Under the Storm

"Fine tendance!" said the old woman. "My lady wants to kill him outright. Nay, nay, my young madam, we want none of your airs and flights here. You can do no good, except by making yourself scarce—you that can't hold your tongue a moment."

Stead here whispered, "Her mistress, will she forgive her?"

"Oh, yes, no fear but that she will," said Emlyn, who perhaps had revolved in her mind, since her first impulse, what it would be to nurse Stead in that hovel, with two such displeased companions as Goody and Patience. More to pacify Steadfast's uneasy eyes than for her own sake, Patience gave her a drink of milk and a piece of bread, and Peter coming just then to ask if he could help Ben with the cattle, undertook to see her safely on her way, since twilight was coming on. Sobered and awestruck by the silence and evident condemnation of all around, she ended by flinging herself on her knees by the bed, and saying "Stead, Stead, you forgive me, though no one else does?"

"Poor child—I do—as I hope—"

"The blood again. You've done it now," exclaimed Goody Grace. "Away with you!"

Peter fairly dragged her out, while the women attended to Stead.

But he let her wait outside till they heard, "Not dead, but not far from it."

CHAPTER XXII. EMLYN'S TROTH

"Woman's love is writ in water,
Woman's faith is traced in sand."

                                         AYTOUN.
Day after day Steadfast Kenton lingered between life and death, and though the external wound healed, there was little relief to the deeper injury which could not be reached, and which the damps and chills of autumn and winter could only aggravate.

He could move little, and speak even less; and suffered much, both from pain and difficulty of breathing, as he lay against sacks and pillows on his bed, or sat up in an elbow chair which Mrs. Elmwood lent him. Everybody was very kind in those days of danger. Mrs. Elmwood let Rusha come on many an afternoon to help her sister, and always bringing some posset, or cordial, or dainty of some sort to tempt the invalid. Goody Grace, Mrs. Blane, Dame Oates, Nanny Pierce vied with each other in offers of sitting up with him; Andrew, the young miller, came out of his way to bring a loaf of white bread, and to fetch the corn to be ground. Peter Pierce, Rusha's lover, and more old comrades than Patience quite desired, offered their services in aiding Ben with the cattle and other necessary labours, but as the first excitement wore off, these volunteers became scantier, and when nothing was to be heard but "just the same," nothing to be seen but a weak, wan figure sitting wrapped by the fire, the interest waned, and the gulley was almost as little frequented as before. Poor Ben's schooling had, of course, to be given up, and it was well that he was nearly as old as Stead had been when they were first left to themselves. Happily his fifteen months of study had not made him outgrow his filial obedience and devotion to the less instructed elder brother and sister, who had taken the place of the parents he had never known. Benoni, child of sorrow, he had been named, and perhaps his sickly babyhood and the mournful times around had tended to make him a quiet boy, without the tearing spirits that would have made him eager to join the village lads in their games. Indeed they laughed at him for his poverty and scholarship, and called him Jack Presbyter, Puritan, bookworm, and all the opprobrious names they could think of, though no one ever less merited sectarian nicknames than he, as far as doctrine went. For, bred up on Dr. Eales' books, and obliged to look out on the unsettled state of religious matters, he was as staunch a churchman as his brother, and fairly understood the foundations of his faith. Poor boy, the check to his studies disappointed him, and he spent every leisure moment over his Latin accidence or in reading. Next to the stories in the Bible, he loved the Maccabees, because of the likeness to the persecuted state of the Church; and he knew the Morte d'Arthur almost by heart, and thought it part of the history of England. Especially he loved the part that tells of the Holy Grail, the Sacred Cup that was guarded by the maimed King Pelles, and only revealed to the pure in heart and life. Stead had fully confided to him the secret of the cave, in case he should be the one left to deliver up the charge; and, in some strange way, the boy connected the treasure with the Saint Grail, and his brother with the maimed king. So he worked very hard, and Patience was capable of a good deal more than in her earlier days. Stead, helpless as he was, did not require constant attendance, and knew too well how much was on his sister's hands to trouble her when he could possibly help doing so. Thus they rubbed on; though it was a terrible winter, and they often had to break in on the hoard which was to have built the house, sometimes for needments for the patient, sometimes to hire help when there was work beyond the strength of Patience and Ben, who indeed was too slender to do all that Stead had done.

