Lochinvar: A Novel

She and Kate sat between the newly lighted lamp and the fire of wood which Maisie had insisted on making in order to keep out the gusty chills of the night. A cosier little upper-room there was not to be found in all Amersfort.

But there had fallen a long silence between the two. Maisie, as usual, was thinking of William. It troubled her that her husband had that day gone abroad without his blue military overcoat, and she declared over and over that he would certainly come home wet from head to foot. Kate's needle paused, lagged, and finally stopped altogether. Her dark eyes gazed long and steadily into the fire. She saw a black and gloomy prison-cell with the wind shrieking into the glassless windows. She heard it come whistling and hooting through the bars as though they were infernal harp-strings. And she thought, at once bitterly and tenderly, of one who might be even then lying upon the floor without either cloak or covering.

A sharp, hard sob broke into Maisie's pleasant revery. She went quickly over to the girl, and sat down beside her.

"Be patient, Kate," she said; "it will all come right if you bide a little. They cannot kill him, for none of the men who were wounded are dead – though for their own purposes his enemies have tried to make the prince believe so."

Kate lifted her head and looked piteously at Maisie.

"But even if he comes from prison, he will never forgive me. It was my fault – my fault," she said, and let her head fall again on Maisie's shoulder.

"Nay," said Maisie; "but I will go to him and own to him that the fault was mine – tell him that he was not gone a moment before I was sorry and ran after him to bring him back. He may be angry with me if he likes; but, at least, he shall understand that you were free from blame."

But this consolation, perhaps because it was now repeated for the fiftieth time, somehow failed to bring relief to Kate's troubled heart.

"He will never come back, I know," she said; "for I sent him away! Oh, how I wish I had not sent him away! Why – why did you let me?"

Maisie's mouth dropped to a pathetic pout of despair. It was so much easier comforting a man, she thought, than a girl. Now, if it had been William —

But at that moment a loud and continuous knocking was heard at the outer door, which had been so carefully barred against the storm.

"It is my dear!" cried Maisie, jumping eagerly to her feet, "and I had not heard his footstep turn into the street."

And she looked reproachfully at Kate, as though in this instance she had been entirely to blame.

"It is the first time that I ever missed hearing that," she said, and ran quickly down the stairs. As she threw open the fastenings a noisy gust of wind rioted in, and slammed all the doors with claps like thunder.

"William!" she cried, "dear lad, forgive me; I could not hear your foot for the noise of the wind, though I was listening. Believe me that – "

But it was the face of an unknown man which confronted her. He was clad in a blue military mantle, under which a uniform was indistinctly seen.

"Your pardon, madam," he said, looking down upon her, "are you not Mistress Gordon, the wife of Captain William Gordon, of the regiment of the Covenant?"

"I am indeed his wife," said Maisie, with just pride; "what of him?"

"I am bidden to say that he urgently requires your presence at the guard-house."

Maisie felt all the warm blood ebb from about her heart. But she only bit her lip, and set her hand hard over her breast.

"He is ill – he is dead!" she panted, scarcely knowing what she said.

"Nay," said the man, "not ill, and not dead. But he sends you word that he needs you urgently."

"You swear to me that he is not dead?" she said, seizing him fiercely by the wet cuff of his coat. For the man had laid his hand upon the edge of the wind-blown door to keep it steady as he talked, or perhaps in fear lest it should be shut in his face before his errand was accomplished.

Without waiting for another word besides the man's reiterated assurance, Maisie fled up-stairs, and telling Kate briefly that her husband needed her and had sent for her to the guard-room, she thrust a sheathed dagger into her bosom, and ran back down to the outer door.

"Bide a moment, and I will come with you!" cried Kate, after her.

"No, no," answered Maisie, "stay you and keep the house. I shall not be long away. Keep the water hot against William's return."

So saying, she shut the outer door carefully behind her, and hurried into the night.

Maisie had expected that the man who had brought the message would be waiting to guide her, but he had vanished. The long street of Zaandpoort was bare and dark from end to end, lit only by the lights within the storm-beaten houses where the douce burghers of Amersfort were sitting at supper or warming their toes at an early and unwonted fire.

