Joan, The Curate/Chapter 15
Tregenna must have been harder than stone if he had not been stirred to the depths of his being by the courage and devotion shown on his behalf by the parson's beautiful daughter.
From the first moment of meeting her, when he had seen her winsome face and sparkling eyes in the moonlight, on board his own vessel, he had been struck with admiration for her person, her modest, unaffected manners, her spirit, and her devotion. This feeling had grown with every meeting. So it was not wonderful that, on this evening, when she had braved such perils on his behalf, Joan should have inspired him with a passion exalted on the one hand, strong on the other, such as he had never believed it possible that he could feel for any woman.
All the greater, therefore, was his mortification, his sudden revulsion of feeling to despair, when she replied to his stammering attempt at thanks with mocking words, and a chilling laugh.
It was some minutes before he recovered himself sufficiently to speak. By that time they had reached the lane that led from the end of the village street up to the Parsonage. As soon as the glimmering light in the ivied window caught his eye, he said, in a tone which he tried to make as indifferent as her own, but in which it was easy to detect traces of the emotion from which he was suffering—
"You will not suffer me to thank you for your goodness on my behalf. I trust your father may be more complaisant."
"My father, sir, will make as much light of it as I do," replied Joan, as she relaxed her hold on her companion's belt, and alighted in the mud of the lane.
Parson Langney's voice, hearty, cheery, but not without a touch of anxiety, rang out pleasantly, at this moment, upon their ears.
"Hey, Miss Madcap, is't you? By what Nance told me, I had begun to fear your wild expedition had turned out ill!"
"Nay, father, it has turned out very well!" cried she; "for I have carried off Mr. Tregenna from those that would have harmed him, and have thereby made him vastly civil!"
"Nay, sir, Miss Joan will not suffer my civility or my gratitude. She, who is so proud herself, will not allow me to acquit my own debt to her even by a word of thanks."
"Tut-tut, there is no need!" said the parson.
"And the less, sir," put in Joan, quickly, "since I own I had some hand in bringing about your discomfiture before, at the hands of the—h'm—'free-traders.' Father," she went on quickly, turning to the vicar, "I'll never do aught for Ann or her friends again! 'Twas she put them on our track; and they had a mind to murder Mr. Tregenna, I verily believe!"
She was speaking very quickly, with a certain frivolous air which was new in her, and less becoming than her usual straightforward simplicity. Tregenna, who was too inexperienced in the ways of women to understand the cause of this change in her, was hurt and grieved by it. He could not understand how strong her anxiety must be to try to efface from his mind the remembrance of her action in so boldly declaring to the smugglers that it was for love she protected him.
Chagrined on the one hand, yet still shaken to the very depths by the adoration he felt for the beautiful girl whose touch he seemed still to feel on his breast, Tregenna stammered out again some hesitating words of thanks, as he held out his hand to Parson Langney, with a shy sidelong glance at his daughter.
"I must hasten back to my ship," said he. "And in the morning I shall hope to pay my respects to you, and to induce Miss Joan to give me a better hearing than she will grant to-night."
At these words, Joan, who had been moving restlessly from the horse to her father and back again, apparently unable to keep still one moment now that the tension of the evening's events was over, became suddenly as motionless as a statue. Then, in a voice which was as earnest as a moment before it had been affectedly gay, she said quickly—
"Father, bid Mr. Tregenna stay here till the morning. These fellows may still be on the watch for him."
"Sh-sh!" said her father, raising his hand to enforce silence.
In the pause which followed, both Joan and Tregenna were aware of a loud, rumbling noise in the village street below, coming gradually nearer. And in a few minutes, during which they all stood silent and wondering, without exchanging a word, they perceived a huge black mass, dim, shadowy, like some mammoth beast whose bulk makes rapid motion impossible, creeping slowly by in the obscurity of the trees at the bottom of the hill.
Slow, phantom-like, it crept along with no sound but the rumbling and creaking that had at first arrested the vicar's attention.
Tregenna, on the alert at once, would have descended the hill to find out what the monster was. But at a sign from his daughter, Parson Langney laid a restraining hand upon the young man's arm.
"What can you do—alone?" said he, warningly. "Keep your heart in your breast for to-night, at least. In the morning—why, you must do your duty. Come, a tankard will do you no harm. You shall drink 'confusion to free-traders' if you will. And, egad, I'm inclined, after what I've heard, to drink the same toast myself!"
