The Toll-Gate Read online

  ‘Lord, no! I’ll take what I want in a saddlebag, and shan’t have the least need of him.’

  ‘When,’ demanded Fanny, a look of foreboding in her eyes, ‘do you mean to return to Mildenhurst?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ said her maddening brother. ‘In a week or so, I daresay. Why?’

  Fanny, prohibited by a quelling glance from her mama from answering this question, merely looked her disapprobation. Mrs Staple said: ‘It is not of the smallest consequence. I have friends coming to stay at Mildenhurst next week, so you are not to be thinking that I may be lonely, John.’

  ‘Oh, that’s famous, then!’ he said, relieved. ‘You know, Mama, I don’t know how it is – whether it’s my uncle, with his bamboozling ways, or Aunt Caroline, or Lucius’s laugh, or Ralph Tackenham prosing on for ever, or young Geoffrey aping the dandy-set, or just the devilish propriety of Easterby – but I can’t stand it here!’

  ‘I know just what you mean,’ his mother assured him.

  He bent, giving her a hug and a kiss. ‘You are the best mother in the world!’ he said. ‘What’s more, that’s a very fetching nightcap, ma’am! I must go: Melksham wants to start a faro-bank now, and Bevis don’t like it above half. Poor old fellow! He’ll never be able to handle Melksham – not when Melksham’s muddled, which he is, six days out of the seven. Christened with pump-water, that lad! He’ll be as drunk as an artillery-man before morning.’

  With this ominous prophecy, the Captain then took himself off, leaving his parent unperturbed, and his sister seething. Hardly had the door closed behind him, than she exclaimed: ‘I think John is the most vexatious creature alive! How could you let him go, Mama? You know what he is! I daresay you won’t set eyes on him again for a month! And now he won’t even meet Elizabeth!’

  ‘It is unfortunate, but I don’t despair,’ replied Mrs Staple, smiling faintly. ‘As for letting him go, a man of nine-and-twenty, my love, is not to be held in leading-strings. Moreover, had I obliged him to come home to meet Elizabeth I am persuaded he would have taken her in aversion from the outset.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fanny crossly, ‘I think he is odiously provoking, ma’am!’

  ‘Very true, my dear: all men are odiously provoking,’ agreed Mrs Staple. ‘Now I am going to bed, and you had best do the same.’

  ‘Yes, or Lichfield will wonder what has become of me,’ Fanny said, getting up from her chair.

  ‘Not at all,’ responded her mother coolly. ‘Lichfield, dear child, is no less provoking than any other man, and is at this moment – I have no doubt – playing faro downstairs.’

  Fanny acknowledged the probable truth of this pronouncement by bidding her parent a dignified good night.

  Two

  Captain Staple was not destined to leave Easterby at an early hour on the following morning. Thanks to the nocturnal habits of Lord Melksham, it was daylight before he went to bed. That amiable but erratic peer, dissuaded from opening a faro-bank, had challenged the company to a quiet game of loo; and since the elders of the party, who included besides the Archdeacon, his brother-in-law, Mr Yatton, and Mr Merridge the Earl’s chaplain, had retired soon after the ladies, and the Earl was plainly unable to keep the situation within bounds, Captain Staple had not the heart to desert him. The Earl was grateful, but he would not permit him to break up the party, which he was perfectly willing to do. He said: ‘No, no! If Melksham is determined – He is my guest, you know, and, besides – Well, you will understand how it is!’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said John bluntly. ‘And if I were you, old fellow, I would order things as I liked in my own house!’

  No one, after as much as one glance at the Captain’s goodhumoured but determined countenance, could doubt this. The Earl said fretfully: ‘Yes, but you don’t understand! It’s all very well for you – However, that don’t signify! The thing is, you know what Lucius is, and that stupid brother-in-law of mine! And here’s my Uncle Yatton taken himself off, and left young Geoffrey to do as he pleases! I wish you will stay, and help me to see that they keep the line!’

  So Captain Staple, no gamester, stayed; and if he failed to keep the stakes as low as his noble cousin would have wished he did contrive to prevent the quiet game of loo from becoming an extremely noisy game of loo. By the time Lord Melksham had wearied of this sport, and inaugurated a game of brag, young Mr Yatton had succumbed to his potations, which, as the Captain cheerfully informed the Earl, was a very happy circumstance, since it cut his losses short.

