the sort. It was a little miserable leaden pipe. I beat all round the walls, praying for some secret door, but there was nothing of any use to me, only a little iron ventilator high up, big enough to take my head, but nothing more. As for the skylight over the bath, it was beyond my reach, high up. For the moment I could see no means of getting to it. I went back to the dining room to give another useless pounding to the door. My head was full of miserable forebodings; but as yet I suspected merely that I had been caught by some sudden advance of militia. Or perhaps the squire had laid plans to get information from one who knew the Duke. Perhaps I had been lured away specially by one hungry for the King's good opinion. Or could it be Aurelia? Whatever
it was, I was trapped, that was the terrible thing. I was shut up there till my enemy, whoever it was, chose to deal with me. I was in arms against the ruling King of England; everybody's hand would be against me, unless my own hands helped me before my enemies came. My first thought was to get the table down the steps, to make a bridge across the bath, from which I could reach the skylight. This I could not do at first; for being much flustered, I did not put the table-leaves down. Until I knocked them down in my hurry they kept me from dragging the table from the dining room. When I got it at last into the bath-room, I found that it would not stretch across the water: the legs were too close together, as I might have seen had I kept my wits about me. I could think of no other way of getting out.

I went back disheartened to the dining room, dragging my coat behind me. The first thing which I saw was a letter addressed to me in a hand already known to me. The letter lay on the floor on the space once covered by the table. As it had not been there when I dragged the table downstairs, someone must have entered the room while I was away. I opened the letter in a good deal of flurry. It ran as follows.

"D
EAR
M
ARTIN
H
YDE
:—As you will not take a sincere friend's advice, you have to make the best of a sincere adviser's friendship. You did me a great service. Let me do you one. I hope to keep you an amused prisoner
until your captain is a beaten man. By about three weeks from this 26th of June we shall hope to have made you so much our friend that you will not think of leaving us. May I make a compact with you? Please do not shoot me with that pistol of yours when I bring you some supper tonight. That is one part of it. The other is this. Let us be friends. We know all about you. I have even talked to Ephraim about you. So let us make it up. We have been two little spitfires. At any rate you have. Let us be friends. What sorts of books do you like to read? I shall bring you some story-books about ghosts, or about red Indians. Which do you like best? I like red Indians myself. I suppose you, being a man, like ghosts best. Your sincere friend Aurelia Carew. Who by the by thinks it best to warn you that you had better not try to get up the chimney, as it is barred across. She hopes that the table did not fall into the bath."

CHAPTER XXI

MY FRIEND AURELIA AND HER UNCLE

I
T
was a friendly letter, which relieved me a good deal from my anxieties; but what I could not bear was the thought that the Duke would think me a deserter. I made up my mind that I would get away from that house at the first opportunity, so as to rejoin the Duke, to whom I felt myself pledged. But in the meantime, until I could get away, I resolved to make the best of my imprisonment. I was nettled by Aurelia's tone of superiority. I would show her, as I had shown her before, that my wits were just as nimble as hers. A few minutes after the letter had been read, she held a parley with me through the keyhole.

"Mr. Martin Hyde. Are you going to shoot me?"

"No, Miss Carew, though I think you deserve it."

"You won't try to get away if I open the door?"

"I mean to get away as soon as ever I get half a chance."

"I've got three men with me at the door here."

"Oh. Very well. But you just wait till I get a chance."

"Don't be so bloodthirsty, Mr. Martin Hyde. Now, I'm coming in to talk with you. No pistols, mind. Not one."

"I've promised I won't shoot. You might believe a fellow. But I mean to get away, remember. Just to show you."

She opened the door after that, a brown, merry Aurelia, behind whom I could see three men, ready to stop any rush. They closed the door behind her after she had entered.

"Well," she said, smiling. "Will you not shake hands with me, Martin Hyde?"

"Yes," I said, "I will shake hands. But you played a very mean trick, I think. There."

"You mustn't think me mean," she answered. "I don't like mean people. Now promise me one thing. You say you are going to run away from us. You won't run away from me when I am with you, will you?"

"No," I said, after thinking this over, to see if it could be twisted into any sort of trap, likely to stop my escape. "I will not. Not while I am with you."

"That's right," she said. "We can go out together, then. Now you've promised, suppose we go out into the garden."

We went into the garden together, talking of every subject under the sun but the subject nearest to our hearts at the moment. I would not speak of her capture of me; she would not speak of the Duke's march towards
Taunton. There was some constraint whenever we came near those subjects. She was a very merry, charming companion; but the effect of her talk that morning was to make me angry at being trapped by her. I looked over the countryside for guiding points in case I should be able to get away. Axminster lay to the southeast, distant about six miles; so much I could reckon from the course of our morning's ride. I could not see Axminster for I was shut from it by rolling combes, pretty high, which made a narrow valley for the river. To the west the combes were very high, strung along towards Taunton in heaps. Due east, as I suspected, quite near to us, was Chard, where by this time the Duke must have been taking up his position. Taunton I judged (from a mile-stone which we had passed) to be not much more than a dozen miles from where I was. I have always had a pretty keen sense of position. I do not get lost. Even in the lonely parts of the world I have never been lost. I can figure out the way home by a sort of instinct helped by a glimpse at the sun. When I go over a hill I have a sort of picture-memory of what lies behind, to help me home again, however tortuous my path is on the other side. So the few glimpses which I could get of the surrounding country were real helps to me. I made more use of them than Aurelia suspected.