Then for the first time it occurred to Maisie that she did not know whether her husband would be found at the guard-house of the palace, or at that by the city port, where was the main entrance to the camp. She decided to try the palace first.

With throbbing heart the young wife ran along the rain-swept streets. She had thrown her husband's cloak over her arm as she came out, with the idea of making him put it on when she found him. But she was glad enough, before she had ventured a hundred paces into the dark, roaring night, to drawn it closely over her own head and wrap herself from head to foot in it.

As she turned out upon the wide spaces of the Dam of Amersfort, into which Zaandpoort Street opened, she almost ran into the arms of the watch. An officer, who went first with a lantern, stopped her.

"Whither away so fast and so late, maiden?" he said; "an thou give not a fitting answer we must have thee to the spinning-house."

"I am the wife of a Scottish officer," said Maisie, nothing daunted. "And he being, as I think, taken suddenly ill, has sent for me by a messenger, whom in the darkness I have missed."

"Your husband's name and regiment?" demanded the leader of the watch, abruptly, yet not unkindly.

"He is called William Gordon," she said, "and commands to-night at the guard-house. He is a captain in the Scots regiment, called that of the Covenant."

The officer turned to his band.

"What regiments are on guard to-night?"

"The Scots psalm-singers at the palace – Van Marck's Frisians at the port of the camp," said a voice out of the dark. "And if it please you, I know the lady. She is a main brave one, and her husband is a good man. He carried the banner at Ayrsmoss, a battle in Scotland where many were slain, and after which he was the only man of the hill folk left alive."

"Go with her, thou, then," commanded the officer, "and bring her in safety to her husband. It is not fitting, madam, that you should be on the streets of the city at midnight and alone. Good-night and good speed to you, lady. Men of the city guard, forward!"

And with that the watch swung briskly up the street, the light of their leader's lantern flashing this way and that across the darkling road, as it dangled in his hand or was swayed by the fitful wind.

It seemed but a few minutes before Maisie's companion was challenging the soldiers of the guard at the palace.

"Captain William Gordon? Yea, he bides within," said a stern-visaged sergeant, in the gusty outer port. "Who might want him at this time of night?"

"His wife," said the soldier of the watch, indicating Maisie with his hand.

The sergeant bent his brows, as if he thought within him that this was neither hour nor place for the domesticities. Nevertheless, he opened an inner door, saluted upon the threshold, spoke a few words, and waited.

Will Gordon himself came out almost instantly in full uniform. One cheek was somewhat ruddy with sitting before the great fire, which cast pleasant gleams through the doorway into the outer hall of the guard.

"Why, Maisie!" he cried, "what do you here, lassie?"

He spoke in the kindly Scots of their Galloway Hills.

Maisie started back in apprehensive astonishment.

"Did you not send for me, William? A messenger brought me word an hour ago, or it may be less, that you needed me most urgently. I thought you had been sick, or wounded, at the least. So I spared not, but hasted hither alone, running all the way. But I came on the watch, and the officer sent this good man with me."

Will Gordon laughed.

"Some one hath been playing April-fool overly late in the day. If I catch him I will swinge him tightly therefor. He might have put thee in great peril, little one."

"I had a dagger, William," said Maisie, determinedly, putting her hand on her breast; "and had I a mind I could speak bad words also, if any had dared to meddle with me."

"Well, in a trice I shall be relieved," he said. "Come in by the fire. 'Tis not exactly according to the general's regulations. But I will risk the prince coming on such a night – or what would be worse, Mr. Michael Shields, who is our regimental chaplain and preceptor-general in righteousness."

Presently they issued forth, Maisie and her husband walking close together. His arm was about her, and the one blue military cloak proved great enough for two. They walked along, talking right merrily, to the street of Zaandpoort. At the foot of the stair they stopped with a gasp of astonishment. The door stood open to the wall.

"It hath been blown open by the wind," said Will Gordon.

They went up-stairs, Maisie first, and her husband standing a moment to shake the drops of rain from the cloak.

"Kate, Kate, where are you?" cried Maisie, as she reached the landing-place a little out of breath, as at this time was her wont.

