The Light of Scarthey Part 54

Quite certain of his prey, he released him, and, setting his horse to a trot, smiled to note the desperate clutch of the lad upon his stirrup leather, as, with the perspiration dripping from his face, and panting breath, he struggled to keep up the pace alongside.

Marched with tremendous ceremony into the magistrate's study and directed to stand right opposite the light, while Mr. Landale installed himself in an arm-chair with a blood-curdling air of judicial sternness, Johnny Shearman, at most times as dare-devil a pickle of a boy as ever ran, but now reduced to a state of mental and physical jelly, underwent a terrible cross-examination. It was comparatively little that he had to say, and no doubt he wished most fervently he had greater revelations to make, and could thus propitiate the arbiter of the appalling fate he firmly believed might lie in store for him. Meagre as his narrative was, however, it quite sufficed for Mr. Landale.

"I think, Johnny," he said more pleasantly, well knowing the inducement that a sudden relaxation from fear offers to a witness's garrulity, "I think I may say you will not hang this time--that is,"

with a sudden hardening of his voice, and making a great show of checking the answers with pen and ink in his most magisterial manner, "that is if you have really told me _all_ you know and it be all _true_. Now let us see, and take care. You saw no one at the peel to-day but Renny Potter, Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Crackenshaw?"

"No, sir."

"But you heard other voices in the next room--a man's voice--whilst you were waiting?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then Renny Potter came back and gave you a message for your brothers.

This message they made you repeat, over and over again. How did it go?" And as Mr. Landale frowningly looked at his paper, the boy tremblingly repeated:

"I mun tell brothers Will an' Rob, that one or t'other mun watchen the light o' nights, to-night, to-morrow night, an' ontil woord coom again. If light go out they mun setten forth in they ketch thot moment, fettled op for a two-three days' sailing. If wind is contrairy like, they mun take sweeps. This for the master's service--for Sir Adrian's service!"--amending the phrase with a sharp reading of the blackness of Mr. Landale's swift upward look.

"Yes," murmured the latter after a pause. "And you were to tell no one else. You were to keep it above all from getting to my ears. Very good, Johnny. If you have spoken the truth, you are safe."

There was a special cell, off the official study, with high windows, bolts and bars, and a wooden bench, for the temporary housing of such desperate criminals as might be brought to the judgment of Rupert Landale, Esquire, J.P. There he now disposed of the young offender who snivelled piteously once more; and having locked the door and pocketed the key, returned to his capacious arm-chair, where, as the twilight waned over the land, he fell to co-ordinating his scheme and gloating upon this unexpected turn of Fortune's wheel.

At that hour Madeleine, alone in her chamber, knelt before her little altar, wrestling with the rebellion of her soul and besieging the heavens with a cry for peace.

Sir Adrian having failed to hear aught of the _Peregrine_ at St. Malo, filled with hara.s.sing doubt about its fate but clutching still at hope--as men will, even such pessimists as he--stood on the deck of his homeward bound s.h.i.+p, straining his eyes in the dusk for the coast line.

In the peel, the beacon had just been lighted by Rene, in whose company, up in his secluded turret, sat Captain Jack, smoking a pipe, but so unusually silent as to have reduced even the loquacious Frenchman to silence too. Below them Lady Landale, torn between the dread of a final separation from the loadstar of her existence and the gnawing anxiety roused in her bosom by Moggie's account of Mr.

Landale's watchfulness, was pacing the long book-lined room with the restlessness of a caged panther.

On the road from Lancaster to Pulwick a posse of riding officers and a carriage full of hastily gathered preventive men were trotting on their way to the Priory.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE LIGHT GOES OUT

The light of Scarthey had not been s.h.i.+ning for quite an hour over the wilderness, when Lady Landale, suddenly breaking the chain of her restless tramp, ran to the door and called for Moggie.

There was so shrill a tone of anguish in the summons that the young woman rushed into the room in trembling expectancy: yet it was to find her mistress alone and the place undisturbed.

"Moggie," said Lady Landale, panting and pressing her hands upon her side as if in the endeavour to control the beating of her heart, "something is going to happen; I know it, I feel it! Tell Captain Smith that I must speak to him, here, at once."

