FullReads

But almost on the instant a woman’s voice took up the cry. “Walter! What has happened to Walter?” and as her son stepped out upon the landing Mrs. a Cleeve came tottering through the corridor leading to her rooms–came in disarray, a dressing-gown hastily caught about her, and a wisp of grey hair straggling across her shoulder. Catching sight of Walter, she almost fell into his arms.

“Thank God! Thank God you are safe!”

“But what on earth is the matter?” demanded Walter, scarcely yet aroused from the torpor of his private misery.

“Poachers, no doubt.” his father answered. “Macklin has been warning me of this for some time. Take your mother back to her room. There is no cause for alarm, Lucetta–if the affair were serious, we should have heard more guns before this. You had best return to bed at once. When I learn what has happened I will bring you word.”

He strode away down the lower corridor, calling as he went to Narracott, the butler, to fetch a lantern and unbolt the hall-door, and entered the gunroom with Father Halloran at his heels.

“I cannot ask you to take a hand in this,” he said, finding his favourite gun and noiselessly disengaging it from the rack, pitch dark though the room was.

“I may carry a spare weapon for you, I hope?”

“Ah, you will go with me? Thank you: I shall be glad of someone to carry the lantern. We may have to do some scrambling: Narracott is infirm, and Roger,”–this was the footman–“is a chicken-hearted fellow, I suspect.”

The two men armed themselves and went back to the hall, where Father Halloran in silence took the lantern from the butler. Then they stepped out into the night.

Masses of cloud obscured the stars, and the two walked forward into a wall of darkness which the rays of the priest’s lantern pierced for a few yards ahead. Here in the valley the night air lay stagnant: scarcely a leaf rustled: their ears caught no sound but that of the brook alongside of which they mounted the coombe.

“Better set down the lantern and stand wide of it,” said the Squire, as they reached the foot of the White Rock gully. “If they are armed, and mean business, we are only offering them a shot.” He paused at the sound of a quick, light footstep behind him, not many paces away, and wheeled about. “Who’s there?” he challenged in a low, firm voice.

“It’s I, father.” Walter, also with a gun under his arm, came forward and halted in the outer ring of light.

“H’m,” the Squire muttered testily. “Better you were in bed, I should say. This may be a whole night’s business, and you have a long journey before you tomorrow.”

The boy’s face was white: he seemed to shiver at his father’s words, and Father Halloran, accustomed to read his face, saw, or thought he saw– years afterwards told himself that he saw–a hunted, desperate look in it, as of one who forces himself into the company he most dreads rather than remain alone with his own thoughts. And yet, whenever he remembered this look, always he remembered too that the lad’s jaw had closed obstinately, as though upon a resolve long in making but made at last.

But as the three stood there a soft whistle sounded from the bushes across the gully, and Jim Burdon pushed a ghostly face into the penumbra.

“Is that you, sir? Then we’ll have them for sure.”

“Who is it, Jim?”

“Hannaford and that long-legged boy of his. Macklin’s up a-top keeping watch, sir. I’ve winged one of ’em; can’t be sure which. If you and his Reverence–“

Jim paused suddenly, with his eyes on the half-lit figure of Walter a Cleeve, recognising him not only as his young master, supposed to be in France, but as the stranger he had seen that afternoon talking with Hannaford. For Walter had changed only his sabots.