XLIII In Which I Drink a Dish of Tea
Being without specific orders what to do with me, my two sergeant bailiffs thrust me into that little den of a strong-room below stairs where I had once found the master of the house, and one of them mounted guard whilst the other fetched the camp armorer to iron me.
The shackles securely on, I was left to content me as I could, with the door ajar and my two jailers hobnobbing before it. Having done all I had hoped to do, there was nothing for it now but to wait upon the consequences. So, hitching my chair up to the oaken table, I made a pillow of my fettered wrists and presently fell adoze.
I know not what hour of the night it was when the half-blood Scipio, who was Mr. Gilbert Stair’s body-servant, came in and roused me. I started up suddenly at his touch, making no doubt it was my summons. But the mulatto brought me nothing worse than a cold fowl and a loaf, with a candle-end to see to eat them by, and a dish of hot tea to wash them down.
I knew well enough whom I had to thank for this, and was set wondering that my lady’s charity was broad enough to mantle even by this little my latest sins against the king’s cause. None the less, I ate and drank gratefully, draining the tea-dish to the dregs—which, by the by, were strangely bitter.
I had scarce finished picking the bones of the capon before sleep came again to drag at my eyelids, a drowsiness so masterful that I could make no head against it. And so, with the bitter taste of the tea still on my tongue, I fell away a second time into the pit of forgetfulness.
When I awakened from what seemed in the memory of it the most unresting sleep I ever had, it was no longer night, and I was stretched upon the oaken settle in that same lumber garret where I had been bedded through that other night of hiding. So much I saw at the waking glance; and then I realized, vaguely at first, but presently with startling emphasis, that it was the westering sun which was shining in at the high roof windows, that the shackles were still on, and that my temples were throbbing with a most skull-splitting headache.
Being fair agasp with astoundment at this new spinning of fate’s wheel, I sprang up quickly—and was as quickly glad to fall back upon the pallet. For with the upstart a heaving nausea came to supplement the headache, and for a long time I lay bat-blind and sick as any landsman in his first gale at sea.
The sunlight was fading from the high windows, and I was deep sunk in a sick man’s megrims, before aught came to disturb the silence of the cobwebbed garret. From nausea and racking pains I had come to the stage of querulous self-pity. ’Twas monstrous, this burying a man alive, ill, fettered, uncared-for, to live or die in utter solitude as might happen. I could not remotely guess to whom I owed this dismal fate, and was too petulant to speculate upon it. But the meddler, friend or foe, who had bereft me of my chance to die whilst I was fit and ready, came in for a Turkish cursing—the curse that calls down in all the Osmanli variants the same pangs in duplicate upon the banned one.
It was in the midst of one of these impotent fits of malediction that the wainscot door was opened and closed softly, and light footsteps tiptoed to my bedside. I shut my eyes wilfully when a voice low and tender asked: “Are you awake, Monsieur John?”
I hope you will hold me forgiven, my dears, if I confess that what with the nausea and the headache, the fetters and the solitude, I was rabid enough to rail at her. ’Twas so near dusk in the ill-lighted garret that I could not see how she took it; but she let me know by word of mouth.
“Merci, Monsieur,” she said, icily. And then: “Gratitude does not seem to be amongst your gifts.”
At this I broke out in all a sick man’s pettishness.
“Gratitude! Mayhap you will tell me what it is I have to be grateful for. All I craved was the chance to die as a soldier should, and some one must needs spoil me of that!”
“Selfish—selfish always and to the last,” she murmured. “Do you never give a moment’s thought to the feelings of others, Captain Ireton?”
This was past all endurance.
“If I had not, should I be here this moment?” I raved. “You do make me sicker than I was, my lady.”
“Yet I say you are selfish,” she insisted. “What have I done that you should come here to have yourself hanged for a spy?”
“Let us have plain speech, in God’s name,” I retorted. “You know well enough there was no better way in which I could serve you.”
“Do I, indeed, mon ami?” she flashed out. “Let me tell you, sir, had she ever a blush of saving pride, Margery Stair—or Margery Ireton, if you like that better—would kill you with her own hand rather than have it said her husband died upon a gallows!”
A sudden light broke in upon me and I went blind in the horror of it.
“God in Heaven!” I gasped; “’twas you, then? I do believe you poisoned me in that dish of tea you sent me last night!”
She laughed, a bitter little laugh that I hated to think on afterward.
“You have a most chivalrous soul, Captain Ireton. I do not wonder you are so fierce to shake it free of the poor body of clay.”
“But you do not deny it!” I cried.
“Of what use would it be? I have said that I would not have you die shamefully on the gallows; so I may as well confess to the poppy-juice in the tea. