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The New Forest Spy, a fiction by George Manville Fenn |
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Chapter 7. Secret Preparations |
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_ CHAPTER SEVEN. SECRET PREPARATIONS Waller's appetite was gone. The girl seemed to have taken it out of the room with her, and the boy thrust his hands into his pockets and sat thinking for some time about his plans, and ended by rising from his hardly touched meal to cross to the bell. But a fresh idea occurred to him, and, going back to the table, he took his untouched cup, carried it carefully to the open window, and emptied it upon a flower-bed; then, returning the cup, he rang the bell, waited till he heard Bella's step in the hall, and then began to parade in a sort of "sentry go" up and down in front of the partly open bookcase, while the maid, after a glance at the boy's averted countenance and frowning face, not daring to catch his eye for fear of bursting out into a fresh fit of laughter, began to clear the table. Neither spoke till the task was pretty well finished, and then the girl looked up at Waller, next at the table, and lastly about the room. "Well," she exclaimed, "if I couldn't declare that I brought two more plates!" Waller paid no apparent heed to the remark, but continued his "sentry go," breathing rather hard the while, till Bella left the room, when he uttered a low sigh of relief. But the boy's thoughts had not been idle during this time, and as soon as he was free to carry out his plans he opened the door, listened to the murmur of voices in the kitchen, and then ran to the bookcase, took out his supply of provender, had another listen, and then ran with the two plates upstairs, past the main set of bedrooms, and then up the next flight to a room in the front which was devoted to his pursuits. Here he had books, tools, stuffed birds, fishing-tackle, a wonderfully untidy lot of specimen birds' nests and their eggs arranged on shelves; in short, in addition to a pallet bedstead and bed that were very rarely used, a most glorious muddle of the odds and ends and collections dear to the heart of a country lad, all of which were under an interdict not to be touched by the brush, broom, or duster of the maids. Waller's actions gave the key to his thoughts. The cereal and carnal cakes were thrust into a closet, and the boy proceeded then to turn down and feel the bed, over which he frowned and seemed in doubt; but the next minute he had rushed out of the room and downstairs to his own chamber, to strip a couple of blankets from the bed, smooth it over again, and make it rougher than it was before, a fact which he grasped and puzzled over for a moment, before exclaiming, "Bother!" and, after listening at the head of the stairs, he rushed up into his work-room with the blankets. That seemed to him to be all that he could do, till it occurred to him that the room felt hot and stuffy, so he threw open the window, fastening back the casement, and stood gazing out at a great rugged old Scotch fir not many feet away, one apparently of great age, and which cut off a part of the view over the undulating greenery of the forest. Quite satisfied now, and with a sigh of relief, the boy went out to the landing, carefully locked the door and pocketed the key. "Let 'em think," he muttered with a grim smile upon his lips, "it's a curiosity I found in the woods." By this time he was down in the gallery and passing his own chamber, where he stopped short, bringing himself up with the ejaculation-- "Oh! Bella will be at me about the blankets! Bother! What shall I say? Tell her to mind her own business," he cried half-savagely; and as if to get away from his thoughts he ran down into the hall, snatched his cap from the stand, and then hurried away for the woods. But it was not in his ordinary free and careless fashion, for his thoughts haunted him, and every now and then he kept turning round as if fancying that he was followed. Now his eyes were directed back at the old ivy-covered house, where he expected to see the maid watching him from one of the windows. Soon after, when the Manor was hidden by the clustering oaks that were scattered park-like among the fields, he was looking over his left shoulder to see if that was the fat village constable in the distance bending down so as to creep along unobserved, and not one of his father's mouse-coloured cows. Hurrying on, and right into the forest, his next fancy was that he heard a distant shout, one that was answered, though it might have been an echo, and his heart beat a little faster as he set both sounds down to soldiers searching among the trees and hallooing to one another so as to keep in touch. "Oh, I say," he muttered to himself, as he proceeded, keeping to the densest portions of the forest, and doubling the labour in threading his way, "who could have thought that it would make one feel so queer? I haven't done anything--at least, nothing much--to mind, and here am I feeling as if I had been guilty of nobody knows what. No wonder that poor chap felt so bad and pulled out the pistol. What did he say his name was? Boyne? Let's see--Battle of the Boyne--where was that? Oh, I know--King James, and he was a Stuart. Nonsense! That couldn't have had anything to do with his name. Let's see; I had better wait till it gets dusk, and then--oh, I'll risk it. I'll smuggle him up to the house and upstairs. But what about Joe Hanson? Mustn't run against him. He's always pottering about outside the house towards evening, just as if he thought I wanted to go down the garden and help myself to apples and pears. Like his impudence, with his 'my garden' and 'my fruit,' and all the rest of it; and father said that I was to take what I liked, and that he should be proud to leave it to my discretion. It will come to a row one of these days, for I shall hit out at Master Joe, and then he will go and complain. Bother Joe Hanson! I want to think about that poor chap lying out there amongst the bracken. What a miserable, haggard scarecrow he did look, just like some poor beggarly tramp. But one could feel that he was a gentleman as soon as he began to speak. There; best way will be to take him boldly up to the front door and right up the stairs, and chance it. One never tries to play the sneak and get anywhere unseen without running bang up against somebody." These and similar thoughts so took up the boy's attention that it was like a surprise to him when, close upon sunset, and when the shadows were deepening in the forest, he found himself close to the spot where he had left the fugitive; and there he stopped short, listening and then, feeling that he must not seem to be peering about, he took out his knife, cut down a nice straight rod of hazel, and began to whittle and trim it, apparently intent upon his task, but with his ears twitching and his lowered eyes peering to right and left in every direction, as he seemed to be unconsciously changing his position. "Wish I were as clever as Bunny Wrigg," he muttered. "He's just like a fox for hiding, throwing anyone off the scent. He'd have got here without anybody seeing him, while, for aught I know, I may have been watched all the time--by soldiers, perhaps. That must have been some of them I heard shouting. Oh, it is so queer," he muttered passionately, as he hacked off the twigs of the stout sapling. "Only this morning I was as happy as I could be, and now my head's all of a buzz with worry. Wish I'd gone and found Bunny Wrigg and told him all; he'd have helped me and enjoyed the job. I don't know, though. There's that hundred pounds reward. I am glad, after all, I didn't trust him. This is one of the things like father talked to me about where one has no business to trust anybody but oneself. Here, I mustn't go straight up to the hiding-place, in case I am watched. Oh, how suspicious I do feel!" Turning short round, he began to retrace his steps, acting as if he had fulfilled his purpose and come expressly for that hazel-rod, which he went on trimming, humming a tune the while, which unconsciously merged into one of the Scottish ditties about "Charley over the water." He sauntered on for some distance, till, coming to what he considered a suitable spot, he glanced furtively to right and left without turning his head, and then, having pretty well trimmed his rod, he began to treat it as if it were a javelin, darting it right away before him, and running after it to catch it up and aim it with a good throw at a tree some yards away. He went through this performance four or five times over before aiming for a dense clump of the abundant bracken, into the midst of which he darted his mock spear, dashed in after it, and did not appear again, for the hazel-rod was left where it fell, and the boy was crawling rapidly on hands and knees beneath the great bracken fronds, keeping well out of sight till, judging by the towering beeches which he took for his bearings, he stopped at last, hot and panting with his exertions, close to where he had left the young spy. _ |
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