XLI How I Played the Host at My Own Fireside
You may be sure that by now the anger gale had blown itself out, that the madness had passed for both of us; and when I stirred, Richard broke out in a tremulous babblement of thanksgiving for that he had not slain me outright.
“I was mad, Jack; as mad as any Bedlamite,” he would say. “The devil whispered me that you would fight; that you wanted but a decent excuse to thrust me out of the way. And when I saw you would not stir, ’twas too late to do aught but turn the flat of the blade. Oh, God help me! I’ll never let a second thought of that little Tory prat-a-pace send me to hell again.”
“Nay,” said I; “no such rash promises, I pray you, Richard. We are but two poor fools, with the love of a woman set fair between us. But you need not fight me for it. The love is yours—not mine.”
“Don’t say that, Jack; I’m selfish enough to wish it were true; as it is not. I know whereof I speak.”
“No,” I denied, struggling to my feet; “it has been yours from the first, Dick. I am but a sorry interloper.”
For a moment he was all solicitude to know if my head would let me stand; but when I showed him I was no more than clumsily dizzy from the effects of the blow, he went on.
“I say I know, and I do, Jack. She has refused me again.”
I groaned in spirit. I knew it must have come to that. Yet I would ask when and where.
“’Twas on our last day’s riding,” he went on; “after we had had your note saying you would undertake a mission for Colonel Davie.”
I took two steps and groped for the horse’s bridle rein.
“Did she tell you why she must refuse you?”
He helped me find the rein for my hand and the stirrup for my foot.
“There was no ‘why’ but the one—she does not love me.”
“But I say she does, Dick; and I, too, know whereof I speak.”
He flung me into the saddle as a strong man might toss a boy, and I understood how that saying of mine had gone into his blood.
“Then there must be some barrier that I know not of,” he said. Whereupon he put hand to head as one who tries to remember. “Stay; did you not say there was a barrier, Jack?—when we were wrestling with death in the Indian fires? Or did I dream it?”
“You did not dream it. But you were telling me what she said.”
“Oh, yes; ’twas little enough. She cut me off at the first word as if my speaking were a mortal sin. And when I would have tried again, she gave me a look to make me wince and broke out crying as if her heart would burst.”
I steadied myself as I could by the saddle horn and waited till he was up and we were moving on. Then I would say: “Truly, there is a barrier, Richard; if I promise you that I am going to Charlotte to remove it once for all, will you trust me and go about your affair with General Gates?”
“Trust you, Jack? Who am I that I should do aught else? When I am cool and sane, I’m none so cursed selfish; I could even give her over to you with a free hand, could I but hear her say she loves you as I would have her love me. But when I am mad.... Ah, God only knows the black blood there is in the heart at such times.”
We rode on together in silence after that, and were come to the bank of the river before we spoke again. But here Dick went back to my warning, saying, whilst we let the horses drink: “’Tis patrolled on the other bank, you say?”
“It was when I passed it a few days agone.”
“Then I will turn back and cross at Beattie’s. ’Twill make you a risk you need not take—to have me with you.”
But I thought now that the upper ford might be guarded as well; and if there must be a cutting of a road through the enemy’s outpost line for Dick, two could do it better than one. So I said:
“No; we are here now, and if need be I can lend you the weight of a second blade to see you safe through.”
“And you with your head humming like a basket of bees, as I make no doubt it will?”
I laughed. “I should be but a sorry soldier and a sorrier friend if I should let a love-tap with the flat of a blade make me fail you at the pinch.”
He reached across the little gap that parted us and grasped my hand.
“By God!” he swore, most feelingly, “you are as true as the steel you carry, Jack Ireton!”
“Nay,” said I, in honest shame; “I do confess I was thinking less of my friend than of the importance of the errand he rides on.”
“But if there should be a fight, you will spoil your chance of coming peaceably to Charlotte and my Lord’s headquarters.”
“If I am recognized—yes. But the night is dark, and a brush with the outpost need not betray me.”
At this he consented grudgingly, and we pushed on to the crossing. Now since this fording place of Master Macgowan’s has marched into our history, you will like to know what the historians do not tell you: namely, how it was but a makeshift wading place, armpit deep over a muddy bottom from the western bank to the bar above an island in mid-stream, and deflecting thence through rocky shallows to a point on the eastern bank some distance below the island. ’Twas here that Lord Cornwallis got entangled some months later—but I must not anticipate.
