Patsy by Samuel Rutherford Crockett (read aloud TXT) 📖

the Horse, and as I have none at present, it is your business to provide some for me! Now good-night to you--I must see that girl again to-morrow. Gad, when I once get her safe to Lyonesse House, she shall wear the cross-gartered sandals, the blue skirt with the red sash, and if London does not bow down and worship, I am no true son of my father."
* * * * *
But the next day Patsy was still absent, greatly to the annoyance of the Duke. He had counted on a difficult but not unwilling captive. He judged from her easy familiarity in the matter of the wool-winding that he would have little difficulty in persuading her to make a dash for the liberty which would also be glory.
But all the morning the Duke waited in vain, and the strange thing about it was that neither at Abbey Burnfoot nor at Cairn Ferris did any one appear to be concerning themselves about daughter, niece or heiress.
The Duke and his party did not know that as Adam Ferris was making his evening round of the sheep on the hill, a plaided shepherd leaped a drystone dyke ten yards in front of him, and was followed by a shaggy, brown-eyed dog. The men exchanged a few words and then each went his own way. Adam Ferris was reassured as to his daughter, and as for Uncle Julian, busy with his guests, he understood that Patsy was safe with the Garlands at Glenanmays.
But instead Stair had convoyed her, with the utmost pains of wood and heather craft, to Ladykirk, where she had been received by Miss Aline with such quiet rejoicings as the staid little gentlewoman permitted herself.
Having housed his charge, Stair set himself to establish a guard about the old house. His two brothers and half a dozen other members of the band were easy to put hands upon when wanted, but Stair needed some one above suspicion, who could come and go freely. He remembered, with a grimace, that the matter would certainly interest Louis Raincy, and accordingly he posted to Raincy Castle to find him, as soon as he had got Agnew and Fergus into position.
Louis Raincy needed no spur. In order to help he was willing to break all rules and dare all angers. He did not even pause to ask himself why Stair Garland was taking so deep a concern in the matter. Patsy was his Patsy, and he flattered himself that the young man from Glenanmays was only recognizing his rights by coming to ask for his assistance.
Louis Raincy was Galloway bred. He knew the farmers' sons of the whole district. He had always met them, played with them, and, on fit occasion, fought with them as equals. Only he did not trouble his grandfather with the closeness of his acquaintance with his neighbours. The old gentleman would neither have understood nor approved. He himself had always stood aloof, and he desired no better than that his heir should follow in his feudal footsteps.
More than this, Louis had made a trip or two with Stair Garland's Free Traders--of course, in the strictest privacy and in a disguise which was immediately penetrated by the whole convoy, though they pretended to accept Stair's statement that the young fellow with the false beard was an Isle of Man shipper who had come to see how his goods were disposed of.
The band thought no worse of Stair for trying to throw dust in their eyes, but an Isle of Man shipper in possession of two spirited Castle Raincy horses was too much for them. They laughed as they rode and wondered how the heir of Raincy would explain matters to the Earl if the business culminated in a tussle.
But Louis had come out all safe, and though he openly flouted the Free Trade with the young men of his own rank, there was no part of his past, except only his talks with Patsy in the hollow of the old beech bole, which returned to him with such a flavour of fresh, glad youth as the "run" in which he had taken part.
So now that he was again to do something which would lead him out on the hills of heather in the misty shining of the moon or under the plush-spangled glitter of the midnight stars, he went off in high spirits to take his groom into his confidence and have the horses ready.
Obscurely, however, he felt that he was about to take part in a struggle for Patsy. It was to be a fight, not so much against danger from unscrupulous dandies like the Duke of Lyonesse and his acolyte, my Lord of Wargrove, as between Stair and himself. Louis de Raincy himself was "of as good blood as the King, only not so rich," as say the Spaniards. But this restless, stern-visaged Stair Garland, with his curious Viking fixity of gaze, what was his position towards Patsy? Was it all only friendship for the confidante of his sister? Louis Raincy's own hopes and purposes were of the vaguest. He did not even know whether he himself loved Patsy, but he was quite clear on the chapter of nobody else having her if he could help it.


CHAPTER IX
HIS LIFE IN HIS HAND
Louis Raincy rode right up to the door of Ladykirk and asked to see Miss Aline, with whom he had always been a great favourite. As a boy he had loved to play about her shrubberies. He remembered still the quaint smell of the damp pine-needles on the ground, the bitterness of laurel leaves which he broke across the centre and nibbled at, and above all, the long pleasant days of Miss Aline's jam-making, when he skirmished in and out and all about the kitchen and pantry, getting in everybody's way. Why, his very breath smelled sweet to himself after he had cleaned out brass pan after brass pan, with that worn spoon of horn warranted not to scratch, kept and supplied by Miss Aline for the purpose.