  Having carried Geoffrey up to bed, he presently held his own brother-in-law’s head under the pump in the scullery, guided his cousin Arthur’s wavering steps up the stairs, and gently but firmly convinced Lord Melksham that it would be better to retire to bed than to try the power of a hunting-horn discovered in the Great Hall.

  After so strenuous a night it was not surprising that the Captain should have slept far into the morning. He did not leave Easterby until past noon, and had he attended to the representations made to him by his host and his sister he would not have left it at all that day. It was pointed out to him that the sky threatened bad weather, that he could not hope to achieve more than a few miles of his journey, and that he would do well to abandon the whole project of riding to Leicestershire. But the probability of rain did not much trouble any man who was accustomed to bivouacking under the worst of conditions in the Peninsula and the Pyrenees; and the possibility of having to rack up for the night at some wayside inn seemed to him infinitely preferable to another of Lord Melksham’s convivial evenings. So at noon, Cocking, the private servant who had been with him through all his campaigns, brought his big, Roman-nosed bay horse up to the house, and strapped to the saddle a heavy frieze cloak, and the bag which contained all that the Captain considered to be necessary for his journey. The rest of the Captain’s luggage consisted of a couple of portmanteaux, and these he instructed Cocking to despatch by carrier to Edenhope, Mr Babbacombe’s hunting-box in Leicestershire. The sight of two such modest pieces caused Lord Melksham’s man, a very superior person, to wonder that any gentleman should care to travel about the country so meagrely provided for. His own master, he said, never stirred from home without several trunks, a dressing-case, and himself: a highly talented valet. However, the bubble of his conceit was swiftly pricked, Cocking replying without hesitation that there was nothing for him to hold his nose up at in that. ‘If the Captain was a tallow-faced twiddle-poop, mounted on a pair o’ cat-sticks, I dessay he’d need a snirp like you to pad his calves out, and finify him,’ he said. ‘Only he ain’t! Would there be anything more you was wishful to say about the Captain?’

  Lord Melksham’s man prudently decided that there was nothing more he wished to say, explaining this forbearance later to his colleagues as being due to his reluctance to bandy words with a vulgar make-bait. Cocking, left in possession of the field, carefully loaded the Captain’s pistols, placed them in the saddle-holsters, and led the bay up to the house. The Captain, attired in buckskin breeches and top-boots, and a coat of slightly military cut, gave him a few last instructions, and mounted the big horse. Keeping a hand on the bridle, Cocking looked up at him, and asked if he was to join him at Edenhope, when he had escorted the mistress safely home.

  ‘No, you might not find me there. Besides, I shan’t need you.’

  ‘Well, sir, that’s as may be, but what I should like to know is who’s going to clean them leathers?’ demanded his henchman.

  ‘I don’t know. Mr Babbacombe’s man, I daresay.’

  ‘Ho!’ said Cocking. ‘That’ll put Mr Babbacombe’s man in prime twig, that will! Howsever, it’s just as you wish, sir, out of course!’

  He then watched his master ride off down the avenue, slowly shaking his head. A sparrow, hopping about within a few yards of him, was the recipient of his next cryptic confidence. ‘Resty, very resty!’ he said, staring very hard at the bird. ‘If you was to ask me, I should say we sha
ll have him up to some kind of bobbery in just a brace o’ snaps!’