Ben did not shine in going to market. He was not big enough to hold his own against rude lads, and once came home crying with his donkey beaten and his eggs broken; moreover, he was apt to linger at stalls of books and broadsheets. As soon as Patience could venture to leave her brother, she was forced to go to market herself; and there was a staidness and sobriety about her demeanour that kept all impertinence at a distance. Poor Patience, she was not at all the laughing rustic beauty that Emlyn would have been at market. She would never have been handsome, and though she was only a few years over twenty, she was beginning to look weather-beaten and careworn, like the market women about her, mothers of half-a-dozen children.

Now and then she saw Emlyn in all her young, plump beauty, but looking much quieter, and always coming to her for news of Steadfast. There were even tears in those bright eyes when she heard how much he suffered. The girl had evidently been greatly sobered by the results of her indiscretion, and the treachery into which it had led her. She probably cared more for Steadfast than for anyone else except herself, and was shocked and grieved at his condition; and she had moreover discovered how her credulity had been played upon, and that she had had a narrow escape of being carried off by a buccaneer.

Her master too had been called to order by the authorities, fined and threatened for permitting Royalist plots to be hatched in his house. He had been angered by the younger Ayliffe's riotous doings, and his wife had been terrified. There had been a general reformation in which Emlyn had only escaped dismissal through her mistress's favour, pleading her orphanhood, her repentance, and her troth plight to the good young man who had been attacked by those dissolute fellows, though Mrs. Henshaw little knew how accountable was her favourite maid for the attack.

So good and discreet was Emlyn, so affectionate her messages to Stead, and so much brightness shone in his face on hearing them; there was so much pleasure when she sent him an orange and he returned the snowdrops he had made Rusha gather, that Patience began to believe that Stead was right—that the shock was all the maiden needed to steady her—and that all would end as he hoped, when he should be able to resume his labours, and add to the sadly reduced hoard.

It was not, however, till the March winds were over that Stead made any decided step towards recovery, and began to prefer the sun to the fire, and to move feebly and slowly about the farmyard, visiting the animals, too few in number, for his skilled attention had been missed. As summer came on he was able to do a little more, herd them with Growler's help, and gradually to undertake what required no exertion of strength or speed, and there he stopped short—all the sunny months of summer could do no more for him than make him fit to do such work as an old man of seventy might manage.

He was persuaded, much against his will, to ride the white horse into Bristol at a foot-pace to consult once more the barber surgeon. That worthy, who was unusually sagacious for his time and had had experience in the wars, told him that his recovery was a marvel, but that with the bullet where it was lodged, he could scarcely hope to enjoy much more health or comfort than at present. It could not be reached, but it might shift, when either it would prove fatal or become less troublesome; and as a friend and honest man, he counselled the poor youth not to waste his money nor torture himself by having recourse to remedies or doctors who could do no real good.

Stead thanked the barber, paid his crown, and slowly made his way to Mrs. Lightfoot's, where he was to rest, dine, and see Emlyn.

Kind Mrs. Lightfoot shed tears when she saw the sturdy, ruddy youth grown so thin and pale; and as to Emlyn, she actually stood silent for three minutes.

The two were left together in Mrs. Lightfoot's kitchen, for Patience was at market, and their hostess had to mind her trade.

Stead presently told Emlyn somewhat of the doctor's opinion, and then, producing his portion of the tester, and with lips that trembled in spite of himself, said that he had come to give Emlyn back her troth plight.

"Oh! Stead, Stead," she cried, bursting into tears. "I thought you had forgiven me."

"Forgiven you! Yea, truly, poor child, but—"

"But only when you were sick! You cast me off now you are whole."

"I shall never be whole again, Emlyn."

"I don't believe Master Willis. He is nought but a barber," she exclaimed passionately. "I know there are physicians at the Bath who would cure you; or there's the little Jew by the wharf; or the wise man on Durdham Down. But you always are so headstrong; when you have made up your mind no one can move you, and you don't care whose heart you break," she sobbed.

"Hearken, little sweet," said Stead. "'Tis nought but that I wot that it would be ill for you to be bound to a poor frail man that will never be able to keep you as you should be kept. All I had put by is well nigh gone, and I'm not like to make it up again for many a year, even if I were as strong as ever."

"And you won't go to the Jew, or the wise man, or the Bath?"

"I have not the money."

