CHAPTER XIX.

"STARS AND GARTERS."

The inmates of the King's Arms had been in bed and asleep full four hours, and profound silence reigned throughout its precincts, when, a few moments after the gatehouse clock had chimed one, a loud rattling on the panes of Mistress Sheppard's bedchamber window roused her from uneasy dreams.

"Cuther! what a night!" ejaculated she, sitting up and listening to the sound as it fell again with increased violence. "There's hail for you! Big as pebble stones, be sure."

A third shower made it clear beyond all question that pebble-stones they were; and rising in haste, she opened a pane of the lattice and looked out.

"Is that you, Mistress Sheppard?" said a muffled voice immediately beneath, as the billowy outlines of her nightcap broke dazzling white amid the surrounding darkness upon the vision of the speaker.

"And is that you, Master Lee?" sharply replied the mistress of the hostelry, as her nocturnal visitor, turning the light of the dark lantern he carried full upon the casement, revealed at the same time his own form and features. "What do you want?" she went on in dudgeon, "coming here at this time o' night, bringin' honest folks' hearts into their mouths, and disturbin' their rest?"

"Yes, yes," hastily assented Lee; "'tis very late, I grant you--"

"Early, I suppose you mean," fumed Mistress Sheppard, clutching the pane, to snap it to again. "And let me tell you--"

"Oh, yes! whatever you please, if--"

"Please! There's little o' pleasin' in bein' waked up at this hour."

"No, no. Quite true. But listen, just listen."

"I'll do no such a thing. What do you want, Master Lee?"

"A horse."

"I'll see Sheppard has his horsewhip in nice trim for you next you come this way," irately retorted she; "an' be you ten times master o' Nether Hall."

[Sidenote: Stars and garters.]

"Nay; for that he need be at no trouble," laughed Lee, hitting a swish in the air with a short riding-whip he carried in his other hand. "I've got my own with me, as luck had it. And if not, 'twould have mattered little enough, for 'tis rarely Stars and Garters needs whip nor spur either."

"Stars and Garters!" gasped Mistress Sheppard.

"Ay, 'tis her I'll take, with your good leave," calmly returned Lawrence.

Now Stars and Garters was the name distinguishing the pride of the King's Arms, and of her mistress's heart, a beautiful black mare, marked with a white star on her left breast, and a curious ring of white hair below the left knee, whose match for docility and fleetness of foot was not to be met with in all the country side; and the audacity of Lee's proposition took Mistress Sheppard's breath away. "Stars and Garters!" ironically ejaculated she, when at last she recovered it. "What next, cuther?"

"A brace of pistols," began Lee.

"Ah! Thieves!" she shrieked. "Murder!--"

"Hold your silly tongue, woman," peremptorily interrupted Lee. "What do you take me for? Don't you know Lawrence Lee yet?"

"I'm none so sure that I do," replied she, recovering all her wonted presence of mind. "And I have liked not your ways of late, young man, and so I tell you."

"I doubt they have scarce pleased me better than they have yourself," said Lee, with a frank and yet humbled look in his upturned face, which somehow went straight to the good woman's heart.

[Sidenote: Mistress Sheppard hesitates.]

"If I know toadstools from mushrooms, he means honestly," she went on to herself, showing, however, no signs of capitulating, and sternly pursing her lips. "They would ill become your father's son," she said aloud, "and make sore places in his heart, as a certain prodigal son's we wot of, did."

"And he resolved, did he not, to try and mend his ways. So come, Mistress Sheppard, quick with the stable-door key; there's a good soul; and Stars and Garters for England and the King."

"The king?!" and curl papers all forgotten, Mistress Sheppard's head craned eagerly down from the casement.

"Ay, he's in danger," nodded Lee, catching up, as he spoke, a rusty crowbar lying in the grass; "and there's not a moment to be lost, I tell you. Shall I break open the stable door and help myself?"

