GONE!

Neither Jasper, Barbara, nor Eve appeared. Mr. Jordan was excited, and had to be told what had taken place, and this had to be done by Jasper. Barbara was with her sister. Eve had recovered, and had confessed everything. Now all was clear to the eyes of Barbara. The meeting on the Raven Rock had been the one inexplicable point, and now that was explained. Eve hid nothing from her sister; she told her about the first meeting with Martin, his taking the ring, then about the giving of the turquoise ring, finally about the meeting on the Rock. The story was disquieting. Eve had been very foolish. The only satisfaction to Barbara was the thought that the cause of uneasiness was removed, and about to be put beyond the power of doing further mischief. Eve would never see Martin again. She had seen so little of him that he could have produced on her heart but a light and transient impression. The romance of the affair had been the main charm with Eve.

When Jasper left the squire’s room, after a scene that had been painful, Barbara came to him and said, ‘I know everything now. Eve met your brother Martin on the Raven Rock. He has been trying to win her affections. In this also you have been wrongly accused by me.’ Then with a faint laugh, but with a timid entreating look, ‘I can do no more than confess now, I have such a heavy burden of amends to make.’

‘Will it be a burden, Barbara?’

She put her hand lightly on his arm.

‘No, Jasper—a delight.’

He stooped and kissed her hand. Little or nothing had passed between them, yet they understood each other.

‘Hist! for shame!’ said a sharp voice through the garden window. She looked and saw the queer face of Watt.

‘That is too cruel, Jasp—love-making when our poor Martin is in danger! I did not expect it of you.’

Barbara was confused. The boy’s face could ill be discerned, as there was no candle in the room, and all the light, such as there was—a silvery summer twilight—flowed in at the window, and was intercepted by his head.

‘Selfish, Jasp! and you, miss—if you are going to enter the family, you should begin to consider other members than Jasper,’ continued the boy. All his usual mockery was gone from his voice, which expressed alarm and anxiety. ‘There lies poor Martin in a stone box, on a little straw, without a mouthful, and his keepers are given what they like!’

‘Oh, Jasper!’ said Barbara with a start, ‘I am so ashamed of myself. I forgot to provide for him.’

‘You have not considered, I presume, what will become of poor Martin. In self-defence he shot at a warder, and whether he wounded or killed him I cannot say. Poor Martin! Seven years will be spread into fourteen, perhaps twenty-one. What will he be when he comes out of prison! What shall I do all these years without him!’

‘Walter,’ said Jasper, going to the window, and speaking in a subdued voice, ‘what can be done? I am sorry enough for him, but I can do nothing.’

‘Oh, you will not try.’

‘Tell me, what can I do?’

‘There! let her,’ he pointed to Barbara, ‘let her come over here and speak with me. Everything now depends on her.’

‘On me!’ exclaimed Barbara.

‘Ah, on you. But do not shout. I can hear if you whisper. Miss, that poor fellow in the stone box is Jasper’s brother. If you care at all for Jasper, you will not interfere. I do not ask you to move a finger to help Martin: I ask you only not to stand in others’ way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Go into the hall, you and Jasper, instead of standing sighing and billing here. Allow me to be there also. There are two more men arrived—two of those who carried the winged snipe away. That makes four inside and one outside; but one is lamed and without his boot. Feed them all well. Don’t spare cider; and give them spirits-and-water. Help to amuse them.’

‘For what end?’

‘That is no concern of yours. For what end! Hospitality, the most ancient of virtues. Above all, do not interfere with the other one.’

‘What other one?’

‘You know—Miss Eve,’ whispered the boy. ‘Let the maidens in, the housemaid certainly; she has a sweetheart among them, and the others will make pickings.’

Then, without waiting for an answer, the queer boy ran along the gravel path and leaped the dwarf wall into the stable yard, which lay at a lower level.

‘What does he mean?’ asked Barbara.