  The Captain, although he had not the smallest intention of getting up to bobbery, was heartily glad to escape from Easterby. There was nothing but Lord Melksham’s mild excesses to break the tedium; and he did not find these amusing. His cousin’s life was hedged about by all the proprieties which had driven the Captain, eight years earlier, to persuade his father to buy him a pair of colours. He had had a strong notion that the Army in time of war would suit him, and events had proved him to be right. Life in the Peninsula had been uncertain, uncomfortable, and often haphazard, but it had offered almost every kind of adventure, and John had refused none of these. He had enjoyed himself enormously, and never so intensely as when engaged upon some dangerous enterprise. But when the war ended, in 1814, although he rejoiced as much as any man in the downfall of Bonaparte, he knew that the life he liked had ended too. Not for John Staple, the boredom of military life in peacetime! He yielded at last to his mother’s solicitations, and sold out. She thought that he would find plenty to occupy him in the management of his estate, his father having died a year previously. The elder John Staple had been an indolent man, and for some months his son was busy enough. Then had come the news of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba, and a brief period of exciting activity for John. But Bonaparte had been a prisoner on St Helena for two years now, and everyone seemed to feel that it was time John settled down to a life of civilian respectability. He felt it himself, and tried to be content, but every now and then a fit of restlessness would seize him. When that happened his subsequent actions would be unpredictable, though, as his brother-in-law gloomily said, it was safe to assume that they would be freakish, and possibly outrageous. Lord Lichfield had every reason to believe that he had once wandered for a couple of weeks with a party of gypsies; and not readily would he forget John’s sudden arrival at his house in Lincolnshire, at midnight, by way of an open window, and clad in strange and disreputable garments. ‘Good God, what have you been doing?’ he had exclaimed.

  ‘Free trading!’ had replied John, grinning at him. ‘I’m glad I’ve found you at home: I want a bath, and some clean clothes.’

  Lord Lichfield had been too much shocked to do more than goggle at him for a full minute. It wasn’t, of course, as bad as John made it sound: the whole affair had been the result of an accident. ‘But what I say is this, Fanny!’ had complained his lordship later. ‘If I go sailing, and run into a squall, and have to swim for it, do I get picked up by a smuggling-vessel? Of course I don’t! No one but John would be! What’s more, no one but John would finish the voyage with a set of cut-throat rascals, or help them to land their kegs! And if it had happened to me, I shouldn’t be alive to tell the tale: they’d have knocked me on the head, and dropped me overboard.’

  ‘I cannot conceive how it comes about that he was spared!’ Fanny had said. ‘Oh, I wish he would not do such things!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed her lord. ‘Though, mind you, he’s very well able to take care of himself.’

  ‘But in the power of a whole crew of smugglers!’

  ‘I expect they liked him.’

  ‘Liked him?’

  ‘Well, you can’t help liking him!’ pointed out his lordship. ‘He’s a very charming fellow – and I wish to God he’d settle down, and stop kicking up these larks!’

  ‘Mama is right!’ declared Fanny. ‘We must find him an eligible wife!’

  Candidate after candidate for this post did Fanny and her mama find, and cunningly throw in John’s way. Apparently he liked them – all of them. This one was a most conversible girl, that one seemed to him a very lively girl, another a remarkably pretty girl. But he asked none of them to marry him. When his sister ventured to ask him once if he had ever been in love, he had replied quite seriously, Yes: he rather thought he had been desperately in love with the lodge-keeper’s wife, who used to regale him with brandy-snaps, and allowed him to keep in a hutch outside her kitchen door the ferrets Mama had so much disliked. Was that all? had demanded an exasperated sister. No, there had been a girl in Lisbon, when he first joined. Juanita, or was it Conchita? He couldn’t remember, but at all events she was the loveliest creature you ever saw. Dark, of course, and with the biggest eyes, and such a well-turned ankle! Had he been in love with her? ‘Lord, yes!’ replied John. ‘We all were!’

  He admitted that it was time he was thinking of getting married: not, of course, to Fanny, but to Mama. ‘Well, I know, Mama,’ he said apologetically. ‘But the thing is I’ve got no fancy for one of these dashed suitable marriages, where you don’t really care a fig for the girl, or she for you. I don’t mean to offer marriage to any girl who don’t give me a leveller. So I daresay I shall remain a bachelor, for they don’t – any of ’em! And if one did,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘it’s Lombard Street to a China orange you wouldn’t take to her!’

  ‘Dearest boy, I should take to any girl whom you loved!’ declared Mrs Staple.

  He grinned his appreciation of this mendacity, and gave her shoulders a hug, saying: ‘That was a whisker!’

  She boxed his ears. ‘Odious boy! The fact of the matter is that it is a thousand pities we are not living in archaic times. What you would have liked, my son, is to have rescued some female from a dragon, or an ogre!’