[Sidenote: A good start.]

"No, no, one instant," she replied, glancing at the slumbering Sheppard, "one instant and I'll be down."

She was better than her word; and in a few seconds, attired in strange garments to protect her from the chilly night-air, she was standing beside Lee, assisting him to prepare Stars and Garters for her journey, before the good mare had well got her wits together. As, however, she felt Mistress Sheppard's own plump hands tightening the saddle-girths round her sleek body, she roused up, and uttered a loud neigh of pleasure.

"Pretty dear!" murmured Mistress Sheppard. "Hark how eager she is to be upon the road, bless her! 'Tis more, I'll warrant, than some Christians'd care about; bein wakened up out o' their beauty sleep. Sheppard, now, he'd been as growly as a bear with a sore head. Now, then, up with you, Master Lee. Here's your pistols," she added, thrusting a pair into the holsters. "You can tell me the tale when you come back. There's some o't won't be so mighty fresh to me, I'm thinkin'. So off with you, and good luck be your servant."

With a hurried wave of the hand Lee clattered out of the stable, and clearing the low garden fence by a bound, horse and rider started "thorough bush, thorough brier," across the fields, till they attained the high-road, winding on by the low open country to the fenny Cambridgeshire wastes, old England's least beautiful part, so lovers of nature say.

[Sidenote: The King's highway.]

For another class of folks, however, it possessed in those days immense attraction; inasmuch as it formed the highway from London to the town of Newmarket, which Charles the Second had made the most important and fashionable horse-racing place in the kingdom. He was accustomed to visit it some five or six times in the year; establishing his quarters at an old mansion situated in the middle of the High Street, which he had purchased from its owner, the Earl of Ormond, and had caused to be altered and enlarged, to accommodate himself and his retinue. Thither, as may be imagined, like wasps after honey, swarmed all sorts and conditions of men, and of women too; from my lord and my lady in their velvet gowns, to the ragged and jagged beggar, and worse than these, the footpads, and "gentlemen of the road," as it was the fashion to call these thieves on horseback, who infested the great highways all over the country.

It need hardly be said that this one and particular half hundred miles of road, stretching between London and Newmarket, was very carefully attended to by these gentry; and Lee, as he cantered on, did not forget to keep one hand near the holsters.

Nothing, however, occurred to vary the monotony of his way, beyond encountering now and again some solitary pedestrian, probably as honest and sober as himself, and here and there some few yards from the road, a group of wayfarers bound for Newmarket, encamped upon the stunted turf round the smouldering embers of their hastily kindled fire. Towards three o'clock he reached the large wayside hostelry at Chesterford called the Blue Bear, where travellers from London always stopped to change horses.

Here, before the big wooden horse-trough in front of the main door, Lee slackened his rein; and while Stars and Garters gratefully drank in the cool clear water, he called for a jack of ale for his own refreshment. The drawer was, however, so slow in getting his drowsy wits together, that when at last he did hand up the jack; he found that he was holding it in empty space, and his customer had disappeared.

[Sidenote: In a mighty hurry.]

"He wor in a mighty hurry," grumbled the man, as he stood listening for a few moments to the fast dying sounds of the horse's feet, and then stooped down to grope by the light of the lantern swinging to the sign-post, after the coin which Lee had flung down in discharge of the reckoning for the refreshment he had not stayed to enjoy. "Well, he must be a woundly wittol be sure, or his business is such a rare pressing one, that he can spare to pass by this;" and he gazed affectionately into the ale's clear amber deeps, "as if 'twere no more'n a cup o' fleet milk. Didn't the king's own self say, but t'other day, last time he comed by, and drinked his nippet o't, that naught o' the stuff in his Whitehall cellars don't hold a rushlight to't? Maaster'd be monsus put about, ef he comed to know of its being scorned so. Naa, Naa," he went on, putting the jack to his lips. "I shudn't dare let him knaw as my fine young gen'leman didn't drink so much as his neckum out o't;" and the charitable creature, to conceal the traveller's shortcoming, took a draught, so long and deep, that it absorbed two-thirds of the liquor, "there goes Sinkum--and," he said, drawing a long breath of satisfaction, and again contemplating the interior of the jug, "an' seein' as him as doan't knaa how to finish a job when he's begun't, but a poor sort o' creetur, why," and tipping up the jack, he emptied the remainder of its contents down his throat, "there goes Swankum after 'em." And having thus vindicated the honour of the house, he turned in to renew his interrupted slumbers.