‘He means,’ said Jasper, ‘that he is going to make an attempt to get poor Martin off.’

‘But how can he?’

‘That I do not know.’

‘And whether we ought to assist in such a venture I do not know,’ said Barbara thoughtfully.

‘Nor do I,’ said Jasper; ‘my heart says one thing, my head the other.’

‘We will follow our hearts,’ said Barbara vehemently, and caught his hands and pressed them. ‘Jasper, he is your brother; with me that is a chief consideration. Come into the hall; we will give the men some music.’

Jasper and Barbara went to the hall, and found that the warder had his foot bandaged in a chair, and seemed to be in great pain. He was swearing at the constables who had come from Beer Alston for not having called at the ‘Hare and Hounds’ on their way for his boot. He tried to induce one of them to go back for it; but the sight of the fire, the jugs of cider, the plates heaped with cake, made them unwilling again to leave the house.

‘We ain’t a-going without our supper,’ was their retort. ‘You are comfortable enough here, with plenty to eat and to drink.’

‘But,’ complained the man, ‘I can’t go for my boot myself, don’t you see?’ But see they would not. Jane had forgotten all her duties about the house in the excitement of having her Joseph there. She had stolen into the hall, and got her policeman into a corner.

‘When is it your turn to keep guard, Joe?’ she asked.

‘Not for another hour,’ he replied. ‘I wish I hadn’t to go out at all.’

‘Oh, Joe, I’ll go and keep guard with you!’

Also the cook stole in with a bowl and a sponge, and a strong savour of vinegar. She had come to bathe the warder’s foot, unsolicited, moved only by a desire to do good, doubtless. Also the under-housemaid’s beady eyes were visible at the door looking in to see if more fuel were required for the fire.

Clearly, there was no need for Barbara to summon her maids. As a dead camel in the desert attracts all the vultures within a hundred miles, so the presence of these men in the hall drew to them all the young women in the house.

When they saw their mistress enter, they exhibited some hesitation. Barbara, however, gave them a nod, and more was not needed to encourage them to stay.

‘Jane,’ said Barbara, ‘here is the key. Fetch a couple of bottles of Jamaica rum, or one of rum and one of brandy. Patience,’ to the under-housemaid, ‘bring hot water, sugar, tumblers, and spoons.’

A thrill of delight passed through the hearts of the men, and their eyes sparkled.

Then in at the door came the boy with his violin, fiddling, capering, dancing, making faces. In a moment he sprang on the table, seated himself, and began to play some of the pretty ‘Don Giovanni’ dance music.

He signed to Barbara with his bow, and pointed to the piano in the parlour, the door of which was open. She understood him and went in, lit the candles, and took a ‘Don Giovanni’ which her sister had bought, and practised with Jasper. Then he signed to his brother, and Jasper also took down his violin, tuned it, and began to play.

‘Let us bring the piano into the hall,’ said Barbara, and the men started to fulfil her wish. Four of them conveyed it from the parlour. At the same time the rum and hot water appeared, the spoons clinked in the glasses. Patience, the under-housemaid, threw a faggot on the fire.

‘What is that?’ exclaimed the lame warder, pointing through the window.

It was only the guard, who had extended his march to the hall and put his face to the glass to look in at the brew of rum-and-water, and the comfortable party about the fire. ‘Go back on your beat, you scoundrel!’ shouted the warder, menacing the constable with his fist. Then the face disappeared; but every time the sentinel reached the hall window, he applied his nose to the pane and stared in thirstily at the grog that steamed and ran down the throats of his comrades, and cursed the duty that kept him without in the falling dew. His appearance at intervals at the glass, where the fire and candlelight illumined his face, was like that of a fish rising to the surface of a pond to breathe.

‘Is your time come yet outside, Joe dear?’ whispered Jane.

‘Hope not,’ growled Joseph, helping himself freely to rum; putting his hand round the tumbler, so that none might observe how high the spirit stood in the glass before he added the water.

