Читать книгу Lochinvar - S. R. Crockett - Страница 4

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Wat Lochinvar rode out of the city of Amersfort with anger humming fierce in his heart, the Black Horseman riding pickaback behind him. He paid little attention to the three cutthroat-looking knaves who had been provided as his escort, till the outer port of the city gates had closed behind him and the chill airs of the outlands, unwarmed by friendly civic supper-fires, met him shrilly in the teeth.

He had been played with, tricked, betrayed, so he told himself. Never more would he think of her—the light trifler with men's hearts. She might gang her own wilful gait for him; but there was one thing he was well assured of—never more would Wat Gordon trust any woman born of woman, never speak a word of love to one of the fickle breed again. On this he was resolved like steel. For him, henceforth, only the stern elation of combat, the clatter of harness, the joy of the headlong charge—point to point, eye to eye, he would meet his man, when neither would be afraid of aught, save of yielding or craving a favor. From that day forth his sword should be his love, his regiment his married wife, his cause and king his family; while his faithful charger, nuzzling against his breast, would bestow on him the only passionate caresses he would ever know, until on some stricken field it was his fate to fill a soldier's grave.

Almost could Walter Gordon have wept in his saddle to think of his wrongs, and death seemed a sweet thing to him beside the fickle favors of any woman. He bethought him of his cousin Will with something of a pitying smile.

"Poor fool!" he said to himself; "he is married. He thinks himself happy. How much better had it been to live for glory!"

But even as he battered himself into a conviction of his own rooted indifference to the things of love, he began to wonder how long his present adventure would detain him. Could he be back in time on the morrow to hear the first trip of a light foot on the stairs in Zaandpoort Street, as she came from her sleeping-room, fresh as though God had made her all anew that morning?

For this is a quality of the wisdom of man, that thinking upon a maid ofttimes makes it vain—especially if the man be very brave or very wise, and the maid exceeding fair. Gradually, however, the changing clatter of the dozen hoofs behind Lochinvar forced itself upon his hearing, and he remembered that he was not alone.

He turned to his followers, and, curbing his horse a little, waited for them to come up. They ranged themselves two on one side of him and one on the other. Lochinvar eyed them with surprising disfavor.

"You are surely the last scourings of the camp," he said, brusquely, for it was too little his habit to beat about the bush; "what may you have been doing with yourselves? You could not all three have been made so unhallowedly ugly as that. After all, God is a good God, and kind to the evil and to the good."

The fellow on Lochinvar's left was a great red-faced man with an immense scar, where (as it appeared) one side of his face had been cut away wellnigh to the cheek-bone—a wound which had healed unevenly in ridges and weals, and now remained of a deep plum-color.

"What is your name?" said Lochinvar to this man.

"I am called Haxo the Bull," he answered, "and I am of the retinue of my Lord of Barra."

"And how came you by your English?" asked Lochinvar.

"My mother always declared that my father was of that nation," answered the man, readily enough.

"To conclude," continued Wat, who was impatient of further conference with such rank knaves, "what might be your distinguished rank in the service of my Lord of Barra?"

"I am his camp butcher," said the man, laying his hand on a long, keen knife which swung at his belt on the opposite side from his sword.

"And these other two gentlemen, your honorable companions?" queried Wat, indicating them over his shoulder with contemptuous thumb.

The hulking fellow of the scar made a gesture with his shoulders, which said as plain as might be, "They are of age; ask themselves."

But the nearer of the two did not wait to be asked. He was a hairless, flaccid-faced rogue of a pasty gray complexion, and even uglier than the plum-colored Bull, with a certain intact and virgin hideousness of his own.

"I, for my part, am called Haxo's Calf, and I am not ashamed of the name!" he said.

And, thinking this an excellent jest, he showed a row of teeth like those of a hungry dog when he snatches a bone from a comrade not his equal in the fray.

"And, I doubt not, a fit calf of such a sire," quoth Lochinvar, looking from one to the other.

"He is my apprentice, not my son—praise to the Virgin and all the saints!" said Haxo, looking at the Calf quite as scornfully as Wat himself.

Lochinvar now transferred his attention to the third. He wore a small round cap on the top of his head, and his narrow and meagre forehead ran back shining and polished to the nape of his neck. His lack-lustre eyes were set curiously at different angles in his head. He had thin lips, which parted nervously over black, gaping teeth, and his nose was broken as if with a blow of a hammer.

"And is this gentleman also of Monsieur Haxo's gallant company, and in the suite of his Excellency my Lord of Barra?"

Haxo nodded his head with some appreciation of Wat's penetration.

"He is, indeed," he said; "he is my chief slaughterman, and a prince at his business."

"He is called 'The Killer,'" interjected the Calf, smacking his lips with unction. "It is a good name for him."

Wat Gordon urged his horse onward with great and undisguised disgust. To be sent on a dangerous mission with three such arrant rascals told him the value that his employers set upon his life. And if he had chanced at that moment to turn him about in his saddle, the evil smile of triumph which passed simultaneously over the faces of his companions might have told him still more.

The small cavalcade of four went clattering on through the dusky coolness of night, across many small wooden bridges and over multitudinous canals. It passed through villages, in which the inhabitants were already snoring behind their green blinds the unanimous antiphonal bass of the rustic just—though, as yet, it was little past nine of the clock on the great kirk tower of Amersfort, and in the city streets and in the camp every one was at the height of merriment and enjoyment.