But she recoiled from what she saw in the sitting-room. The lamp burned calmly and steadily upon its ledge. But the chairs were mostly overturned. The curtain was torn down, and flapped in the gusts through the window, which stood open towards the canal. Kate's Bible lay fluttering its leaves on the tiles of the fireplace. The floor was stained with the mud of many confused footmarks. A scrap of lace from Kate's sleeve hung on a nail by the window. But in all the rooms of the house in the street of Zaandpoort there was no sign of the girl herself. She had completely vanished.

Pale to the lips, and scarce knowing what they did, Will Gordon and his wife sat down at opposite sides of the table, and stared blankly at each other without speech or understanding.

CHAPTER XV

A NIGHT OF STORM

I will now tell the thing which happened to Kate in the house in Zaandpoort Street that stormy night when for an hour she was left alone.

When Maisie went out, Kate heard the outer door shut with a crash as the wind rushed in. The flames swirled up the wide chimney in the sitting-room, whereupon she rose and drew the curtain across the inner door. Then she went to the wood-box and piled fresh fagots about the great back-log, which had grown red and smouldering. For a long time after she had finished she knelt looking at the cheerful blaze. She sighed deeply, as if her thoughts had not been of the same complexion. Then she rose and went to the window which looked out upon the canal. It was her favorite musing-place. She leaned her brow against the half-drawn dimity curtain, and watched the rain thresh the waters till they gleamed gray-white in the sparkle of the lights along the canal bank. A vague unrest and uncertainty filled her soul.

"Wat, Wat!" she whispered, half to herself. "What would I not give if I might speak to you to-night – only tell you that I would never be hasty or angry with you again!"

And she set her hand upon her side as though she had been suddenly stricken by a pain of some grievous sort. Yet not a pang of sharp agony, but only a dull, empty ache, lonely and hungry, was abiding there.

"How he must hate me!" she said. "It was my fault that he went away in anger. He would never have gone to that place had we not first been cruel to him here."

And in his cell, listening dully, to the tramp of the sparse passers-by coming up to his window through the tumultuous blowing of all the horns of the tempest, Wat was saying to himself the same thing: "How she must hate me – thus to walk with him and let him point a scornful hand at my prison window."

But in the street of Zaandpoort, the lonely girl's uneasiness was fast deepening into terror.

Suddenly Kate lifted her head. There was surely a slight noise at the outer door. She had a vague feeling that a foot was coming up the stair. She listened intently, but heard nothing save the creaking of doors within and the hurl of the tempest without. A thought came sharply to her, and her heart leaped palpably in her breast. Could it possibly be that Wat, released from prison, had come directly back to her? Her lips parted, and a very lovely light came into her eyes, as of late was used to do when one spoke well of Wat Gordon.

She stood gazing fixedly at the door, but the sound was not repeated. Then she looked at the place where he had stood on the threshold that first night when he came bursting in upon them – the time when he saw her lie with her head low in Maisie's lap.

"Dear Wat!" she said softly, over and over to herself – "dear, dear Wat!"

But alas! Wat Gordon was lying stretched on his pallet in the round tower of the prison of Amersfort; while without another maid called to him in the drenching rain, which love did not permit her to feel. He could neither hear the tender thrill in his true love's voice, nor yet respond to the pleading of her once proud heart, which love had now made gentle. He heard nothing but the roar of the wind which whirled away towards the North Sea, yelling with demon laughter as it shook his window bar, and shouted mocking words over the sill.

But all suddenly, as Kate looked again through the window, she became aware that certain of the lights on the canal edge were being blotted out. Something black seemed to rise up suddenly before the window. The girl started back, and even as she stood motionless, stricken with sudden fear, the window was forcibly opened, and a man in a long cloak, and wearing a black mask, stepped into the room. Kate was too much astonished to cry out. She turned quickly towards the door with intent to flee. But before she could reach it two men entered by it, masked and equipped like the first. None of the three uttered a word of threatening or explanation; they only advanced and seized her arms. In a moment they had wrapped Kate in a great cloak, slipped a soft elastic gag into her mouth, and carried her towards the window. The single wild cry which she had time to utter before her mouth was stopped was whirled away by a gust yet fiercer than any of those which all night had ramped and torn their way to the sea betwixt the irregular gables and twisted chimney-stalks of the ancient street of Zaandpoort.

