The Toll-Gate Read Free Page B

Cocking. "That'll put Mr. Babbacombe's man in prime twig, that will! Howsever, it's just as you wish, sir, out of course!"
    He then watched his master ride off down the avenue, slowly shaking his head. A sparrow, hopping about within a few yards of him, was the recipient of his next cryptic confidence. "Resty, very resty!" he said, staring very hard at the bird. "If you was to ask me, I should say we shall have him up to some kind of bobbery in just a brace o' snaps!"
    The Captain, although he had not the smallest intention of getting up to bobbery, was heartily glad to escape from Easterby. There was nothing but Lord Melksham's mild excesses to break the tedium; and he did not find these amusing. His cousin's life was hedged about by all the proprieties which had driven the Captain, eight years earlier, to persuade his father to buy him a pair of colours. He had had a strong notion that the Army in time of war would suit him, and events had proved him to be right. Life in the Peninsula had been uncertain, uncomfortable, and often haphazard, but it had offered almost every kind of adventure, and John had refused none of these. He had enjoyed himself enormously, and never so intensely as when engaged upon some dangerous enterprise. But when the war ended, in 1814, although he rejoiced as much as any man in the downfall of Bonaparte, he knew that the life he liked had ended too. Not for John Staple, the boredom of military life in peace-time! He yielded at last to his mother's solicitations, and sold out. She thought that he would find plenty to occupy him in the management of his estate, his father having died a year previously. The elder John Staple had been an indolent man, and for some months his son was busy enough. Then had come the news of Bonaparte's escape from Elba, and a brief period of exciting activity for John. But Bonaparte had been a prisoner on St. Helena for two years now, and everyone seemed to feel that it was time John settled down to a life of civilian respectability.
    He felt it himself, and tried to be content, but every now and then a fit of restlessness would seize him. When that happened his subsequent actions would be unpredictable, though, as his brother-in-law gloomily said, it was safe to assume that they would be freakish, and possibly outrageous. Lord Lichfield had every reason to believe that he had once wandered for a couple of weeks with a party of gypsies; and not readily would he forget John's sudden arrival at his house in Lincolnshire, at midnight, by way of an open window, and clad in strange and disreputable garments. "Good God, what have you been doing?" he had exclaimed.
    "Free trading!" had replied John, grinning at him. "I'm glad I've found you at home: I want a bath, and some clean clothes."
    Lord Lichfield had been too much shocked to do more than goggle at him for a full minute. It wasn't, of course, as bad as John made it sound: the whole affair had been the result of an accident. "But what I say is this, Fanny!" had complained his lordship later. "If I go sailing, and run into a squall, and have to swim for it, do I get picked up by a smuggling-vessel? Of course I don't! No one but John would be! What's more, no one but John would finish the voyage with a set of cut-throat rascals, or help them to land their kegs! And if it had happened to me, I shouldn't be alive to tell the tale: they'd have knocked me on the head, and dropped me overboard."
    "I cannot conceive how it comes about that he was spared." Fanny had said. "Oh, I wish he would not do such things!"
    "Yes," agreed her lord. "Though, mind you, he's very well able to take care of himself."
    "But in the power of a whole crew of smugglers!"
    "I expect they liked him."
    "Liked him?"
    "Well, you can't help liking him!" pointed out his lordship. "He's a very charming fellow—and I wish to God he'd settle down, and stop kicking up these larks!"
    "Mama is right!" declared Fanny. "We must find him an eligible wife!"
    Candidate