CHAPTER V

I

It was the sixth night after Dick Sampson had come back with news of Mr. Alban; and he had already received instructions as to how he was to go twenty-four hours later.  He was to walk, as before, starting after dark, not carrying a letter this time, after all, in spite of the news that he might have taken with him; for the priest would be back before morning and could hear it all then at his ease.

Every possible cause of alarm had gone; and Marjorie, for the first time for three weeks, felt very nearly as content as a year ago.  Not one more doubtful visitor had appeared anywhere; and now she thought herself mistaken even about those solitary figures she had suspected before.  After all, they had only been a couple of men, whose faces her servants did not know, who had gone past on the track beneath the house; one mounted, and the other on foot.

There had been something of a reaction, too, in Derby.  The deaths of the three priests had made an impression; there was no doubt of that.  Mr. Biddell had written her a letter on the point, saying that the blood of those martyrs might well be the peace, if it might not be the seed, of the Church in the district.  Men openly said in the taverns, he reported, that it was hard that any should die for religion merely; politics were one matter and religion another.  Yet the deaths had dismayed the simple Catholics, too, for the present; and at Hathersage church, scarcely ten miles away, above two hundred came to the Protestant sermon preached before my lord Shrewsbury on the first Sunday after.

The news of the Armada, too, had distracted men’s minds wonderfully in another direction.  News had come in already, she was informed, of an engagement or two in the English Channel, all in favour of its defenders.  More than that was not known.  But the beacons had blazed; and the market-place of Derby had echoed with the tramp of the train-bands; and it was not likely that at such a time the attention of the magistrates would be given to anything else.

So her plans were laid.  Mr. Alban was to come here for three or four days; be provided with a complete change of clothes (all of which she had ready); shave off his beard; and then set out again for the border.  He had best go to Staffordshire, she thought, for a month or two, before beginning once more in his own county.

* * * * *

She went to bed that night, happy enough, in spite of the cause, which she loved so much, seeming to fail everywhere.  It was true that, under this last catastrophe, great numbers had succumbed; but she hoped that this would be but for a time.  Let but a few more priests come from Rheims to join the company that had lost so heavily, and all would be well again.  So she said to herself:  she did not allow even in her own soul that the security of her friend and the thought that he would be with her in a day or two, had any great part in her satisfaction.