The man who had entered first through the window now received her in his arms. He clambered down by a ladder which was set on the canal bank, and held in its position by two men. Yet another man stood ready to assist, and so in a few moments Kate found herself upon a horse, while the man who had come first through the window mounted behind her and kept about her waist an arm of iron strength. By this time Kate was half unconscious with the terror of her position. She knew not whither she was being taken, and could make no guess at the identity of her captors.

She could, indeed, hear them talking together, but in a language which she could not understand and which she had never before heard. The gag in her mouth did not greatly hurt her, but her arms were tightly fastened to her sides, and her cramped position on the saddle in front of her captor became, as the miles stretched themselves out behind them, an exquisitely painful one.

With the beating of the horses' hoofs the cloak gradually dropped from her eyes, so that Kate could discern dark hedge-rows and occasional trees drifting like smoke behind them as they rode. The lightning played about in front, dividing land and sky with its vivid pale-blue line. Then the thunder went roaring and galloping athwart the universe, and lo! on the back of that, the black and starless canopy shut down blacker than ever. Once through the folds of the cloak Kate saw a field of flowers, all growing neatly together in squares, lit up by the lightning. Every parallelogram stood clear as on a chess-board. But the color was wholly gone out of them, all being subdued to a ghastly pallor by the fierce brilliance of the zigzag flame.

To the dazed and terrified girl hours seemed to pass, and still the horses did not stop. At last Kate could feel, by the uneven falling of the hoofs and by the slower pace of the beasts, that they had reached rougher country, where the roads were less densely compacted than in the neighborhood of the traffic of a city.

Then, after a little, the iron of the horseshoes grated sharply on the pebbles of the sea-shore. Men's voices cried harshly back and forth, lanterns flashed, snorting horses checked themselves, spraying the pebbles every way from their forefeet – and presently Kate felt herself being lifted down from the saddle. So stiff was she with the constraint of her position that, but for the support of the man who helped her down, she would have fallen among the stones.

The lightning still gleamed fitfully along the horizon. The wind was blowing off shore, but steadily and with a level persistence which one might lean against. The wild gustiness of the first burst of the storm had passed away, and as the pale lightning flared up along the rough edges of the sea, which appeared to rise above her like a wall, Kate could momentarily see the slanting masts of a small vessel lying-to just outside the bar, her bowsprit pointing this way and that, as she heaved and labored in the swell.

"You are monstrously late!" a voice exclaimed, in English, and a dark figure stood between them and the white tops of the nearer waves.

Kate's conductor grunted surlily, but made no audible reply. The man in whose arms she had travelled, as in bands of iron, now dismounted and began to swear at the speaker in strange, guttural, unintelligible oaths.

"We are here to wait for my lord!" cried the man who had lifted Kate from the saddle. He stood by her, still holding her arm securely.

His voice had a curious metallic ring in it, and an odd upward intonation at the close of a sentence which remained in the memory.

"Indeed!" replied the voice which had first spoken; "then we, for our part, can stop neither for my lord nor any other lord in heaven or on earth. For Captain Smith of Poole has weighed his anchor, and waits now only the boat's return to run for Branksea, with the wind and the white horses at his tail. Nor is he the man to play pitch-and-toss out there very long, even for his own long-boat and shipmates, with such a spanking blow astern of the Sea Unicorn."

"My lord will doubtless be here directly. His horse was at the door ere we left," again answered the metallic voice with the quirk in the tail of it.

"We will e'en give him other ten minutes," quoth the sailor, imperturbably.

And he stood with his ship's watch in his hand, swinging his lantern up and down in answer to some signal from the ship, too faint for ordinary eyes to catch across the whip and swirl of the uneasy waves.

But he was spared any long time of waiting; for a man in uniform rode up, whose horse, even in the faint light, showed evident signs of fatigue.

"You are to proceed on board at once with your charge. My lord has been stricken down by an assassin. He lies in the palace of Amersfort, dangerously but not fatally hurt. Nevertheless, you are to carry out his directions to the letter, and at the end of your journeying he or his steward will meet you, and you shall receive the reward."

