Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/580

540 hurriedly, as if time were short, thrust it inside her laces and went quickly on her way.

All the lower stairways were bright with candles; there were blazing logs in the hall and living-rooms, and she despatched a servant to see that the chamber for her guest was curtained and prepared. Down a long stone corridor she passed to that wing of Pages which had once been sacred to the menkind of her people. Hither they had withdrawn for their smoking and cards, their political squabbles, their rougher jests, their magisterial administration (for many an earl had coolly dealt out justice in his own fashion without reference to his weaker neighbors), for their money transactions, their chatter over horses and dogs, woodlands and waterlands.

She stopped for a moment in a little lobby and rang a bell. Instantly a movement was audible in the room beyond. An old man, her steward, opened the door of communication and saluted.

"Is the officer here?" she asked.

"Yes, my lady, with two other men."

"Are they of the neighborhood?"

"They are from Canterbury, my lady, and will go back there."

"It is good. Rye men would have chattered out their business before it was begun. Why has the sheriff only two guards? I told him four."

"Two suffice, my lady."

She regarded the old man with a hard smile. "Yes, Ruffany, three to one is accounted fair odds in fair love and open war."

"And what if this be both?" muttered the old steward, in his beard, as she passed him and went into the stone-paved room beyond. Upon the rustle of her thick silk the heavily booted men rose to their feet and pushed aside their chairs. They fell back from the fireplace and stood stiffly to attention.

"You have had food and rest?" she asked. "You are warm and merry? That is right. You will usher in the New-year pleasantly with an easy task, I think. All laborers are not so fortunate."

The biting tone of her voice, the contemptuous smile, the half-closed deep eyelids, the proud, lovely head, made an impression of concentrated coolness and autocracy. There was almost a touch of gallantry in the dry voice of the sheriff as he answered her:

"It is not often that so much of my labor is already done at the beginning, or by such hands as yours, my lady."

"All I require of you is that you act like gentlemen—as my brother would have wished. Give me the warrant here a moment."

He laid it before her.

"That is good," she said. "No word is left out, and my name as accuser is properly written. For the rest—I do not care. His Majesty has given me the right to deliver this man to punishment. Punish—but do it like gentlemen. And if he struggles, defend yourselves. And if he thrusts, thrust you also, and do it clean and straight—as the Earl would have had it."

She handed the warrant back composedly.

"You know the signal, my men. A quarter of an hour before midnight I will send my steward for the loving-cup to be drunk in the New-year. That shall be your summons. You, Master Sheriff, shall knock three times at the door of the upper parlor, and I will open it to you and pass out. The rest is your affair."

Once more the men saluted as the lady of Pages recrossed the threshold and went to the dining-parlor.

In the face of the northeast, with his servant, also mounted, behind him, rode Otway Romilly from Croydon across Surrey heaths and Kentish vales to Pages in the Sussex hills. His head was bent low, his hat thrust down over his keen eyes, his mouth set. But the cruel sleet had not more to do with the drawing of the lines in his face or the compression of his lips than the thoughts which beat in his brain. For he was not like my Lady Clemency. To him long waitings had not brought coolness nor counsel, and this because the motive at the heart of his delay was not that of a revenge which already apprehends the first-fruits of satisfaction. For him the stake was also very great, but it was not the stake for which her ladyship had played so carefully for three years. Time had