The Watchers by A. E. W. Mason

Author:A. E. W. Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781634213882
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter XI - Our Plans Miscarry Upon Castle Down

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The next morning, you may be sure, I crossed the hill betimes, and came down to the house under Merchant's Rock with my good news. I told her the news with no small elation, and with a like elation she began to hear it. But as I related what had occurred at the Palace Inn, she fell into thought, and now smiled with a sort of pride, and now checked a sigh; and when I came to the knife upon the table's edge she shuddered.

"But you are in danger!" she cried. "Every minute you are in danger of your life, and on my account!"

"Nay," said I lightly, "you exaggerate. The best of women have that fault."

But she did not smile. She laid a hand upon my arm, and said, very earnestly:

"I cannot have it. I am very proud you count the risk so little, but you must go."

"No," said I, "they must go, and we have the means to make them march. We have but to inform Captain Hathaway at the Garrison that here are some of Bartholomew Robert's fry, and we and the world will soon be quit of them for ever."

"But we cannot," she exclaimed, "for then it would be known that my"—she hesitated for a second, or rather she paused, for there was no hesitation in her voice, as she continued—"my father also was of the band. It may be justice that it should be known. But I cannot help it; I guard his memory. Besides, there is Cullen."

It was to Cullen that she always came in the end, and with such excuses as a girl might make who was loyal to a man whom she must know not to be worth her loyalty. The house in which she lived, the money which she owned were his by right. She dreaded what story these men, if captured, might have to tell of Cullen—she could not be persuaded that Glen and his friends had not a motive of vengeance as well as of gain,—and that story, whatever it was, would never have been enacted, had not Cullen been driven penniless from Tresco. It did not occur to her at all that this house was not Cullen's by any right, but belonged to the scattered sons of many men with whom the ship Royal Fortune had fallen in.

She repeated her arguments to me as we walked in the grass-grown garden at the back of the house. A thick shrubbery of trees grew at the end of the garden, and behind the trees rose the Merchant's Rock. On one side the Castle Down rolled up towards the sky, on the other a hedge closed the garden in, and beneath the hedge was the sea. Over the hedge I could see the uninhabited island of St. Helen's and the ruined church upon the summit, and a ship or two in St. Helen's Pool; and this side of the ships the piled boulders of Norwithel.

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