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THE CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE.

CHAPTER I.

THE WAY TO MARLEY WATER.

"No one by the Highflyer to-night ?" asked the blacksmith of Compton-on-theMoor of the weak-eyed landlord of the Black Bear, first and greatest hostelry in that parish.

"No one but Captain Duke." "What? the Captain's been up in London, then, may be ?"

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"Been there three weeks, and over," replied the landlord, who seemed rather of a desponding nature, and not conversationally inclined.

"Ah! um!" said the blacksmith; "three weeks and more up in London; three weeks and more away from that pretty-spoken lady of his; three weeks gambling, and roystering, and fighting, and beating of the watch, and dancing at that fine roundabout place at Chelsea, and suppers in Covent Garden; three weeks spending of the King's money; three weeks

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"Going to the devil! three weeks going to the devil!" said a voice behind him; "why not say it in plain English, John Homerton, while you're about it ?" "Bless us and save us, if it isn't Mr. Darrell Markham!"

"Himself, and nobody else," said the speaker, a tall man in a riding-dress and high boots, wearing a three-cornered hat, drawn very much over his eyes; "but keep it dark, Homerton, nobody in Compton knows I'm here; it's only a business visit, and a flying visit. I'm off in a couple of hours. What was that you were saying about Captain George Duke, of his Majesty's ship the Vulture?"

"Why, I was saying, Master Darrell, that if I had such a pretty wife as Mistress Duke, and could only be with her two months out of the twelve, I wouldn't be in London half of the time. I think your cousin might have made a better match of it, Master Darrell Markham, with her pretty face."

"I think she might, John Homerton." They had been standing at the door of the inn during this little dialogue. The blacksmith had the bridle of his sturdy little white pony-five-and-twenty years of age, if a day-in his hand, ready to mount him and ride home to his forge, at the furthest end of the straggling country town; but he had been unable to resist

the fascination of the weak-eyed landlord's conversational powers. Darrell Markham turned away from the two, and walking out into the dusty high road, looked along a narrow winding track that crossed the bare black moorland, stretching away for miles before him. The Black Bear stood at the entrance to the town, and on the very edge of the bleak open country.

We shall have a dark night," said Markham, "and I shan't have a very pleasant ride to Marley Water."

"You'll never go to-night, sir ?" said the landlord.

"I tell you I must go to-night, Samuel Pecker. Foul or fair weather, I must sleep at Marley Water this night."

"You always was such a daring one, Mr. Darrell," said the blacksmith, admiringly.

"It doesn't take so very much courage for a lonely ride over Compton Moor as all that comes to, John Homerton. I've a pair of pistols that never missed fire yet; my horse is sound, wind and limb; I've a full purse, and I know how to take care of it: I've met a highwayman before tonight, and I've been a match for one before to-night; and what's more to the purpose than all, honest John, I must do

it'

"Must be at Marley Water to-night, Mr. Markham ?"

"Must sleep at the Golden Lion, in the village of Marley Water, this night, Mr. Pecker," replied the young man.

"Landlord, show me the road from here to Marley Water," said a stranger.

The three men looked up, and saw, looking down at them, a man on horseback, who had ridden up to the inn so softly that they had never heard the sound of his horse's hoofs. How long the horse might have been standing there, or when the horseman had stopped, or where he had come from, neither of the three could guess; but there he was, with the last fading light of the autumn evening full upon his face, the last rosy shadow of the low sun gleaming on his auburn hair.

This face, lit up by the setting sun, was a very handsome one. Regular features, massively cut; a ruddy colour in the cheeks, something bronzed by a foreign sun; brown eyes, with dark, clearly-defined eyebrows, and waving auburn hair, which the October breeze caught up from

the low broad forehead. The horseman was of the average height, stalwart, well proportioned; a model, in short, of manly English beauty. The horse was like its master, broad-chested and strong-limbed.

"I want to know the nearest road to Marley Water," he said for the second time; for there was something so sudden in the manner of his appearance, that neither of the three men had answered dis inquiry.

The landlord, Mr. Samuel Pecker, was the first to recover his surprise.

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"Your cousin's husband, sir; Captain George Duke."

"Is that George Duke? Why he spoke like a stranger."

"That's his way, sir," said the landlord; "that's the worst of the Captain; hail fellow well met, and what would you like to drink? one day, and keep your distance, another. There's no knowing where to have him; but, after all, he's a jolly chap, the Captain.'

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He's a very handsome chap," said Darrell Markham; "I don't so much wonder that Millicent Markham fell in love with him."

"There's some as says Miss Millicent had fell in love with some one else before ever she saw him," said the landlord insiaruatingly.