  ‘Famous good sport to have had a turn-up with a dragon,’ he agreed. ‘As long as you didn’t find yourself with the girl left on your hands afterwards, which I’ve a strong notion those fellows did.’

  ‘Such girls,’ his mother reminded him, ‘were always very beautiful.’

  ‘To be sure they were! Dead bores too, depend upon it! In fact, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the dragons were very glad to be rid of ’em,’ said John.

  Not very promising, this. But Fanny had discovered Elizabeth Kelfield, and Mrs Staple had acknowledged, after careful and critical study of Miss Kelfield, that here was a lady who might well take John’s fancy. She was dark; she was decidedly handsome; her fortune was respectable; and although she was not quite twenty years of age she seemed older, the circumstance of her having taken from an invalid mother’s shoulders the burden of household cares having given her an assurance beyond her years. Mrs Staple thought she had quality, and began to cultivate the ailing Mrs Kelfield.

  And now, when mother and daughter had been coaxed to Mildenhurst, off went John into Leicestershire, so that all the scheming so painstakingly undertaken on his behalf seemed likely to be wasted.

  In happy ignorance of this, Captain Staple, climbing the slopes of the Pennines, found himself in a wild, moorland country, and liked it. Having a good sense of direction, he had left the pike road at the earliest opportunity, and with it, in a very short space of time, all signs of civilization. This exactly suited his mood, and he rode over the moors, at an easy pace and in a southeasterly direction. He had meant originally to have spent the night in Derby, but his late start made this impossible. Chesterfield became his objective. That was before the bay cast a shoe. When this happened, the Captain had ample time in which to regret having left the pike road, for he appeared to be in the centre of a vast desert. The only habitations to be seen for miles were an occasional cottage, and a few rough sheds dotted about the moors for the protection of shepherds. It was dusk when the Captain, leading Beau, dropped off the moor into a small village, which boasted not only a forge, but an alehouse as well. The smith had gone home, and by the time he had been fetched from his cottage, and the fire had been blown up again, not only had the last of the daylight vanished, but the rain, which had held off all day, had begun to fall. There was no possibility of racking up for the night at the alehouse, but bait was forthcoming for man and beast. Captain Staple ate a hearty meal of ham and eggs, lit one of his Spanish cigarillos, and went out to see what hope there might be of the weather’s clearing. There was plainly none. The rain was falling with persistent steadiness, and not a star was to be seen. The Captain res
igned himself to a wet ride, and sought counsel of the landlord. This was his undoing. The worthy man not only knew of a comfortable inn a few miles distant, but, anxious to be helpful, directed the Captain to it by what he assured him was the shortest route. He said that the Captain could not miss it, and no doubt the Captain would not have missed it if the landlord had not omitted to tell him that when he bade him take the first lane on the right he did not mean the track which, as every native of those parts knew, led winding upwards to the moor, and ended at a small farmstead. It was an hour later when the Captain, trusting his instinct, and riding steadily southward, found a lane which, rough though it was, seemed likely to lead to some village, or pike road. He followed this, noting with satisfaction that it ran slightly downhill, and within a short space of time knew that his guess had been correct. The lane ran into a broader road, which crossed it at right angles. Captain Staple had no very certain idea where he was, but he was reasonably sure that Sheffield lay to the east, probably at no great distance, so he turned left-handed into the larger road. The rain dripped from the brim of his hat, and mud generously splashed his top-boots, but the heavy frieze cloak had so far kept him fairly dry. He leaned forward to pat Beau’s streaming neck, saying encouragingly: ‘Not much farther now, old chap!’

  A bend in the road brought into view an encouraging sight. A small light glowed ahead, which, from its position, the Captain judged to be the lantern hung upon a toll-gate. ‘Come, now, Beau!’ he said, in heartening accents. ‘We’re on the right track, at all events! If this is a pike road, it must lead to some town!’

  He rode on, and soon saw that he had indeed reached a pike. The light, though very dim, enabled him to see that it was shut, and guarded, on the northern side of the road, by a gatehouse. No light was visible in the house, and the door was shut. ‘Cross-country road, not much used,’ the Captain informed Beau. He raised his voice, shouting imperatively: ‘Gate!’