As the party passed out of view round the angle of the white road, Trenchard made his way back to Wilding to tell him what he had seen and to lay before him, for his enucleation, the problem of Blake’s being the leader of it. But Wilding thought little of Blake, and cared little of what he might be the leader.
“We’ll stay here,” said he, “until they have passed the crest of the hill.”
This, Trenchard told him, was his own purpose; for to leave their concealment earlier would be to reveal themselves to any of the troopers who might happen to glance over his shoulder.
And so they waited some ten minutes or so, and then walked their horses slowly and carefully forward through the trees towards the road. Wilding was alongside and slightly ahead of Trenchard; Vallancey followed close upon their tails. Suddenly, as Wilding was about to put his mare at the low stone wall, Trenchard leaned forward and caught his bridle.
“Ss!” he hissed. “Horses!”
And now that they halted they heard the hoofbeats clear and close at hand; the crackling of undergrowth and the rustle of the leaves through which they had thrust their passage had deafened their ears to other sounds until this moment. They checked and waited where they stood, barely screened by the few boughs that still might intervene between them and the open, not daring to advance, and not daring to retreat lest their movements should draw attention to themselves. They remained absolutely still, scarcely breathing, their only hope being that if these who came should chance to be enemies they might ride on without looking to right or left. It was so slender a hope that Wilding looked to the priming of his pistols, whilst Trenchard, who had none, loosened his sword in its scabbard. Nearer came the riders.
“There are not more than three,” whispered Trenchard, who had been listening intently, and Mr. Wilding nodded, but said nothing.
Another moment and the little party was abreast of those watchers; a dark brown riding-habit flashed into their line of vision, and a blue one laced with gold. At sight of the first Mr. Wilding’s eyelids flickered; he had recognized it for Ruth’s, with whom rode Diana, whilst some twenty paces or so behind came Jerry, the groom. They were returning to Bridgwater.
They came along, looking neither to right nor to left, as the three men had hoped they would, and they were all but past, when suddenly Wilding gave his roan a touch of the spur and bounded forward. Diana’s horse swerved so that it nearly threw her. Ruth, slightly ahead, reined in at once; so, too, did the groom in the rear, and so violently in his sudden fear of highwaymen that he brought his horse on to its hind legs and had it prancing and rearing madly about the road, so that he was hard put to it to keep his seat.
Ruth looked round as Mr. Wilding’s voice greeted her.
“Mistress Wilding,” he called to her. “A moment, if I may detain you.”
“You have eluded them!” she cried, entirely off her guard in her surprise at seeing him, and there echoed through her words a note of genuine gladness that almost disconcerted her husband for a moment. The next instant a crimson flush overspread her pale face, and her eyes were veiled from him, vexation in her heart at having betrayed the lively satisfaction it afforded her to see him safe when she feared him captured already or at least upon the point of capture.
She had admired him almost unconsciously for his daring at the town hall that day, when his strong calm had stood out in such sharp contrast to the fluster and excitement of the men about him; of them all, indeed, it had seemed to her in those stressful moments that he was the only man, and she was—although she did not realize it—in danger of being proud of him. Then again the thing he had done. He had come deliberately to thrust his head into the lion’s maw that he might save her brother. It was possible that he had done it in answer to the entreaties which she had earlier feared she had poured into deaf ears; or it was possible that he had done it spurred by his sense of right and justice, which would not permit him to allow another to suffer in his stead—however much that other might be caught in the very toils that he had prepared for Mr. Wilding himself. Her admiration, then, was swelled by gratitude, and it was a compound of these that had urged her to hinder the tything-men from winning past her until he and Trenchard should have got well away.
Afterwards, when with Diana and her groom—on a horse which Sir Edward Phelips insisted upon lending them—she rode homeward from Taunton, there was Diana to keep alive the spark of kindness that glowed at last for Wilding in Ruth’s breast. Miss Horton extolled his bravery, his chivalry, his nobility, and ended by expressing her envy of Ruth that she should have won such a man amongst men for her husband, and wondered what it might be that kept Ruth from claiming him for her own as was her right. Ruth had answered little, but she had ridden very thoughtful; there was that in the past she found it hard to forgive Wilding. And yet she would now have welcomed an opportunity of thanking him for what he had done, of expressing to him something of the respect he had won in her eyes by his act of selfdenunciation to save her brother. This chance, it seemed, was given her, for there he stood, with head bared before her; and already she thought no longer of seizing the chance, vexed as she was at having been surprised into a betrayal of feelings whose warmth she had until that moment scarce estimated.
In answer to her cry of “You have eluded them!” he waved a hand towards the rising ground and the road to Bridgwater.
“They passed that way but a few moments since,” said he, “and by the rate at which they were travelling they should be nearing Newton by now. In their great haste to catch me they could not pause to look for me so close at hand,” he added with a smile, “and for that I am thankful.”
She sat her horse and answered nothing, which threw her cousin out of all patience with her. “Come, Jerry,” Diana called to the groom. “We will walk our horses up the hill.”
“You are very good, madam,” said Mr. Wilding, and he bowed to the withers of his roan.
Ruth said nothing; expressed neither approval nor disapproval of Diana’s withdrawal, and the latter, with a word of greeting to Wilding, went ahead followed by Jerry, who had regained control by now of the beast he bestrode. Wilding watched them until they turned the corner, then he walked his mare slowly forward until he was alongside Ruth.
“Before I go,” said he, “there is something I should like to say.” His dark eyes were sombre, his manner betrayed some hesitation.
The diffidence of his tone proved startling to her by virtue of its unusualness. What might it portend, she wondered, and sought with grave eyes to read his baffling countenance; and then a wild alarm swept into her and shook her spirit in its grip; there was something of which until this moment she had not thought—something connected with the fateful matter of that letter. It had stood as a barrier between them, her buckler, her sole defence against him. It had been to her what its sting is to the bee—a thing which if once used in self-defence is self-destructive. Not, indeed, that she had used it as her sting; it had been forced from her by the machinations of Trenchard; but used it had been, and was done with; she had it no longer that with it she might hold him in defiance, and it did not occur to her that he was no longer in case to invoke the law.
Her