"They should find something better to do than to talk of a young lady's love affairs, then," answered Markham, gravely. "I tell you what, Samuel Pecker, if 1 don't set out at once, I shan't find Marley Water to-night; it will be as dark as pitch in another hour. Tell them to bring out Balmerino."

"Must you go to-night, Mr. Markham ?''

"I tell you I must, Samuel. Come, tell the ostler to bring the horse round. I shall be half way there before 'tis dark, if I start at once."

Good-night, then, sir," said the blacksmith; "I only wish you was going to stop in Compton; the place is dull enough now, with the old squire dead, and the

Hall shut up, and the young squire ruining himself in London, and you away. Compton isn't what it was when you was a boy, Mr. Darrell, and the squire, your uncle, used to keep Christmas up at the Hall; those were times-and now" "Egad, we must all get old, Jolm Homerton," said Darrell, with a sigh.

"But it's hard to sigh, or to talk of growing old, either, sir," said the blacksmith, at eight-and-twenty years of age. Good-night, Master Darrell, and asking pardon for the liberty-God bless you,' and he mounted the elderly white pony, and jogged off towards the twinkling lights of the narrow high street.

Just as the blacksmith rode away, a female voice in the interior of the inn was heard crying, "Where is he? where is that foolish boy of mine, I say? He's not a going away to-night; he's not a going to have his throat cut, or his brains blowed out on the King's highway," and with these words a ponderous female, of some fifty summers, emerged from the inn door, and flung two very red fat arins, ornamented with black mittens, round Darrell Markham's neck.

"You're not a going to-night, Master Darrell? Oh, I heard Pecker asking of you to stay; but in his niminy piminy, namby pamby way, asking isn't asking, somehow," said ponderous Mrs. Pecker, contemptuously. "Oh, I've no patience with him; as if you was a going to stay for dying ducks!" This rather obscure observation was pointed derisively at Mr. Samuel Pecker, whose despondent manner drew upon him the contempt of his magnificent and energetic better half.

As to the landlord of the Black Bear, it must be here set down that there was no such thing. Waiters there were, chambermaids there were, ostlers there were, but landlord there was not. He was so entirely absorbed in the splendour of his large and dominant spouse that he had much better have not been at all; for what there was of him was always in the way. If he gave an order, it was, of course, an insane and utterly impracticable order; and if by any evil chance some domestic, unused, perhaps, to the ways of the place, attempted to execute that order, why there was the whole internal machinery of the Black Bear thrown into confu sion for an entire day. If he received a traveller, he generally gave that traveller such a dismal impression of life

in general, and Compton-on-the-Moor in particular, that nine times out of ten the dispirited wanderer would depart as soon as his horse had had a mouthful of corn, and a drink of water out of the great trough under the oak tree before the door. There never were so many highwaymen on any road as on the roads he spoke of; there never were going to be such storms as when he discoursed of the weather; there never were such calamities coming down upon poor old Eugland as when he talked politics, or such bad harvests about to paralyse the country as when he conversed on agriculture.

Some people said he was gloomy by nature, and that (like that well-beloved king across the channel, who used to tell Madame de Pompadour to stop in the middle of a funny story) it was pain to him to smile. Others, on the contrary, affirmed that he had been a much livelier man before his marriage, and that the weight of his happiness was too much for him; that he was sinking under the bliss of being allied to so magnificent a creature as Mrs. Samuel Pecker, and that his unlooked-for good fortune in the matrimonial line had undermined his health and spirits. Be it as it might, there he was, mildly despondent, and utterly powerless to combat with the contumely daily heaped upon his head by his lovely, but gigantic partner, Sarah Pecker.

The stranger, on first becoming a witness of the domestic felicity within the Black Bear, was apt to imagine that Mr. Samuel Pecker was in a manner an intruder there; landlord on sufferance, and nominal proprietor; or as one might say, host consort, only reigning by right of the actual sovereign, his wife. But it Was no such thing; the august line of Pecker, time out of mind, had been regnant at the Black Bear. The late Samuel Pecker, father of Samuel, husband of Sarah, was a burly, stalwart fellow, six feet high, if an inch, and as unlike his mild and feeble son as it is possible for one Englishman to be unlike another Englishman. From this father Samuel had inherited all those premises, dwelling house, out-buildings, gardens, farm-yard, stables, cowhouses, and pigsties, known as the Black Bear. But Samuel had not long enjoyed his dominions. Six months after ascending the throne, or rather installing himself in the great oaken armchair in the bar parlour of the Black Bear, he had taken to wife Sarah, housekeeper to Squire Ringwood

Markham, of the Hall, and widow of Thomas Masterson, mariner.