We made the crossing of the main current in safety and were a-splash in the rocky shallows beyond the island when we sighted the camp-fires of the outpost. To ride straight upon the patrol was to invite disaster, and though Jennifer was for a charging dash, a hurly-burly with the steel, and so on to freedom beyond, he listened when I pointed out that our beasts were too nearly outworn to charge, and that the noise we must make would rouse the camp and draw the fire of every piece in it long before we could reach the bank and come to blade work.
“What for it, then?” he asked, impatiently. “My courage is freezing whilst we wait.”
“There is nothing for it but to hold straight on across,” I said.
“That we can not; ’twill be over the horses’ ears. The beasts will drown themselves and us as well.”
How we should have argued it out I do not know, for just then Jennifer’s horse, scenting the troop mounts on the farther shore, cocked tail and ears, let out a squealing neigh, and fell to curveting and plunging in a racket that might have stood for the splashings of an advancing army.
In a twinkling the outpost camp was astir and a bellowing hail came to us across the water. Having no answer, the troopers began to let off their pieces haphazard in the darkness; and with the singing zip of the first musket ball, Richard went battle-mad, as he always did in the face of danger.
“At them!” he thundered, clapping spurs to his jaded beast and whipping out the great claymore; and so we charged, the forlornest hope that ever fell upon an enemy.
How we came ashore alive through the gun-fire is one of those mysteries to which every battle adds its quota; but the poor beasts we rode were not so lucky. Jennifer’s horse went down while we were yet some yards from the bank; and mine fell a moment later. To face a score of waiting enemies afoot was too much for even Richard’s rash courage; so when we were free of the struggling horses we promptly dove for shelter under the up-stream bank.
Here the darkness stood our friend; and when the redcoat troopers came down to the river’s edge with torches to see what had become of us, we took advantage of the noise they made and stole away up-stream till a shelving beach gave us leave to climb to the valley level above.
Richard shook himself like a water-soaked spaniel and laughed grimly.
“Well, here we are, safe across, horseless, and well belike to freeze to death,” he commented. “What next?”
I made him a bow. “You are on my demesne of Appleby Hundred, Captain Jennifer, and it shall go hard with us if we can not find a fire to warm a guest and a horse to mount him withal. Let us go to the manor house and see what we can discover.”
He entered at once into the spirit of the jest, and together we trudged the scant mile through the stubble-fields to my old roof-tree. As you would guess, we looked to find the manor house turned into an outpost headquarters; but now we were desperate enough to face anything.
Howbeit, not to rush blindly into the jaws of a trap, we first routed out the old black majordomo at the negro quarters; and when we learned from him that the great house was quite deserted, we took possession and had the black make us a rousing fire in the kitchen-arch. Nay, more; when we had steamed ourselves a little dry, we had old Anthony stew and grill for us, and fetch us a bottle of that madeira of my father’s laying in.
“A toast!” cried Richard, when the bottle came, springing to his feet with the glass held high. “To the dear lady of Appleby Hundred, and may she forgather with the man she loves best, be it you, or I, or another, Jack Ireton!”
We drank it standing; and after would sit before the fire, havering like two love-sick school-boys over the charms of that dear lady to whom one of us was less than naught, and to whom the other could be but naught whilst that first one lived.
You will smile, my dears, that we should come to this when, but a short hour before, one of us had been bent upon slaying the other for Mistress Margery’s sake. But the human heart is many-sided; notably that heart the soldier carries. And though I looked not to live beyond the setting of another sun, I was glad to my finger-tips to have this last loving-cup with my dear lad. I thought it would nerve me bravely for what must come—and so it did, though not as I prefigured.
We were still sitting thus before the kitchen-arch when the dawn began to dim the firelight, and the work of the new day confronted us. Pinned down, old Anthony confessed that some two or three horses of the Appleby Hundred stables had escaped the hands of the foragers of both sides; and two of these he fetched for us. Of the twain one chanced to be Blackstar, the good beast which had carried me from New Berne in the spring; and so I had my own horse betwixt my knees when I set Dick a mile on the road to Salisbury, and bade him farewell.
His last word to me was one of generous caution.
“Remember, Jack; ‘haste, haste, post haste’ is your watchword. There will be other couriers in from the battle-field at King’s Mountain; and you must hang and fire your news-petard and vanish before they come to betray you.”
“Trust me,” said I, evasively; and so we parted, he to gallop eastward, and I to charge down peaceably upon that British outpost we had set abuzz in the small hours of the night.