We were much together that day. Certainly she did her best to make my imprisonment happy. In the evening
she was kinder; we were more at ease together; I was able to speak freely to her.

"Aurelia," I said, "you risked your life twice to warn me."

"That's not quite true, Martin," she said. "I am a government spy, trusted with many people's lives. I had other work to do than to warn a naughty boy who wanted to see what the ghosts were." I was startled at her knowing so much about me; she laughed.

"Well," she said, "I like you for it. I should have wanted to see them myself. But the ghost-makers are scattered far enough now."

"All the same, Aurelia," I said, "I thank you for what you did for me. I wish I could do something in return." She laughed.

"Well," she said, "you were very kind in the ship. You were a good enemy to me then. Weren't you?"

"Yes," I said, "I beat you properly on the ship. I carried the Duke's letters in my pistol cartridges, where you never suspected them. The letters which were in the satchel I forged myself after I got on board. If you'd not been a silly you'd have seen that they were forged."

"So that was why," she said. "Those letters gave everybody more anxious work than you've any notion of. Oh, Martin, though, I helped to drug you to get those letters. It was terrible. Terrible. Will you ever forgive me?"

"Why, yes, Aurelia," I said. "After all, it was done for your King. Just as I mean to run away from here to serve mine. All is fair in the King's service. Let us shake hands on that." We shook hands heartily, looking into each other's eyes.

"By the way," I said, "where did you get to that day in Holland, when I got the letters from you?"

"Ah," she answered, "you made me like a wildcat that day. I nearly killed you, twice. You remember that low parapet on the roof? I was behind that, waiting for you with a loaded pistol. You were all very near your deaths that morning. In the King's service, of course. For just a minute, I thought that you would climb up to examine that parapet. What a crazy lot you all were not to know at once that I was there! Where else could I have been?"

"Well," I answered, "I beat you in the ride, didn't I? You thought yourself awfully clever about that horse at the inn. Well, I beat you there. I beat you in the race. I beat you with my letters to the Dutchman. I beat you over those forgeries."

"Yes, indeed," she said. "I can beat all the men in your Duke's service. Every one. Even clever Colonel Lane. Even Fletcher of Saltoun. But a boy is so unexpected, there's no beating a boy, except with a good birch rod. You beat me so often, Martin, that I think you can afford to forgive me for tricking you once in bringing you here."

"I shall beat you in that, too, Miss Carew," I said; "for I mean to get away from you as soon as I can."

"So you say," she said. "But we have club men walking all round this house all night, as well as sentries by day, guarding the stock. Your gang of marauders will find a rough welcome if they come for refreshments here."

Even as she spoke, there came a sudden crash of fire-arms from the meadows outside the garden. About a dozen men came hurrying out of the house with weapons in their hands, among them a big, fierce-looking handsome man, who drew his sword as he ran.

"That is my uncle, Travers Carew," said Aurelia. "He owns this property. He wants to meet you." There came another splutter of fire-arms from the meadows. "Come," she said. "We'll see what it is. It is the Duke's men come pillaging."

We ran through a gate in the wall into an apple-orchard, where the Carew men were already dodging among the trees towards the enemy. There was a good deal of shouting, but the tide of battle, as they call it, the noise of shots, the trampling of horses, had already set away to the left, where the enemy were retreating, with news, as I heard later, that the militia held the Abbey in force. The Carew men came back in a few minutes with a prisoner. He had been captured while holding the horses of two friends, who had dismounted to drive off some of the Carew cattle. He said that the
attack had been made by a party of twenty of the Duke's horse, sent out to bring in food for the march. They had scattered at the first discharge of fire-arms, which had frightened them horribly, for they had not expected any opposition. The frightened men never drew rein till they galloped their exhausted horses into Chard camp, where they gave another touch of dejection to the melancholy Duke. As for the prisoner, he was sent off under guard to Honiton gaol; I don't know what became of him. He was one of more than three thousand who came to death or misery in that war. They said that he was a young farmer, in a small way, from somewhere out beyond Chideock. The war had been a kind of high-spirited frolic for him; he had entered into it thoughtlessly, in the belief that it would be a sort of pleasant ride to London, with his expenses paid. Now he was ended. When he rode out with bound hands from the Carew house that evening, between two armed riders, he rode out of life. He never saw Chideock again, except in the grey light of dawn, after a long ride upon a hurdle, going to be hanged outside his home. Or perhaps he was bundled into one of the terrible convict ships bound for Barbadoes, with other rebels, to die of small-pox on the way, or under the whip in the plantations.