CHAPTER XIV.

“THE ROMANYS HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN.”

On leaving the terrace before the Chase, Stephen Lee struck immediately into the forest in a northerly direction.

The circumference of the Chase enclosure measured fully ten miles, but there was barely a yard of the space that was not known to the gypsy-bred lad, who had been familiarized with it in bygone poaching days of childhood long before the period when, as a decently dressed and apparently respectable lad, he had applied for and obtained a situation about the dairy farm on the property. Very soon his usefulness caused him to be promoted. He had “ways” with horses, dogs, cows, and sheep; could repair a fence or sow a field, break in a horse or administer medicine to a sick dog, with equal cleverness.

He was, so his fellow-servants decided, inordinately proud and unsociable, for what reason none of them could satisfactorily fathom. He broke in Sir Philip’s hunters and taught Miss Cranstoun to ride, being himself little more than three years older than she. He did not drink, and had, so far as others knew, neither sweetheart nor friends; yet now and then he would mysteriously disappear for hours together, nor would he afterward even attempt to explain his absences.

The evening was closing in as he made his way in and out the undergrowth in a direct cut through the wood; and it was only after more than an hour of very rapid walking that he began to slacken his speed.

The trees grew very closely together at this point, so closely, indeed, that it seemed impossible to force a path between them. But Stephen knew the track and could almost have found it blindfold, and after about a quarter of an hour more of difficult walking he came upon an open space of grassy mounds, crowned by the ruins of an ancient hunting tower, dating back to a very early period, of which, however, little more than four stout ivy-hung walls, and a portion of a low battlemented tower remained. The ruin was not large enough to be imposing, nor had it any known historical interest. Very few people knew of its existence, as it was not discernible over the tops of the tall trees by which it was surrounded; yet that it was known to at least one person was evident now, for from the ruined tower a thin blue line of smoke rose into the clear evening air.

No way of entering the ruin was visible, the base of the tower and of the low building attached to it being blocked up by rubble, by overgrown bushes, and by fallen masonry. But Stephen Lee made straight for a portion of the ruin heavily veiled with ivy, and removing this with one hand, he came upon a low archway of stonework completely blocked by a solid wooden door. Upon this he tapped with the handle of a knife he carried in his belt, and softly whistled. The signal was answered, and the sound of a rusty bolt being withdrawn was the prelude to the apparition of old Sarah Carewe’s face in the doorway.

Entering, Stephen found himself in an improvised chamber formed partly by the tower and partly by roughly hewn timber roofing to the adjacent walls. Dry leaves thickly covered the ground, and on a heap of them in front of the fire the brawny figure of a man in the prime of life was stretched, revelling in the smoky warmth of a fire of peat and sticks.

An oil lamp, hanging from the roof, lit up the scene, which was not wanting in elements of the picturesque. By its feeble illumination, assisted by the firelight, a few pieces of extempore furniture could be discerned, such as a wooden table, two or three stools, an iron pot, and some other cooking utensils, and in the far corner a long, shallow box of wood, upon which some rags and rugs were stretched to form a not unacceptable couch for such as needed not luxury to induce slumber.

To Stephen all these details were familiar, as was the bent and shrunken form of his great-grandmother, Sarah Carewe, of whom he stood in some considerable awe. In her seventy-ninth year, Mrs. Carewe might well have lived through the century with which she was popularly credited; her energy was boundless, and her brain as keen and cunning as when, nearly sixty years before, she had become the proud mother of Hiram Carewe, shot down by Sir Philip Cranstoun’s hand on that memorable evening eighteen and a half years ago.

“_Baish down_, lad,” she said, pointing to a stool by the fire. “Uncle Jim and me have been looking for you for the past two hours. What’s the news up at the house?”

He drew the token from his pocket and laid it in her hand.

“This,” he said. “She is a prisoner, as you know, and she threw it me from her room window. The lord was there to-day at the burying. They’re driving her close to marry him, curse him! He’s as ugly as a monkey, and I could throttle him with one hand.”

“Her fancy is a lot handsomer,” laughed the old crone. “I don’t blame Clare’s girl for fixing on a good-looking man.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, half-fearfully, half-savagely, pausing in the act of knocking the ashes out of a pipe he had taken from his pocket.

Sarah Carewe shook with creaking laughter, holding her hands to her sides as she looked at her angry descendant.

“Why, I mean as how you shot the right chap when you potted the big ’un,” she said. “That’s the one she’s set her mind on.”