Wafts of balmy country scents blew across the by-ways along which they went; and through the limpid gray coolness where the young leaves of the sparse hedgerow trees brushed his face, Wat could see that he was passing countless squares of parti-colored bloom. Miles of hyacinth, crocus, and narcissus gardens stretched away on either hand beyond the low, carefully cut Dutch hedges. Haxo the Bull rode first, showing them the way to the inn of Brederode, silently, save that every now and then he would cry a word over his shoulder, either to one of his ill-favored retinue or to an unseen watcher at some lonely cross-road.

Wat followed sullenly and fiercely, without caring much about the direction in which he was being taken. His mind, however, was preternaturally busy, going carefully over all the points of his interview with Kate, and very soon from the heights of justified indignation he fell to accusing himself of rude stupidity.

"I fear she will never look kindly on me again," he said, aloud. "This time I have certainly offended her forever."

And the thought troubled him more than all the traitorous Barras and ill-conditioned Bull Haxos in the world.

A breath of perfume blew fresh across the way from a field of dark purple bloom, and with an overpowering rush there came back to him the sweet scent of Kate's hair as for a moment he had bent over her by the window. He let the reins fall on his horse's neck, and almost cried aloud in agony at the thought of losing so great a treasure.

"And shall I never see her more," he said, "never watch the responsive blood spring redly to her cheek, never see the anger flash proudly in her eye, never (were it but for once) touch the sweet tangle of her hair?"

Wat's love-lorn melancholy might have driven him to further and yet wilder utterance had he not been conscious of a slight metallic click behind him, which certainly did not come from the hoofs of the horses. He turned sharply at the sound and caught Haxo's Calf with a pistol in his right hand, and the Killer with his long butcher's knife bare and uplifted. Haxo himself was riding unconcernedly on in front. Wat quickened the pace of his horse, and rode alongside the Bull.

"Sir Butcher," he said, calmly, "do your men behind there wish to have their weapons ready in case of meeting the enemy, or do they perchance desire to flesh them in my back? It may seem a trifling matter to trouble you with, and of no great consequence, nevertheless I should somewhat like to ascertain their intentions."

Haxo glanced behind him. The Calf and the Killer were closing in upon Wat.

"Varlets," cried Haxo, in a terrible voice, "put your weapons in your belts, ride wide apart and far behind, or I will send you both quick to hell!"

The men fell asunder at the words, and for a mile or two only the sound of the horses' feet pounding the hard paven road came to Wat's ears. But he did not again return to that entrancing dream of Kate, her beauty, and her hard-heartedness which had so nearly led to his destruction. Yet, nevertheless, whatever he said or did, he remained through all that followed conscious of his love for her, and for the remainder of the night the desire of getting back to Amersfort in order to see her sharpened every faculty and kept every sense on the alert.

More than once during the night Haxo endeavored to enter into conversation, but Wat, indignant at the cowardly attempt on his life (for so he was bound to consider it), waved him peremptorily aside.

"Do your duty without further words," he said; "lead on directly to the inn of Brederode."

It was long past the gloaming, and already wearing nigh to the watershed of the night, before the perfectly flat country of marsh and polder through which they had been riding gave place to a district in which the undulations of the surface were distinctly felt beneath the horses' feet. Here, also, the hard-baked, dusty roads gave place to softer and more loosely knit tracks of sand, on which the iron-shod hoofs made no sound. They were, in fact, fast approaching that broad belt of dunes which shuts off the rich, flower-covered nurseries of Haarlem from the barren, heathy wastes along the borders of the Northern Sea.

On their right they passed the dark walls of the castle of Brederode, and pursued their way to the very edge of the lofty dunes, which at this point are every year encroaching upon the cultivated fields. Presently they came to a long, low, white building surrounded by dark hedges, which in the coolness of the night sent out a pleasant odor of young beech leaves. The court-yard was silent, the windows black. Not a ray of light was visible anywhere.

Walter Gordon rode directly up to the door. He felt with his hand that it stood open to the wall, and that a dark passage yawned before him. Instinctively he drew back a little way to decide what he should do. With an unknown house before him and a cut-throat crew behind, he judged that he would be wiser to proceed with extreme caution.

"Keep wide from me at your peril," he cried, threateningly, to his rascal company. The three horses backed simultaneously, and Haxo, his Calf and his Killer, waited in an irregular semicircle, while Wat took out of his pocket a tinder-box and from his holster a candle. There was not a breath of air, and when Lochinvar lighted the taper the flame mounted steadily upwards, so that he had no need even to shelter it with his hand while the flame went down and then as slowly came again, as all candles do when they are first lighted.

Wat glanced up at the sign of the Black Bull's Head, which was set in rude caricature over the door of the inn. His mind wandered grimly to the significance of that emblem in his own country, and to the many good men and true who had dined with the Black Bull's head on the table—and thereafter dined no more in this world. And to think that he, Wat Gordon of Lochinvar, had brought the Bull with him, together with the Bull-calf and the Killer, to keep him company to the Black Bull of Brederode! He took the conceit as an omen, and gritted his teeth to remember what an arrant gull he had been.

"I shall never see my love more," he said under his breath; "well, never mind, Wat Gordon, lad—if die you must, there are some now alive who will be in a similar plight ere you turn up your toes. And at all events I am glad that I kissed her."

He dismounted and drew his sword.

"Stand still where you are," he cried to Haxo. "Advance an inch at your peril till I give the word."

He looped his horse's rein to the iron hook at the cheek of the inn door. Then he gripped his sword tighter, and said a prayer which ended somewhat unorthodoxly:

"I wish I had that glove which I threw into the canal. For, after all, she gave it to me. Also, her lips pout most adorably when she is angered."

And this seemed strange enough information to give the Deity. But without doubt its sincerity carried it further heavenward than many an empty Credo. For the God who made love does not, like Jove, laugh at lovers' vows.