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I had little use for money at the Hanyards, least of all in the pockets of my Sunday best, and not until she told me her plight did I realize the fact that in the elation of starting from home, I had forgotten that money might be necessary. Though I laughed, I watched her closely. Now she would break down. No woman's heart could stand the shock.
I used to dream that I rode up to the yard-gate on Sultan, and every time, in my dream, the Hanyards looked so desolate and woebegone, as if the very barns and byres were mourning for the dear dead lad who had played amongst them, that I pulled Sultan round and spurred him away till he flew like the wind, and I woke up in a cold sweat.
"Who's there?" he quavered. "Wheatman of the Hanyards," I answered; "but my name is nothing to the purpose and my business is. I must see Sir James Blount." "He's abed," said he, "hours ago!" "Then fetch him out!" The old man pushed his lantern close to my face and straightened himself to take a fair look at me.
Dear, brave Cherry-Cheeks sent it home by the hands of a vagrom pedlar, laboriously and exactly writing on the package the inscription she found on the fly leaf: OLIVER WHEATMAN, Esquire, of the Hanyards, Staffordshire, Aetatis anno 13 I routed out ostlers, and by dint of a judicious blend of cursings and bribings had the horses ready under the archway in time.
O God! Brocton! My father is taken! And by Brocton!" She spoke aloud in her agitation, and I saw that she was cut to the quick. And I rejoiced, so strange is the human heart, that it was Lord Brocton's name that came in anguish off her tongue. Oh for one blow at the man whose father had harried mine into an untimely grave! In sharp, frosty air sound travels far across the meadows of the Hanyards.
"Sir," said I, draining off the horn, "I can drink and talk with any man living, and, drunk or sober, I only answer the questions of my friends. So get a horn off the dresser I'm a bit tired fill up, and tell me what you want. D'you happen to be of my Lord Brocton's regiment?" "I am." "Then you'll be as drunk as me before you've finished with the Hanyards.
I found Kate's cookery-book, and would have flung it through the window, but my eye caught the quaint inscription on the fly-leaf, in her big, pot-hooky handwriting: "KATHERINE WHEATMAN, her book, God give her grease to larn to cook. At the Hanyards. Jul. 1739." The simple words stung me like angry hornets.
Out of the town he fled, past the end of the Stafford road, along which two hours of Sultan's best would bring me to the Hanyards and mother and Kate, and I kept him at it for a full two miles before I gave him a breather and settled down to think out what it meant. I did not know the man from Adam, but he had me and my name quite pat.
It was a lucky hit, for when I had in solemn whispers rolled off the great lines in the sixth Aeneid which foretell the work and glory of Rome, I thought of my Lord Ridgeley, thiever by cunning process of law of most of my ancient patrimony, and his blackguard son, my Lord Brocton, lustfully hunting the proud, gracious woman beneath, and I said grandiosely to myself, "Rome's destiny is thine too, Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards, and these betitled scullions are the proud ones you shall war down."
The thousand and more acres of the Upper Hanyards, sweet meadows stretching a mile along the river and a snatch of the chase at its wildest and loveliest, the prize that had fallen to the rascal earl in the great lawsuit, had been promised me as readily as a pinch of snuff.
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