“Who? That Pritchard cove? He’s left the place, and gone to the Cranstoun Arms and then to London----”

“A lot _you_ know,” she cried, in her shaky treble. “He went to the Cranstoun Arms right enough, and Stella visited him there twice. The morning of the day that cursed Sir Philip’s _mort_ went to glory, Stella was nabbed by her father, chatting with her spark, with his arm still tied up from your shot.”

“Hang him! I wish I’d killed him!” muttered Stephen. “And I would if I’d known what was coming. Something told me as he caught Zephyr’s rein, and stared up at her, that he’d be after her; that’s why I fired. But why didn’t you tell me all this before, _mami_ Sarah? It’s all along of your promise to me about her that I’m working for you. You know right well you swore by your tricks and magic to make her come to me, and love me, and choose me for her mate before every one. And here I stand by to see her in love with one man, and married to another. I haven’t done your bidding, and your spying, ay, and your _choaring_ and thieving too, if it comes to that, in the pay of a man whose throat I’d like to cut, all these years, to be hocused and laughed at now. I tell you, _mami_ Sarah,” he added, starting from the stool, and stamping heavily upon the ground, having worked himself up to a frenzy, “I won’t be made a fool of any longer!”

The man by the fire rolled over, and looked up at him, speaking for the first time.

“You talk of wanting to cut Philip Cranstoun’s throat,” he began, slowly. “What call have _you_ to hate him, like I have, and _mami_ here? For eighteen years, come last October, we’ve been waiting, _mami_ and me, to get our knife into him, and our chance has come at last! You’re young and green, lad; we don’t let you into all our secrets. You follow orders, and do as the _nais nort_ tells you--_she’s_ got her head screwed on right. Do you think a man forgets to pay a debt like mine? Think of it, lad! I was younger than you are now, and I loved my sister Clare--Sarah here can tell you how I loved her. When she was brought up grand as a regular _been rawnie_, she used to steal away to see brother Jim on the sly. The girl Stella you’re so sweet on ain’t a patch on her mother--my sister Clare. She’d a pair of eyes like stars dancing in a pool at moonlight, and teeth like little round dewdrops. And he married her, and broke her heart, and swore he’d shoot down any of her relations as he should find loitering about his place. But that night, which was to be my last in England afore I sailed to America, to a splendid opening there with uncle Pete, that’s long ago dead, says I to father, ‘I must have one more look at Clare, for maybe I’ll never come back again.’ Father was against it at first, but I’d take no advice, and he wanted badly to speak to her, seeing she’d written to say she was breaking her heart; so we went. Oh, you’ve heard the story of how, so soon as she’d crept over the grass to us, her father and brother, by the moonlight, all in white silks and satins, to wish us good-by, she was seized and blindfolded, and dragged away, while he, that double villain, that cursed Philip Cranstoun, shot my father down where he stood by my side! No call to tell you how I fought to punish them, nor how, when they’d nabbed me, being three to one, they made a pretence of a trial, and give me five years--five years in prison for seeing my father murdered in cold blood, and trying to get at them as shot him down. Well, I’ve lived through them five years; I’m a tough un to kill. You think of it, lad--you as lives as I lived for the most part, under the sky, with the free air blowing in your face all day--think what prison is: Four bare walls, a dog’s work in front of you, and a slave-driver to see as you do it; and all the while eating your heart out with knowing it was unjust, the cruel injustice of a titled scoundrel as had broken your sister’s heart, and made a jailbird of you, and murdered your father. And all for what? For his own dirty pride--pride of his family, as are no older than us Carewes; pride that I’ll humble in the dust yet, if I spend the rest of my life in quod for it.”

“There ain’t no talk of quod for this business of ours, dearie,” put in the old crone, as she stirred the fire with a bent iron stick. “You shall have your revenge, sure enough, and so will I. Your _dadi_ Hiram was my own first-born, that I’d seen grow up from the stoutest and prettiest _kinchin_ to the finest man in the country-side. And my eyes have seen what yours have not: your sister, my bonny Clare, as she lay dying in my arms, making me swear on her child’s head that I would punish Philip Cranstoun. ‘He swore he would break my pride,’ she said, with the death-rattle in her throat. ‘_Mami_, break his. Disgrace is worse than death to him. He has brought death upon me; bring disgrace upon him.’ I seem to hear her voice now, and to see her glazing eyes light up for the last time as she said the words.”

She sat still for a while, staring into the flaming logs over the outstretched figure of James Carewe. A wonderful Rembrandtesque study they would have made, those three generations of gypsies, had any Dutch painter been there to fix the scene on canvas, with its sombre tone lit by the ruddy firelight. The woman, in her heavy cloak, the hood fallen back, and disclosing a faded red and yellow silk handkerchief wound round her head, from which scattered white elf locks fell over her wrinkled brow and sunken cheeks. Only a great artist could have reproduced the look in her glittering black eyes, a look that took in a past of wrongs and sufferings, and brooded in cruel, anticipative joy over a future of revenge.