Now he was grown up. School and college had passed him by, and much to his own astonishment had left him in many ways as much a boy as ever. He had not been allowed to enter either of the fighting services, so he took what of adventure the country afforded--the rustic merry-making of the "Kirn" in the days of harvest home, the coastwise adventure of ships, and the midnight raid of the Free Traders with their clanking keg-irons and long defiles of pack horses crowning the fells and bending away towards the North star and safety.
Now Miss Aline greeted him cheerfully as he came in through the great doors of the courtyard which had been shut that morning for the first time since her father's funeral.
"Ah, Louis," she cried at sight of him, "it is easy to guess what brings you to my door so early in the morning. It is long since the days of the brass preserving-pan. Laddie, I'm feared that 'tis quite another berrying of sweets which brings you so fast and so far!"
"Miss Aline," said the lad, with a frankness which made the good chatelaine like him the better, "I rode over to see Patsy Ferris. I must hear what all this is about the Duke of Lyonesse."
"Nothing, so far as I can hear, Louis," said Miss Aline; "but our maid is afraid, and her father's house and her uncle's are both as full of soldiers and ribaldry as ever in the times of the Covenant. So where should she come if not to me? It was more wisely done than I could have expected from that 'fechtin' fule' of a Stair Garland."
Louis Raincy saw Patsy. She was sitting in Miss Aline's own room among the simple daintiness of many white linen "spreads" with raised broidery, the work of Miss Aline's own hands. Here she told him her determination to keep out of the way till the Prince and his train had left the country. The reasons for her instinctive dislike of her uncle's guest were not clear to any except herself, but on these Louis did not insist. It was enough that Patsy was so minded. In any case he wished her to know that he would follow the movements of the enemy with care, and warn her of their intentions. Captain Laurence, especially, was a free talker, and might let slip useful information. He, Louis, would ride over to headquarters that very afternoon, and, if Laurence was still absent, he would get an orderly to find him.
Thus was Patsy equipped with two cavaliers of courage and address, one of whom had his entries everywhere, while the other possessed the supreme skill of sea, shore, morass, hill, and heather, which comes only after generations of practice. But against them they had a man infinitely subtle and wholly without scruple. Eben McClure was of that breed of Galloway Scot, which, having been kicked and humiliated in youth for lack of strength and courage, pays back his own people by treachery with interest thereto.
The like of Eben McClure had tracked with Lag when he made his tours among his neighbours, with confiscation and fine for a main object, and the murder of this or that man of prayer, covenant-keeper or Bible-carrier, as only a wayside accident. Now Galloway is half Celtic, and the other half, at least till the Ayrshire invasion, was mostly Norse. So McClure was hated with all the Celtic vehemence which does not stop short of blood. He was the salaried betrayer of his own, and in time, unless he could make enough money and remove himself to some far hiding-place, would assuredly die the death which such men die.
Of this, of course, he was perfectly aware, and had arranged his life accordingly.
In the meantime he watched and pondered. He disguised himself and made night journeys that he might learn what would suit his purpose. He could be in turn an Irish drover, a Loch Fyne fisherman, a moor shepherd, a flourishing burgess of Lanark or Ruglen, even an enterprising spirit dealer from Edinburgh or Dundee, with facilities for storage of casks when the Solway undutied cargoes should reach these cities.
And the marvel was that in none of his personations had he yet been caught. In proof of which he was still alive, but McClure confessed to himself that it was only a matter of time. He must make a grand stroke for fortune--quick fortune, and then bolt for it. For his heart was sick with thinking on the gunshot from behind the hedge or the knife between his shoulders. He never now went to his own parish of Stonykirk where his father had been a well-doing packman--which is to say, a travelling merchant of silks and laces. McClure knew that he was in danger anywhere west of the Cree, but the danger increased as he went westwards, and in his own parish of Stonykirk there were at least a score of young blades who would have taken his life with as little thought as they would have blooded a pig--aye, and had sworn so to do, _handfasted_ upon it, kissing alternately Bible and cold steel.
It was no difficult matter for McClure to possess himself of the unavowed reason of my Lord Wargrove's ardent search for a carriage and horses. Clearly it was for a secret purpose--one that could not be declared. Because in any other case Lord Wargrove had only to take the pair which belonged to his host, or more easily still, Adam Ferris's in the north end of the Glen.