“Only about eighty—not nearly so many as at Reading or Oswestry. Wanfield is quite a small place, as you know.”
“Eighty too many!” remarked Mr. Ramage, who seemed possessed by a grievance. “They are a damned nuisance, and Bannister, the agent, is too easy with them. Hardly a week passes but one of them breaks his parole or is up to some dirty trick or other!”
“Come, come, Ramage,” interposed Mr. Bentley, “you exaggerate, my dear fellow. We have not really had a case since December, 1812—since last year, in fact—when that major of engineers took the key of the fields, as I believe he would call it. He got clear off, too.”
“Yes, and how?” enquired Mr. Ramage indignantly, the very wig he conservatively wore bristling with indignation. “Disgraceful to say, with English assistance! To think what some people will do for money—that for the sake of gain there should exist throughout the country a regular gang of escape agents who live by it as by a trade! But I have got my eye on that man Zachary Miller—pedlar, poacher, and what not—and one day I shall catch him at his nefarious practices! I am convinced that it was he was the go-between with Major Suchet and those even greater scoundrels on the coast.”
“Zachary Miller?” enquired a fresh voice, proceeding from a tall, fair, handsome gentleman of about thirty who had come unperceived along the terrace and joined them. “What about Zachary Miller? Not poaching again, I hope? I had him up before me last month, but he managed to prove an alibi.”
Mr. Ramage turned eagerly to the newcomer. “Not poaching, no, Sir Francis. I suspect him of something much worse—only there again nothing can be proved against him.”
“Ramage thinks he is a sort of escape agent for the prisoners, Mulholland,” supplied Mr. Bentley rather quizzically. “That is a somewhat more ambitious occupation than poaching.”
“A better paid one, anyhow,” observed Sir Francis Mulholland. “If you would tell me what you know about Zachary Miller, Mr. Ramage, I should be greatly obliged to you, for I am tired of finding him prowling in my woods for no apparent reason. But let us remove ourselves for the purpose, since I know that Mr. Bentley finds it hard to believe anything to the discredit of the French prisoners.”
“Now, my dear fellow!” protested his host, but Sir Francis, with a smile which seemed to show that he was only jesting, slipped his arm through that of the detractor of Zachary Miller and they walked away, he inclining his head to listen to the gesture-emphasized disclosures of the smaller man.
“That is Mulholland of Mulholland Park, I take it?” observed Mr. Sturgis to his friend. “I did not quite catch his name when you introduced us just now. I seem to remember that he had just succeeded his uncle in the estate when I visited you two years ago, but that he had not yet taken up his residence. The prospect, however, if I am not mistaken, was then causing a considerable flutter among the young ladies of the district and their mammas.”
Mr. Bentley smiled. “It was, and the flutter continued unabated until about three months ago, when he ceased to be the very eligible parti at whom they were all setting their caps.”
“Ceased? Why?”
“Because he became engaged. And the mortifying thing to the fair of the neighbourhood was, that he laid Mulholland Park at the feet of no local aspirant after all, although—and this perhaps made it the more bitter—his chosen lady was staying at Wanfield at the time, in this house, in fact. Sir Francis Mulholland is betrothed to a very charming young lady, Miss Juliana Forrest, a school friend of my daughter’s.”
“Juliana Forrest—Lord Fulgrave’s daughter?”
“The same. She is one of the party in the drawing room now, for she has been staying with Mrs. Mulholland—though she goes away the day after to-morrow, and then returns, I hope, to visit us here at Northover. Don’t fall in love with her if you can help it, Sturgis; I have a fancy that, though he tries not to show it, Mulholland is infernally jealous.”
“He could hardly be jealous of an old man of sixty! And so they met here, at Northover?”
“He was accepted last January under this very roof—to be exact, I believe, in the small room off the drawing room where I keep my Chinese porcelain.”
Mr. Sturgis looked away for a moment. Sir Francis and his companion had disappeared round the corner of the house. “I should have thought, Bentley,” he said slowly—“pardon an old friend, won’t you?—that Mulholland and your own pretty girl . . . had you never thought of the match?”
Mr. Bentley showed a heartfree smile on his daughter’s account. “Laetitia, my dear fellow, is going to marry her second cousin. And—try to believe that it is not a case of sour grapes—she does not greatly like Mulholland; I can’t think why. Possibly because—well, you know what girlish friendships are. Yet hers and Juliana’s seems as strong as ever; in fact, I sometimes wonder how Sir Francis likes his betrothed spending as much time at Northover as, I am glad to say, she does, and what he said when he heard that she was going to pay us, and not his mother, a visit in April. . . . Where have he and Ramage got to, I wonder?”
“Some quiet spot where they can discuss the chance of getting this Mr. Zachary Miller transported, I imagine,” returned his friend. “It is transportation now, is it not, for helping a prisoner of war to escape?”
“Since last year, yes. But I cannot say that so far the fact has done much to deter escapes, though I suppose it has raised their cost. It is a very surprising thing to me, this inability of the French to respect their parole of honour. My old Royalist friend, the Comte de Sainte-Suzanne, who has been an exile for twenty years and lived here for twelve of them, assigns it all, of course, to the spirit which came in at the Revolution. He says that the majority of these officers are destitute alike of breeding and of military tradition, so what can one expect?”
“Ah, you have a Frenchman of the other party living here?” exclaimed Mr. Sturgis with interest. “Yes, of course, I remember him now. How do the two kinds mix?”
“About as well as oil and vinegar. The Comte ignores any Bonapartist prisoner he may happen to meet. Young des Sablières, who was singing just now, is about the sole exception, and I think he tolerates him only because he is of good family and has a pleasing address. It is a mercy that it is so, for Sainte-Suzanne being such an old friend, and having the freedom of Northover, he and Mr. Rowl meet here fairly often.”
“Mr. Rowl?” queried his guest.
Mr. Bentley smiled. “The shop people and so on, who can’t get their tongues round M. Raoul des Sablières’ family name, call him by that form of his Christian one.”
“Is Mr. Rowl the only one of the paroled officers who has the privilege of your hospitality?”
“No; I daresay there are about half-a-dozen others. But he is here the most frequently. A charming fellow, we all think him, even though he is an enemy—and when he was at large, I somehow fancy, a pretty daring one. Not that he ever talks of his exploits. He is a hussar, and was wounded and captured at Salamanca last summer.”
They took a turn up and down. Someone was now playing the pianoforte with vigour. “That’s Laetitia,” said her father. “We might go in when she has finished her performance.”
“Before we do, and before the patriotic Mr. Ramage comes back,” said Mr. Sturgis, taking his friend by the arm, “tell me something, my dear Bentley. I presume that here, as elsewhere, the prisoners are strictly limited as to where they may go—one mile along the turnpike road from either confine of the town being their boundary, eh?”
Mr. Bentley nodded.
“Well, my dear friend, when last I visited you the first milestone—I distinctly remember the fact—stood a few yards to the left of your entrance gates,