[Sidenote: The day dawns.]

The rain had long ceased; the air smelt warm and fragrant, as, soon after daybreak, Lawrence Lee came in sight of the roof-tops of Newmarket showing sharp and dark against the clear gray sky, just rose-tinted with the hues of the rising sun, whose rays were gilding the smooth turfy down, till it gleamed like richest velvet. Very soft and pleasant it must have felt to the weary feet of Stars and Garters; though indeed as she alighted from the flinty road on to the elastic grass of the course, she carried herself so bravely, that none of the critical eyes she was now encountering could have guessed she had been an hour out of her stall. Who knows but that she was conscious that her laurels were at stake; for already, though it was barely six o'clock, the course was dotted with knots of gentlemen and trainers, and a host of hangers-on and loungers engaged in keen discussion of the pros and cons of their ventures, or watching the jockeys as they breathed their magnificent barbs and racers in a morning gallop.

[Sidenote: The horseman.]

"Who be he, I wunner?" enviously growled a mounted jockey as Lee dashed past. "Happen you caught sight of his colours, my lord?"

"Black," laughingly replied the gentleman thus addressed, a handsome man richly attired in a becoming morning suit. "By my faith, black as the very mischief's self, for aught I could see besides. Black as Old Nick and his nag. Eh, Master Alworth, was it not so?"

"Nay," replied the somewhat elderly, grizzled, beperiwigged gentleman to whom the other had appealed, as he leaned with one hand on his silver-knobbed ebony stick, and shaded his eyes with the other, to gaze after the strange horse and his rider. "Black to a certainty. But in my poor judgment the animal was such a Pegasus of grace and vigour, and his rider's countenance looked such a goodly one, that if ever our patron George of England wore a suit of sables."

"And bestrode a black charger?" gaily interrupted the other.

"Even so," bowed the elder man, with a twinkle in his kindly brown eyes; "why, I should have guessed him to be our champion saint in the flesh."

"Hastening to deliver his country from the evil-doers," said the nobleman.

"'Twould be a miracle indeed if he could do that," soberly answered Mr. Alworth, "or he a Quixote of Quixotes to dream of it."

"More like he is come to match his Rosinante's paces with our Fleetfoot's here," rattled on the other, as he toyed with the nose of the beautiful racer against whose shoulder he was leaning. "By the way," he went on, addressing the jockey in charge of it, "which day is settled for the match with Woodcock?"

"Monday se'nnight, my lord," answered the man.

"Does the king stay so long?" asked Alworth, looking up in some surprise.

[Sidenote: "Pleasure!"]

"Long!" groaningly echoed the younger gentleman. "'Tis all too short for us poor Cambridgeshire squires, let me tell you, Master Alworth. When the court's back again in London, we may as soon be the cabbages in our own kitchen-gardens, for any pleasure there is in life."

[Sidenote: A moralist.]

"Pleasure!" groaningly echoed Master Alworth, as he turned and faced slowly about towards the town. "Pleasure! Pleasure! 'Tis the watchword always, and a melancholy one it has grown to be in my ears, since it no longer pairs off with duty; as though one should surfeit always on honey, and eat no bread, and poor England is sickening sorely of it Pray heaven she be not finding any plague of quack doctors to try their remedies on her;" and with a sigh Mr. Alworth pursued his way.