‘Oh, Joe duckie, don’t say that. I’ll go and keep you company on the stone steps: we’ll sit there in the moonlight all alone, as sweet as anything.’

‘You couldn’t ekal this grog’ answered the unromantic Joseph, ‘if you was ever so sweet. I’ve put in four lumps of double-refined.’

‘You’ve a sweet tooth, Joe,’ said Jane.

‘Shall I bathe your poor suffering foot again?’ asked the cook, casting languishing eyes at the warder.

‘By-and-by, when the liquor is exhausted,’ answered the warder.

‘Would you like a little more hot water to the spirit?’ said Patience, who was setting—as it is termed in dance phraseology—at the youngest of the constables.

‘No, miss, but I’d trouble you for a little more spirit,’ he answered, ‘to qualify the hot water.’

Then the scullery-maid, who had also found her way in, blocked the other constable in the corner, and offered to sugar his rum. He was a married man, middle-aged, and with a huge disfiguring mole on his nose; but there was no one else for the damsel to ogle and address, so she fixed upon him.

All at once, whilst this by-play was going on, under cover of the music, the door from the staircase opened, and in sprang Eve, with her tambourine, dressed in the red-and-yellow costume she had found in the garret, and wearing her burnished necklace of bezants. Barbara withdrew her hands from the piano in dismay, and flushed with shame.

‘Eve!’ she exclaimed, ‘go back! How can you!’ But the boy from the table beckoned again to her, pointing to the piano, and her fingers; Eve skipped up to her and whispered, ‘Let me alone, for Jasper’s sake,’ then bounded into the middle of the hall, and rattled her tambourine and clinked its jingles.

The men applauded, and tossed off their rum-and-water; then, having finished the rum, mixed themselves eagerly hot jorums of brandy.

The face was at the window, with the nose flat and white against the glass, like a dab of putty.

Barbara’s forehead darkened, and she drew her lips together. Her conscience was not satisfied. She suspected that this behaviour of Eve was what Walter had alluded to when he begged her not to interfere. Walter had seen Eve, and planned it with her. Was she right, Barbara asked herself, in what she was doing to help a criminal to escape?

The money he had taken was theirs—Eve’s; and if Eve chose to forgive him and release him from his punishment, why should she object? Martin was the brother of Jasper, and for Jasper’s sake she must go on with what she had begun.

So she put her fingers on the keys again, and at once Watt and Jasper resumed their instruments. They played the music in ‘Don Giovanni,’ in the last act, where the banquet is interrupted by the arrival of the statue. Barbara knew that Eve was dancing alone in the middle of the floor before these men, before him also who ought to be pacing up and down in front of the corn-chamber; but she would not turn her head over her shoulder to look at her, and her brow burnt, and her cheeks, usually pale, flamed. As for Eve, she was supremely happy; the applause of the lookers-on encouraged her. Her movements were graceful, her beauty radiant. She looked like Zerlina on the boards.

Suddenly the boy dropped his bow, and before anyone could arrest his hand, or indeed had a suspicion of mischief, he threw a canister of gunpowder into the blazing fire. Instantly there was an explosion. The logs were flung about the floor, Eve and the maids screamed, the piano and violins were hushed, doors were burst open, panes of glass broken and fell clinking, and every candle was extinguished. Fortunately the hall floor was of slate.

The men were the first to recover themselves—all, that is, but the warder, who shrieked and swore because a red-hot cinder had alighted on his bad foot.

The logs were thrust together again upon the hearth, and a flame sprang up.

No one was hurt, but in the doorway, white, with wild eyes, stood Mr. Jordan, signing with his hand, but unable to speak.

‘Oh, papa! dear papa!’ exclaimed Barbara, running to him, ‘do go back to bed. No one is hurt. We have had a fright, that is all.’

‘Fools!’ cried the old man, brandishing his stick. ‘He is gone! I saw him—he ran past my window.’