Tregenna agreed, anxious for another chance of a word with Joan. But he saw no more of her that night. Even while the vicar was giving this invitation, his daughter had slipped quietly into the house, and disappeared for the night.
This left Tregenna free to tell his host, over the nut-brown ale which the vicar poured out with loving hands, the whole story of the adventures of the evening. Astounded, enthralled, marveling at his daughter's courage, and furious at the smugglers' daring outrage, the vicar listened with all his ears.
And when the young man's tone grew lower, his eyes more passionate, as he declared his love and admiration for the girl who had risked so much for him, Parson Langney listened sympathetically, and with tears in his eyes, to the tale he had often indeed heard before, but never from such eager lips.
"Ay, ay, she's a good girl, a good girl, my bonnie Joan!" said he, in a tremulous voice, when Tregenna paused. "You're not the first that has come to me with this tale, sir, though you're the first she's shown such kindness to as she's shown to you. But reckon not too much on that, I warn you. She's not your ordinary lass, that minces and mouths, like the girls at Hurst Court we're going to dine with to-morrow." Tregenna made a mental note of this fact, and determined that he would be invited too. "And what she did and what she said she'd have done and said for any other man in such a plight as yours, I doubt not! But we'll see, we'll see. I'm in no hurry to lose my Joan, I promise you, sir. The day must come when she'll go forth from me as a bride; but there's time enough for that, time enough for that! And I would not have you hope too much, though I do not bid you despair."
Tregenna was forced to be content with this vague encouragement, and with the comfort of having unburdened his heart to a sympathetic ear. It was not long before he took his leave, and having followed the vicar's advice to concern himself for that night with nothing but his own safety, reached the boat in the creek without accident, and was soon on board the Sea-Gull.
Next morning he was early astir. He had already, on arriving on board, sent a trusty messenger to Rye, to beg the brigadier to lose no time in making a second expedition against Rede Hall; he promised to meet him there, and to put him in possession of some facts he had learnt concerning its hiding-places.
But although it was no later than nine o'clock in the morning when he and General Hambledon met at the farmyard gates, they found that the smugglers had been beforehand with them.
Not a man or a woman was to be found on the premises; not a cow or a horse; not a pig or a hen. And though the trap-door to the celler had been flung wide to assist them in their search, it was in vain they sought for the bales among which Tregenna had stood on the previous night.
Not a keg or a bale was there in the whole place, though they searched it from garret to cellar!
The brigadier was ferociously facetious, tauntingly jocose.
"Hey-day, Tregenna, I fear they gave thee too much of their contraband aqua vitæ, and that it has bred visions in thy brain!" said he, with an ugly smile on his red face, and a vicious look in his eyes. He was in no very good humor with the young man for having outrun himself in zeal, and was at heart rather pleased that this expedition, designed by his rival, should have been as complete a failure as the last.
"Well, at any rate, you see, General, that there was something wrong with the place, for them all to have deserted it like this," said the lieutenant, reasonably enough.
"More like they have deserted it from fear of quarter-day!" retorted the brigadier. "'Tis a common thing enough a flitting like to this, at such seasons!"
"A least," said Tregenna, who was hot and furious at this fresh rebuff, "you will find the ship under the barn-floor!"
But even as he uttered the words, a chill seized him as he remembered, in a fresh light, a mysterious incident of the previous evening. He was, therefore, more disgusted than surprised when, in searching the barn, the soldiers discovered that the flooring was indeed loose, as he had said, and that there was a crypt beneath: but that though there were traces of the cradle in which the smugglers' boat had been hauled up and down, and some tools lying about in dark corners with logs and screws, ropes and mallets, the vessel itself had disappeared.
Tregenna took almost in silence the taunts with which the brigadier now saluted him. Leaving the soldiers to return to Rye, the young man, with a shrewd suspicion that the mammoth beast he had dimly seen crawling through the village in the dark on the previous evening was the smugglers' boat, resolved to try to track it to its new resting-place.
Such a weighty thing as the unfinished vessel, and the wagon or wagons on which it must have been removed, could not, he argued, but have left its mark on the roads it traversed.
And so it proved. Following the deep wheelmarks which were easily discernible even now in the mire of the Hurst road, he arrived at that village, went through it, still tracing the wheelmarks; and finally, to his consternation, tracked the wagons to the stables of Hurst Court.