"But I will—I will save it for you!" cried Emlyn, who never had saved in her life. "Or look here. Master Henshaw might give you a place in his office, and then there would be no need to dwell in that nasty, damp gulley, but we could be in the town. I'll ask my mistress to crave it from him."

Stead could not but smile at her eagerness, but he shook his head.

"It would be bootless, sweetheart, I cannot carry weights."

"No, but you can write."

"Very scurvily, and I cannot cypher."

For Stead, like everyone else at Elmwood, kept his accounts by tally and in his head, and the mysteries of the nine Arabic figures were perfectly unknown to him. However, Emlyn stuck to the hope, and he was so far inspired by it that he ceased to insist on giving up the pledges of the betrothal, and he lay on the settle in quiet enjoyment of Emlyn's castle building, as she sat on a stool by his side, his hand on her shoulder, somewhat as it was wont to lie on Growler's head. And in spite of Master Willis's opinion, he rode home to the gulley a new man, assuring Patience, on the donkey by his side, that there was more staunchness and kindness in little Emlyn than ever they had thought for. Even the ferryman who put them over the river declared that the doctor must have done Master Kenton a power of good, and Stead smiled and did not contradict him.

Stead actually consulted Mr. Woodley how to learn cyphering beyond what Ben had acquired at school; and the minister lent him a treatise, over which he pored with a board and a burnt stick for many an hour when he was out on the common with the cattle, or on the darkening evenings in the hut. Ben saw his way into those puzzles with no more difficulty than whetted his appetite, worked out sum after sum, and explained them to his brother, to the admiration of both his elders, till frowns of despair and long sighs from Stead brought Patience to declare he was mazing himself, and insist on putting out the light.

Stead had more time for his studies than he could wish, for the cold of winter soon affected the injured lungs; and, moreover, the being no longer able to move about rapidly caused the damp and cold of the ravine to produce rheumatism and attendant ills, of which, in his former healthy, out-of-door life, he had been utterly ignorant, and he had to spend many an hour breathless, or racked with pain in the poor little hovel, sometimes trying to give his mind to the abstruse mysteries of multiplication of money, but generally in vain, and at others whiling away the time with his books, for though there were only seven of them, including Bible and Prayer-book, a very little reading could be the text of so much musing, that these few perfectly sufficed him. And then he was the nurse of any orphaned lamb or sick chicken that Patience was anxious about, and his care certainly saved many of those small lives.

The spring, when he came forth again, found him on a lower level, less strong and needing a stick to aid his rheumatic knee.

Not much was heard of Emlyn that spring. She did not come to market with her mistress, and Patience was not inclined to go in quest of her, having a secret feeling that no news might be better for Stead than anything she was likely to hear; while as to any chance of their coming together, the Kentons had barely kept themselves through this winter, and Steadfast's arithmetic was not making such progress as would give him a place at a merchant's desk.

Patience, however, was considerably startled when, one fine June day, she saw Mrs. Henshaw's servant point her out to two tall soldierly-looking men, apparently father and son.

"Good morrow to you, honest woman," said the elder. "I am told it is you who have been at charges for many years for my brother's daughter, Emlyn Gaythorn."

Patience assented.

"You have been right good to her, I hear; and I thank you for that same, and will bear what we may of the expense," he added, taking out a heavy bag from his pouch.

He went on to explain that he and his son having gone abroad with his master had been serving with the Dutch, and had made some prize money. Learning on the peace that a small inheritance in Worcestershire had fallen to the family, they had returned, and found from Lady Blythedale that the brother's daughter was supposed to be alive somewhere near Bristol. She had a right to half, and being honourable men, they had set out in search of her, bringing letters from the lady to Mr. Henshaw, whose house was still a centre of inquiry for persons in the Cavalier interest. There, of course, they had discovered Emlyn; and Master Gaythorn proceeded to say that it had been decided that the estate should not be broken up, but that his son should at once wed her and unite their claims.

"But, sir," exclaimed Patience, "she is troth plight to my brother."

"So she told me, but likewise that he is a broken man and sickly, and had offered to restore her pledge."

Patience could not deny it, though she felt hotly indignant.

"She charged me to give it back to you," added the uncle; "and to bid you tell the young man that we are beholden to you both; but that since the young folk are to be wedded to-morrow morn, and then to set forth for Worcestershire, there is no time for leave-takings."

"I do not wonder!" exclaimed Patience, "that she has no face to see us. She that has been like a child or a sister to us, to leave us thus! O my brother!"