United States or Macao ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was the pimple-faced Major. I turned to my intended victim, and found him looking calmly and impassively at me. "Master Wheatman of the Hanyards, unless I am mistaken," he said. "Your servant, sir," said I, rather sourly. But for that dead rascal at our feet I could beyond a doubt have plucked him like a chough, and here I was, still penniless.
I gloated over the revenge I was winning for my race, a race rooted in those darling Hanyards a century before the Ridgeleys were heard of, for the first earl, the grandfather of the old rogue, started as an obscure pimp to Charles the Second, and was enriched and ennobled for his assiduity. But no familiary pride could cheer me for long. The dead landscape around chilled me.
He was getting no nearer to the object of his visit, and, perhaps thinking it would be well to humour me, he fetched a horn and tried our Hanyards ale. This gave me a chance of taking stock of him. He was a thin, wiry man of middle height and middle age. Such a face I had never seen. The first sight of it made me suck in my breath as if I had touched the edge of a razor.
"I am not able to talk to you in the modish manner, nor do I think you would wish me to try to ape my betters, so I say plainly that our meeting has not made me uneasy. Why then you?" "Had you not met me, you would now be asleep at the Hanyards, a free and happy country gentleman.
Thus was Mistress Waynflete made welcome to the Hanyards. Mother and Kate took their accustomed seats on the cosy settle beside the hearth. I sat on a three-legged stool in front of the fire, and Jane flitted about as quietly as a bat, laying the table for our evening meal. Never had the house-place at the Hanyards looked so fair.
"You shall have the Upper Hanyards back again, Master Wheatman," he quavered. The rascal earl, his father, had juggled more than a thousand acres of the Hanyards away from my father by some musty process of law and a venal bench. The reference angered me, and I cried loudly, "You shall not have it back at any price!" He looked at the window, and paled as he thought of the sentinel ears without.
Oddly enough, as I drove him along, the thought came to me of the bygone days when Jack and I had played horses just like this at the Hanyards, and when my prisoner stuck a trifle at the door of the guest-room, I growled at him, "Come up!" It was a strange trick of the mind. To me he was just play-horse Jack dawdling to look at ten-year-old Kate feeding her chickens.
Had I, as I ought to have done, brought money of my own from the Hanyards, I should never have started highwayman, and so never have met Master Freake on Wes'on Bank. Three miles or more we made in this manner, and I had heard nothing more alarming than the hoot of an owl from an ivy-crusted elm.
I was the equal of most men with the pistol, and usually had, indeed, a capital pair at the Hanyards, but Jack had taken them off with him on his dragooning. Over and above the pistols and their ammunition I found a sizeable leathern bag, and the feel of it to my fingers showed that it was chock-full of money.
I have already said that the river was the boundary of the Hanyards on the side towards the village. About a hundred yards above the pocket of deep water where the jack had lain, I had built a little covered dock, and here I kept a craft, half boat and half punt, which I used for my fishing, and in which mother and Kate could lie on cushions while I rowed them on the river on warm summer nights.