Patsy Part 14

Where Stair and Louis placed themselves, though some considerable way from the burn which ran at the bottom of the defile, they were still in a very pit of darkness. The leaves were dense overhead, and only the white gates gleamed very faintly in the trough of gloom where ran the eastern military road.

Louis lay under a tremulous rustle of leaves, for the wind was coming in from the sea, and listened to the trill and chirrup of the burn which carried off the overflow of the White Loch, as it muttered over its sands or clattered across the loose round pebbles of its numerous shallows.

The lads waited long and anxiously, not that they had any fear of having missed their mark, for Stair had searched in vain in all the softest spots for any trace of carriage wheels. They _must_ pa.s.s this way. They could not go off the road, because there was no other. But, what would have spoiled the matter more than a squadron of cavalry in attendance, was the fact that if they delayed much longer, the carriage would reach the Elbow of the White Water after daybreak.

From where they lay they could see the ragged fantastic line of the hills to the east behind which the sun would rise. Stair watched these anxiously. They had a clear hour before them, but unless the mist came up again with the tide, they could count on no more time.

Already out on the face of the moorland the curlews were crying tentatively one to the other. Louis would gladly have talked, but Stair sat grave and silent. At last, visibly unquiet, he betook himself up through the wood to the edge of an old turf-built fold where in summer the cows were wont to be milked. Here he occupied himself with the priming of his gun and looked to his pistols. An undefined glimmer from the sky and the absence of trees on the heathery slopes enabled him to dispense with other light.

In ten minutes he was back again by the side of Louis Raincy.

"They are coming," he whispered, "up yonder I heard the rumble of the carriage. Listen--we shall catch it in a minute."

Louis listened intently and at last could make out, from very far to the west, the rhythmic and yet changeful beating of the feet of horses. But it was not till the carriage had actually climbed to the summit and was rumbling down the slope that Stair Garland moved.

"I am going to meet them there at the gates," he said, "be you ready with the horses. There is a part of this business in which there is no need of your being mixed up, only see that Honeypot and Derry Down are ready for Patsy. If for any reason I cannot get away with you, take the upper side of the White Loch till you strike the old track by which we came, then give the little mare her head and she will carry you safe."

"But why will you not be with us? We can ride time about."

"There are certain risks," said Stair,--"I do not know what will come out of all this. But at any rate your business is to get Patsy home to her father's and then carry the word to my sister Jean that the house is to be strongly guarded. She will understand."

The carriage was very close now. They could hear the labouring of the horses, the wheezing of straining harness. Then the pole of the carriage became entangled with Stair's carefully angled lodge-gates. The coach stopped. The driver sprang from his seat and ran to keep his horses from plunging over into the ravine. An angry voice from the inside called out to know what was the matter.

A pistol shot rang out. Then several answered, followed by the roar of a fully charged gun, a turmoil of voices, the stamping of horses, and a voice that cried: "They have killed the Prince! The Duke is shot!"

The next moment through the green velvety dark Louis heard footsteps approaching. Stair, his gun flung over his shoulder, had Patsy with him.

"Quick, up with you! There!"

He placed her on Derry Down.

"Now, Louis--off with you, and remember what I said. Keep the upper side of the valley, and if in difficulty let the little mare lead. I shall follow, as soon as I can get a horse to ride. One of our lads lives not far from here!"

"You have not killed him?" said Louis, anxiously.

"I do not know. I certainly let the marauding Turks have the benefit of a few slugs," said Stair with carelessness. "If his princes.h.i.+p is a little worse splintered than the others, why, so much the better. But they will all have a souvenir to carry away. Now, ride, and never mind me!"

In ten minutes Louis and Patsy were fairly safe from pursuit--at least from any immediate pursuit. They followed the line of the White Loch--the sh.o.r.e sand gleaming like silver beneath them making the task a simple one. Then by easier gradients than the path by which they had so precipitately descended, Louis struck diagonally for the old drove road.

As they mounted higher they became aware that the day was breaking behind the distant Minnegaff ridges--the hills of the great names, Bennanbrack, Benyellaray, Craignairny, The Spear of the Merrick, and the Dungeon of Buchan, coming up one by one in delicate aerial perspective.

In half an hour Louis Raincy could see Patsy's face suffused with eager joy, freedom and the red in the east together making it flush like a dusky peach.

"Oh, I am so glad," she broke out when at last they could ride together over a little stretch of bent, "I had not even my Canary Island knife, or anything, but somehow I thought that you or Stair would follow me."

"It was all Stair's doing," said Louis; "he called me, and gave me the chance to help him when he could quite as well have taken one of his brothers, Fergus or Agnew."

"Why did he stay behind just now?" Patsy asked. "If they capture him they will kill him."

"I think there is no great fear of that, for the present, at least,"

said Louis Raincy, loyally. "Stair Garland has many hiding-places. I don't believe any one can catch him in his own land. He is off to find a moor-pony and will ride after us as soon as it is safe. If not, he will come home on foot, lying up in the daytime. He knows every farm and cothouse and is welcome at all. Sea-cave and moss-hag, wood-shelter and whin-bush, he knows every hidie-hole for forty mile."

Louis and Patsy kept so far to the north among the flowes of the moors that they never once came in sight of the road, along which all that day frenzied messengers tore east and west with tidings that the King's son had been murdered near the White Loch, by a gang of ruffians who had laid a trap and overturned his carriage.

So the two young people travelled in a great loneliness of plovers and curlews and peewits, all singing and calling and whistling their hardest. They saw the glimmer of a herd's house or two, faint whitewashed dots on the brown, surface of the moor. But of living souls they met not one.