"That will not do for Captain Smith," cried the sailor, emphatically. "He must have the doubloons in hand ere a soul of you quit the coast."

The man who had held Kate in his arms during her night-ride turned sharply about.

"Quit your huxtering! I have it here!" cried he, indignantly, slapping his pocket as he spoke.

"Run out the boat!" shouted the man, promptly, and half a dozen sailors squattered mid-thigh in the foam and swelter of the sea.

"Now, on board with you this instant!" he cried, as one accustomed to command where boats and water were in question.

Then the man with the money took Kate again in his arms and carried her easily through the surf to where the men held the leaping craft. One by one the dripping crew and passengers scrambled in, and presently, with four stout fellows bending at the long oars, the boat gathered way through the cold gray waves of the bar towards the masts of the ship which tossed and heaved in the offing.

CHAPTER XVI

THE BREAKING OF THE PRISON

Black Peter Hals stood grumbling and snarling at the door of the prison of Amersfort. It was almost sundown, and the outer city ports were closed at that hour. A crowd of merrymakers had just passed on their way to sup at a dancing-tavern. They had cried tauntingly to him as they went by, and the laughing, loose-haired girls had beckoned tantalizingly with their hands.

"Come, thou grizzled old bunch of keys," cried one of them, in a voice that tinkled like a bell, "learn to be young again for an hour. So shalt thou cheat both Father Time, and eke Jack Ketch, thy near kinsman."

"I am waxing old, indeed, when Bonnibel taunts me unscathed," muttered Peter Hals, grimly, to himself, as he watched them out of sight; "it is true there are gray hairs in my poll. But, Lord knows, I have yet in me the fire of youth. My natural strength is noneways abated. I can stand on my feet and swig down the sturdy Hollands with any man – aye, even with a city councillor at a feast of the corporation. But I rust here and mildew in this God-forsaken prison. 'Tis six o'clock of a morning, open the doors! Seven o'clock, take about the breakfast! Ten o'clock, comes a jackanapes spick-and-span officer for inspection! Two o'clock, a dozen new prisoners, and no cells to put them in! Six o'clock, supper and complaints! Then click the bolts and rattle the keys – to bed, sleep, and begin all the pother over again on the morrow! Pshaw! – a dog's life were livelier, a-scratching for fleas. They at least bite not twice on the same spot."

Thus Black Peter Hals, discontentedly ruffling his gray badger's cockscomb on the steps of the prison of Amersfort.

As he watched, a dainty slip of a maid came up the street with a pitcher of coarse blue delft on her shoulder. In the by-going she raised her eyes to those of Peter Hals. It was but a single long glance, yet it sent his ideas every way in a fine scatter, and eke Peter's hand to his mustache that he might feel whether it were in order.

At this moment a dog ran against the girl, and the pitcher clattered to the ground, where it broke into a thousand pieces.

The maid stopped, clasped her hands pitifully, and burst into tears.

"It is all your fault," she cried, looking up at the keeper of the prison.

Peter ran down the steps and took her by the hand.

"Do not weep, sweet maid," he said, "I will buy thee a pitcher ten times better, and fill it with the best of white wine or the choicest oil, only do not cry your pretty eyes all red."

The girl stole a shy glance at Black Peter.

"Are you of the servants of the prince?" said she, bashfully looking at the orange facing of his tunic.

Black Peter erected himself a little and squared out his chest. It was the first time that his grim prison uniform had been so distinguished.

"I am indeed the keeper of this castle of the prince," he said, with dignity.

"It is a fine castle, in truth," said the maid, looking at it up and down and crossways, with blue, wide-open, most ingenuous eyes.

"You come from the country, perhaps?" asked Peter. For such innocence was wellnigh impossible to any maid of the city.

"Aye," said the girl, "I have come from La Haye Sainte in the Flemish country of the West, where they speak French. So, therefore, I do not know your customs nor yet your speech very well. I bide with my aunt in the street but one to the right. I was sent to bring home a gallon of white wine in a new pitcher. And now it is spilled – all with looking up at you, Sir Officer, standing at the gate of your tower."