Thus it is that Sarah Pecker's two fat mottled arms are at this present moment clasped round Darrell Markham's neck. She had known Darrell from his childhood, and firmly believed that not amongst all the beaux who frequent Ranelagh and the coffee-houses, not in either of the king's services, not in Leicesterfields or Kensington, not at the "Cocon Tree," "White's," nor "Bellamy's;” in the Mall, or in Change Alley; at Bath, or at Tonbridge Wells; not, in short, in any quarter of civilized and fashionable England, is there to be met with so handsome, so distinguished, so clever, so elegant, so brave, generous, fascinating, noble, and honest a scapegrace as Darrell Markham, gentleman at large, and, what is worse, in difficulties.

"You wont go to-night, Master Darrell,” she said. "You wont let it be said that you went away from the Black Bear to be murdered on Compton Moor. Jenny's basting a capon for your supper at this very minute, and you shall have a bottle of your poor uncle's own wine, that Pecker bought at the Hall sale."

"It's no use, Mrs. Pecker; I tell you I mustn't stay. I know how well Jenny can roast a capon, and I know how comfortable you can make your guests, and there's nothing I should like better than to stop, but I mustn't; I want to catch the coach that leaves Marley Water at five o'clock to-morrow morning for York. I had no right to come to Compton at all, but I couldn't resist riding across to shake hands with you, Mrs. Sarah, for the sake of the old times that are dead and gone, and to ask the news of Nat Halloway the miller, and Lucas Jordan the doctor, and Selgood the lawyer, and a few more of my old companions, andand

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"And of Miss Millicent ? Eh, Master Darrell? For all London's such a wide city, and there's so many of these fine painted madams flaunting along the Mall, full sail, in their pannier-hoops and French furbelows. You haven't quite to gotten Miss Millicent, eh, Darrell Markham?",

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She had nursed him on her ample knees when he was but a tiny, swaddled baby, and she sometimes called him Darrell Markham, tout court.

"There was something wrong in that, Master Darrell. There was a gay wedding a year ago at Compton church, and very

grand and very handsome everything was; and sure the bride looked very lovely, but one thing was wrong, and that was the bridegroom."

"If you don't want me to be benighted, or to have these very indifferent brains of mine blown out by some valiant knight of the road upon Compton Moor, you'd better let me be off, Mistress Pecker! Mistress Pecker! oh, the good old days, the dear old days! when I used to call you Mistress Sally Masterson, in the housekeeper's room at the Hall." He turned away from her with a sigh, and began whistling a plaintive old English ditty, as he stood looking out over the wide expanse of gloomy moorland.

The ostler brought the horse round to the inn door-a stout brown hack, sixteen hands high, muscular and spiritedlooking, with only one speck of white about him, a long slender streak down the side of his head.

The young man put his arm caressingly round the horse's neck, and drawing his head down looked at him as he would have looked at a friend, of whose truth, in all a truthless world, he at least was certain.

"Brave Balmerino, good Balmerino," he said, "you've to carry me four-and-twenty miles across a rough country to-night. You've to carry me on an errand, the end of which perhaps will be a bad one; you've to carry me away from a great many bitter memories and a great many cruel thoughts; but you'll do it, Balmerino, you'll do it, wont you, old boy?"

The horse nestled his head against the young man's shoulder, and snuffed at his coat sleeve.

"Brave boy; that means yes," said Markham, as he sprang into the saddle. “Good night, old friends; good-bye, old home as Mr. Garrick says in Mr. Shakespear's play, Richard's himself again! Good-bye."

He waved his hand and rode slowly off towards the moorland bridle path, but before he had crossed the wide high road, the usually phlegmatic Samuel Pecker intercepted him, by suddenly rising up, pale of countenance and dismal of mien, under his horse's head.

Darrell pulled up with an abrupt jerk that threw Balmerino on his haunches, or he must inevitably have ridden over the

landlord of the Black Bear.

"Mr. Darrell Markham," said the moody innkeeper, very slowly, "don't you go to Marley Water this night! Don't

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"What, a presentiment, eh. Pecker ?" "That's the dictionary word for it, I believe, sir. Don't go !"

"Samuel Pecker, I must. If I go to my death, through going to Marley Water, so be it; I go!"

He shook the bridle

on the horse's neck, and the animal sped off at such a rate that by the time Mr. Samuel Pecker had recovered himself sufficiently to look up, all he could see of Darrell Markham was a cloud of white dust hurrying over the darkening moorland before the autumn wind.

Mrs. Pecker stood under the wide thatched porch of the Black Bear, watching the receding horseman.

"Poor Master Darrell! Brare, generous, noble Master Darrell! I only wish, for pretty Miss Millicent's sake, that Captain George Duke was a little like him."

"But suppose Captain George Duke wishes nothing of the kind? How then, Mistress Pecker ?"