It was a disconcerting discovery enough, but Tregenna, furious at the conspiracy thus formed against the representatives of law and order, did not scruple to follow it up. It was evident that the hiding-place they had found for their vessel had been looked upon by the smugglers as safe and sacred, for no steps had been taken to guard it. Tregenna opened the wide door of the coach-house; and inside, as he had expected, he saw the hull of the unfinished boat.
Without a moment's loss of time he went straight up to the house, where he fancied that the butler who admitted him looked at him askance, as if with some suspicion of his errand.
The squire himself, however, while affecting the greatest astonishment and indignation on hearing that the smugglers' boat had been placed in his stables, was evidently in a state of extreme trepidation as to the course Tregenna meant to pursue with regard to himself.
The lieutenant, however, thought it better to receive his assurances of innocence as if he believed them, thinking that this would be a lesson strong enough to cure the squire of complicity with the smugglers.
Squire Waldron was, of course, particularly civil to his unwelcome guest, pressing him to stay to dinner; an invitation which Tregenna accepted at once, in the hope of meeting Joan.
Then the squire made haste to rid himself of his guest by presenting him to the ladies in the music-room, who again, as on a previous occasion, loaded him with hypocritical expressions of horror at the smugglers and their conduct. Certain rumors of the adventures of the previous evening had reached their ears from the Parsonage, and they all endeavored to worm out of Tregenna the exact details of his visit to Rede Hall, and of Joan's late ride.
"They do say, you must know, dear Mr. Tregenna," lisped one young lady, with a prim little ghost of a malicious smile, "that Joan Langney was so afraid you were gone to make love to Ann Price, who is reckoned a great beauty in these parts (though I am sure I ha'n't a notion why), that she cantered after you on horseback!"
"The forward thing!" cried Miss Lucy.
"But maybe 'tis not true!" said Mrs. Waldron inquisitively.
"Do, pray, tell us how 'twas, sir," went on Miss Alathea, playing affectedly with her fan. "'Tis no breach of confidence; for you and she were seen to return to the Parsonage together, late in the evening. So 'twill make the best of a bad business to let us know the circumstances!"
"A bad business!" echoed Tregenna hotly. "Nay, madam, 'twas a very good business for me! Since, if Miss Joan had not been good enough, knowing I was going thither, to ride to Rede Hall and release me from what was practically imprisonment at the hands of the scoundrels who infest that place, I should scarce have got hither alive!"
The young ladies both went off into a series of little twittering shrieks, raising their hands and turning up their eyes towards the painted ceiling, with every mild expression of horror and affright.
"So she knew you was going thither!" chirped Miss Lucy presently. "You are great friends at the Parsonage then, Mr. Tregenna?"
"I hope I am, madam," returned Tregenna promptly. "For there's no friendship in the world I value more than that of Miss Joan and her father."
This prompt declaration seemed rather to damp the spirits of the two little pink-eyed girls, and they desisted from their attacks in this direction; and having obtained his assurance that music was his passion, they proceeded to the harpsichord and warbled monotonous little duets to him until the arrival of Parson Langney and his daughter brought a welcome relief from the infliction.
Poor Tregenna, however, rather regretted that he had been so prompt in accepting the squire's invitation, when he found how very frigid Miss Joan was to him. She made him a stately curtsey, with her eyelids lowered, and without taking any notice of his proffered hand. And when the parson, who had heard already of the doings of the morning, twitted Tregenna about the escape of the smugglers, Joan joined heartily in his ironical comments while the squire was not long in adding his taunts; so that the young man found himself assailed on all sides with no ally save the chirruping young Waldron ladies, whose advocacy irritated him more than did the attacks of Joan.
So mortified was he, indeed, that when the ladies withdrew from the table, he felt that he could not bear the society of the other three gentlemen—his host, Bertram Waldron, and the parson—any longer. He therefore made the excuse of his duties calling him away, and left them to their wine.
Just as he was taking his three-cornered hat from the peg in the hall where it hung, he caught sight of one of the maids of the house, in her smart frilled cap and neat muslin kerchief and apron, in a corner of the hall. On seeing him she started and turned to go back and this action arrested his attention, and caused him to look at her again.
The first look made him start; the second made him stare; the third caused him to run lightly across the hall, and to seize her by the apron as she tried to escape into one of the rooms.
"Ann Price—masquerading as a housemaid, by all that's audacious!" cried he, as they came face to face.