The man at her feet was himself a model of rugged power and a certain swarthy beauty. His coal-black hair and beard were plentifully streaked with gray; his dark skin was unnaturally pallid, and in his sunken black eyes there lurked an expression not good to see, the look of a strong man deeply wronged, at war with society, and ripe for revenge. His dress was careless and dirty; long ago he had ceased to have any pride in his appearance, and those years of prison life, followed by the misery of police supervision, had changed him from a handsome, gallant lad, full of strength and possibilities, to a surly and brooding loafer, whose hand was against every man’s and whose whole nature was in sullen revolt against the established order of things.

The third member of the group by the fire added no little to the strange picturesqueness of the scene as he leaned with folded arms against the wall, listening eagerly while his elders recounted their past experiences. Stephen Lee was grandson to Sarah’s second child, a daughter, married to a gypsy of the name of Lee. But for some years past Stephen’s lines had fallen in comparatively pleasant places, and in his smart velveteen coat, corduroy breeches, and gaiters, he formed a strong contrast to the ragged and neglected appearance of his uncle, and to the tatters of old Sarah.

“You’ve got good cause to hate the gray wolf,” he said, after a pause. “I’ve been taught to hate him ever since I could speak, and I never set eyes on him without tingling to put a bullet through him. It’s the way he treats Stella as maddens me. You talked of prison just now; well, she’s imprisoned, shut in with two cursed women spies, one or the other, turn and turn about, watching her all the time. Lady Cranstoun was good to her, I will say that, for all she wasn’t her mother. But now she’s gone, that girl’s heart’s wellnigh broken; and when I pass the house at night and see the light up in her turret-window, I’m mad to burn the place down with everything and every one in it except _her_. But you two don’t know her as I do. You haven’t watched her grow up each day. She’s a regular lady, and looks down on such as me, for all I’m her cousin if she but knew it. Say what you like, _mami_, she won’t love a fellow like me. And on the tenth of May they’re going to marry her to this lord. I heard the gray wolf tell the other so, coming from the burying. Stella’s sent you that token, and you’ve got to save her. Though how in thunder you’re going to do it, and bring the disgrace upon Philip Cranstoun’s name as you talk so much about, it beats me to imagine.”

Again the old woman laughed the mirthless, rattling laugh of old age, and this time James Carewe raised his head from his arms, exchanged a glance with her, and turned over on his side again to face the fire, with the nearest approach to a laugh he ever made. Their incomprehensible merriment annoyed Stephen greatly, and he muttered an oath or two under his breath as he watched them.

“_Chee, chee_, lad!” remonstrated the crone. “You will laugh too when we’ve done the trick, and spirited the girl away, and hocused her father and her bridegroom. Your part of the business now is, first, to carry her a letter I mean to write her; and next, to make believe you’ve fallen in love with one of them two women as spy upon her. Have you got paper and pencil about you?”

Stephen took from his pocket a thick leather-covered account-book, and, tearing out a sheet, handed it to her.

“Not me!” she returned, shaking her head. “I leave all that to boys like you. Write down what I say: ‘From Sarah Carewe to Stella Cranstoun--The Romanys have not forgotten. Pretend to agree to the marriage, so that the watch may be relaxed. On your wedding-eve help will come. Hope and trust. Your mother’s friends watch over you, and soon you will be free.’ And now,” old Sarah added, “you must contrive that this shall be given her. Hang about until you see Margaret. She’s timid, but she’s square. If Stella plays her part, and cods them into thinking she’s come round, we’ll cheat the gray wolf yet, and within a month--ay, less than that, Jim, my boy--you and me will have a laugh, a right good laugh together, and even Steve here can join in then!”

Thoroughly mystified, but accustomed from childhood to unquestioningly obey the orders of old Sarah, whose reputation for abnormal sagacity, together with her undoubted magnetic powers, had earned her a great reputation among her own class, as well as among credulous and open-handed members of the public, Stephen presently left the ruins and returned to the Chase. Joining the other servants at supper that night, and listening to their talk about the coming marriage, he contrived by a look to signify to Margaret that he had something to say to her. Greatly surprised, but ready-witted as women of all classes usually prove in an emergency, she presently, as she sat next to him at table, contrived to knock her supper-plate off on to the floor with a great clatter.

Down went her head under the table, and down went Stephen’s. The result was a collision, and under cover of the laughter which ensued, she felt him slip a tiny piece of folded paper into her hand, and heard him whisper:

“For the mistress.”