The person who thus answered Mrs. Pecker's soliloquy was a man of average height, dressed in a naval coat and three-cornered hat, who had come up the inn doorway as quietly as the horseman had done half an hour before.

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For once the gigantic bosom of the unflinching Sarah Pecker quailed before one of the sterner sex; she almost stam mered, that great woman, as she said, “I beg your pardon, Captain Duke, I was only a-thinking!"

"You were only a-thinking aloud, Mistress Pecker. So you'd like to see George Duke, of His Majesty's ship the Vulture, a good-for-nothing, idling, reckless ne'er-do-weel, like Darrell Markham, would you ?"

"I tell you what it is, Captain; you're Miss Millicent's husband, and if—if you was a puppy dog, and she was fond of you, there isn't a word I could bring myself to say against you, for the sake of that sweet young lady. But don't you speak one bad word of Master Darrell Markham, for that's one of the things that Sarah Pecker will never put up with, while she's got a tongue in her head and sharp nails of her own at her fingers' ends."

The Captain burst into a long, ringing

laugh; a laugh that had a silver music peculiar to itself. There were people in the town of Compton-on-the-Moor, in the seaport of Marley Water, and on board His Majesty's frigate the Vulture, who said that there were times when that laugh had a cruel sound in its music, and was by no means good to hear. But what man in authority ever escaped the breath of slander, and why should Captain Duke be more exempt than his fellows?

"I forgive you, Mrs. Pecker," he said, "I forgive you. I can afford to hear people speak well of Darrell Markham. Poor devil, I pity him!" With which friendly remark the Captain of the Vulture strode across the threshold of the inn, and on the door step encountered Mr. Samuel Pecker, who had, after his solemn adjuration to Darrell Markham, re-entered the hostelry by a side door that led through the stable yard.

If Captain George Duke, of His Majesty's navy, had been a ghost, his appearance on the step of the inn door could scarcely have more astonished the mild Samuel Pecker. He started back, and stared at the naval officer with his weak blue eyes opened to their very widest extent.

"Then yon didn't go, Captain ?"
"Then I didn't go? Didn't

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"Samuel Pecker, you're drunk." 'I haven't tasted a mug of beer this day, Captain. Ask Sarah.'

That he hasn't, Captain," responded his spouse to this appeal. "I keep my eye upon him too sharp for that."

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Then what's the fool wool-gathering about, Mistress Sally ?" said the Captain, rather angrily.

"Lord have mercy upon us! I don't know," replied Mrs. Pecker, scornfully; "he's as full of fancies as the oldest woman in all Cumberland; he's always a-seein' of ghosts, and hobgoblins, and windin'sheets, and all sorts of dismals," added the landlady, contemptuously, "and unsettlin' his mind for business and bookkeepin'. I haven't common patience with him, that I han't."

Mrs. Pecker was very fond of informing people of this fact of her small stock of common patience in the matter of Samuel, her husband; and as all her actions went to confirm her words, she was no doubt go pretty generally believed.

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"Didn't go to Marley Water?" "Go to Marley Water! No! Who said I was going ?"

The small remnant of manly courage left in Mr. Samuel Pecker after his surprise, was quite knocked out of him by the energetic tone of the Captain, and he murmured mildly,

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Who said so? Oh! no one particular; only, only yourself!”

The Captain laughed his own ringing laugh once more.

"I said so, I said so, Samuel ? When?"

“Half-an-hour ago. When you asked me the way there." "When I asked you the way to Marley Water! Why I know the road as well as I know my own quarter-deck." "That's what struck me at the time, Captain, when you stopped your horse at this door and asked me the way. I must say I thought it was odd."

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"I stopped my horse! When ?" "Half-an-hour ago." 'Samuel Pecker, I haven't been across a horse to-day. I'm not over-attached to the brutes at the best of times, but to

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Oh! never mind, it's no consequence, and it's no business of mine," said the landlord, with abject meekness; "there was three of us as see him, that's all!" "Three of you as see whom?" asked the Captain. "As see him,"the landlord gave a peculiar dry gulp just here, as if the ghost of something was choking him, and he was trying to exorcise it by swallowing hard,-"three of us sceit!"

"It? What ?"

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"The Captain that stopped on horseback at this door half-an-hour ago, and asked me the way to Marley Water."

Captain Duke looked very hard into the face of the speaker; looked thoughtfully, gravely, earnestly at him, with bright, searching brown eyes; and then again burst out laughing louder than before. So much was he amused by the landlord's astonished and awe-stricken face, that he laughed all the way across the low old hall, laughed as he opened the door of the oak room in which the genteeler visitors at the Bear were accustomed to sit, laughed as he threw himself back into the great wooden chair by the fire,

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