Nor had they seen anything of Stair when, at dusk, they breasted the last bosky eyebrow of Raincy territory which overhung the rich Ferris valleys, and saw beneath them, as it had been deserted, the House of Cairn Ferris. Windows had been knocked out. Household gear lay scattered in the yard and even littered the avenue. A great blackened oblong showed the position of a burned hay-mow.

Louis halted a moment, in doubt what he should do, and then seeing that there was no safety in such a place for Patsy, he turned the tired horses about and rode straight for the great towers of Castle Raincy which frowned above them out of the purple gloom of the woods.

"Grandfather," said Louis, still holding Patsy by the hand as he penetrated unannounced into the Earl's study, "this is Miss Patricia Ferris. The Duke of Lyonesse laid a trap for her. He carried her off, bound and gagged, in Kennedy McClure's carriage, but Stair Garland and I rescued her. There was a fight and I believe the Duke is hurt, but it served him right. I took her home, but the house has been sacked. So I brought her to you!"

The old man, who had nightly cursed the Ferrises, root and branch, all his life, rose to his full height, for a moment irresolute. Then he bowed, and took Patsy's hand in his.

"You are welcome," he said, "I am--hem--satisfied that my boy had the pluck to put a bullet into the Hanoverian swine. He came and asked for my carriage, curse his impudence--my carriage and horses to play his Guelphish pranks on honest men's daughters. Royal prince or no royal prince, I will stand by you, hang me if I don't! And when it comes to the House of Lords, I shall have a few truths to tell the whole royal gang which will make their ears tingle from the Regent himself to poor Silly Billy."

In the meanwhile no news of Stair. He had, as it seemed, been entirely blotted out. Had he fallen into the hands of the cavalry which after a fruitless search had sacked Cairn Ferris at their pleasure upon the first news of the killing of the king's son? They had departed to scour the easterly roads and had been seen no more in the valleys or on the heights of Raincy.

There was no news except that Kennedy McClure had been seen galloping eastward in frantic search of his carriage and horses. The former had been reported blown to flinders, and his two carefully matched horses killed by the bandits. So he was now riding in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, the cowrie sh.e.l.ls at his watch fob clanging against the little bundle of keys he wore there. In his mind he was doing sums of which the main issues were, "What is the difference between the fifty pounds I have in hand and the value of the carriage and horses, and will my loss give me a claim on the royal family and the Government?" Kennedy McClure saw before him endless Court of Session pleas, with expenses mounting steadily up, and the verdict given in his favour upon appeal to the House of Lords.

The Laird of Supsorrow, who loved a good-going plea, felt vaguely consoled, but he spurred his beast all the same to find out what he had to go upon. That the whole countryside spoke of the young prince as dead was nothing to him. His horses and the precious chariot with the yellow wheels, the pale blue body and linings, were more to him than the whole royal house. There were a plenty of princes--and no great gain to the country either by all accounts! But he, Kennedy of Supsorrow, had only one chariot and one well-matched pair of carriage horses, for which he had paid out good golden guineas.

As he rode he heard the sound of horses galloping behind him. They turned out to be a patrol of dragoons from Cairnryan headed by Captain Laurence. That officer was in great fear for his commission, being in military command of the district; and though he had received the Prince's own orders to confine himself to his barracks that the ways might be clear, he could not hide from himself that if anything happened to the King's favourite son, he might as well send in his papers.

So whenever he crossed a coast-guardsman, or even the most ignorant and harmless farm-lad, he shouted to him, "The Duke--the Duke! What of the Duke? Have they killed the Duke?"

To which Kennedy McClure of Supsorrow responded like an echo, "The horses--the horses? What have they done to the horses? Have they killed my horses?"

CHAPTER XIII

PLOTS AND PRINCES

But the Duke of Lyonesse was not dead. He lay at the King's Arms in the town of Newton Douglas, well peppered with slugs, and swearing most royally. Lord Wargrove was alone in attendance upon him. One might well pity him, for his job was no pleasant one.

Eben the Spy had disappeared, and with him every stiver of the Prince's money, which had been kept in a leathern dispatch case carefully stowed beneath the seat of the carriage. His wallet of jewels, too, had vanished, so that the poor Duke had never a spare snuff-box or a change of rings.

More wonderful still was the official declaration made and sworn to before the Fiscal and Sheriff. The attack had been made entirely for the purpose of robbery, by Ebenezer McClure and a band of malefactors, collected by him for the purpose. In proof of which it was shown that the said Eben McClure had driven the carriage into a trap, previously laid with care in the dangerous defile of the White Water near where it enters into the loch of that name, that he had removed the Duke's treasure during the fight, and so escaped, mounted upon one of the horses which he had borrowed of his kinsman Kennedy of Supsorrow. The name of Patsy Ferris did not appear.

This explains why on arriving at Newton Douglas in search of his steeds, Kennedy McClure found himself pulled down from his horse, treated with much official roughness, and finally lodged in the townhouse awaiting his removal to the gaol of Wigton. He began to think that the fifty pounds which had been paid down by Eben of Stonykirk const.i.tuted but a feeble consolation for losses such as his. The Duke could not see him.

My Lord of Wargrove would not, and Captain Laurence, to whom in desperation he made his plea, consigned him with extreme conciseness of speech to the deepest and hottest pit of Eblis.

All these things made no considerable stir in the little village of Newton Douglas, which was beginning to extend itself under the heights of Penninghame. The borough was proud of its guest, but what the Duke and his hench-man desired most of all was to be safely across Cree Bridge and to place a county or two between them and the wrath of Adam Ferris and his brother-in-law Julian Wemyss, whom they held to be answerable for the attack at the White Loch. So as soon as the wounded man could be moved, the best horses to be had in Minnigaff drew the coach gingerly across the bridge and out of immediate danger of pursuit.