Infected by the terror upon her mistress's face, Madame Lapotre flew upon her errand; a moment later, Captain Jack entered the room and stood before Lady Landale with a look of impatient inquiry.

"Oh, it is wicked, it is mad!" cried she pa.s.sionately; "it is tempting G.o.d to remain here!"

"Of whom are you speaking?" he asked, with an involuntary glance of contempt at the distracted figure. "If it is of yourself, I entirely concur. How often these last days, and how earnestly have I not begged of you to return to Pulwick? Was not the situation you placed me in with regard to Adrian already odious enough that it needed this added folly? Oh, I know--I know what you would say: spare it me. My safety?

You fear for me? Ah, Lady Landale, that you could have but left me in peace!"

He had waxed hot with anger from his first would-be calmness, as he spoke. This dismal life of close but inharmonious proximity, started upon the seas and continued under his absent friend's own roof had tried his impetuous temper to the utmost. Upon the morrow of their return he had, indeed, exercised all his powers of persuasion to induce Lady Landale to proceed to the Priory; but, impelled by her frantic dread of the separation, and entrenching herself behind the argument that her mysterious re-appearance would awaken suspicion where people would otherwise believe the _Peregrine_ still in foreign parts, she had declared her irrevocable determination not to quit the island until she knew him to be safe. And he had remained, actuated by the dual desire, first to exonerate himself personally in her husband's eyes from any possible suspicion of complicity in Molly's flight--the bare thought of which had become a horrible torment to him--then to encompa.s.s through that good friend's means an interview and full explanation with Madeleine, which not only the most ordinary precaution for his life, but likewise every instinct of pride forbade him now to seek himself.

Thus began a state of affairs which, as the days succeeded each other without news of Sir Adrian, became every moment more intolerable to his loyalty. The inaction, the solitary hours of reflection; the maddening feeling of unavailing proximity to his heart's dearest, of impotency against the involving meshes of the present false and hateful position; all this had brought into the young man's soul a fever of anger, which, as fevers will, consumed him the more fiercely because of his vigour and strength.

It was with undisguised hatred and with scorn immeasurable that he now surveyed the woman who had degraded him in his own eyes. At another time Molly might have yielded before his resentment, but at this hour her whole being was encompa.s.sed by a single thought.

"It is for you--for you!" she repeated with ashen lips; "you must go before it is too late."

"And is it not too late?" stormed he. "Too late, indeed, do I see my treachery to Adrian, my more than brother! Upon my s.h.i.+p I could not avoid your company, but here--Oh, I should have thought of him and not of myself, and done as my honour bade me! You are right; since you would not go, I should have done so. It was weak; it was mad; worse, worse--dishonourable!"

But she had no ears for his reproaches, no power to feel the wounds he dealt her woman's heart with such relentless hand.

"Then you will go," she cried. "Tell Rene, the signal."

He started and looked at her with a different expression.

"Have you heard anything; has anything happened?" he asked, recovering self-restraint at the thought of danger.

"Not yet," she replied, "not yet, but it is coming."

Her look and voice were so charged with tragic force that for the moment he was impressed, and, brave man though he was, felt a little cold thrill run down his spine. She continued, in accents of the most piercing misery:

"And it will have been through me--it will have been through me! Oh, in mercy let me make the signal! Say you will go to-night."

"I will go."

There followed a little pause of breathless silence between them. Then as, without speaking, he would have turned away, a loud, peremptory knock resounded upon the door of the keep and echoed and re-echoed with lugubrious reverberation through the old stone pa.s.sages around them.

At first, terror-stricken, her tongue clave to her palate, her feet were rooted to the ground; then with a scream she flung herself upon him and would have dragged him towards the door.

"They have come--hide--hide!"

He threw up his head to listen, while he strove to disengage himself.

The blood had leaped to his cheek, and fire to his eye. "And if it be Adrian?" he cried.

Another knock thundered through the still air.

"It is but one man," cried Rene from his tower down the stairs. "You may open, Moggie."

"No--no," screamed Molly beside herself, and tighter clasped her arms round Captain Jack's neck.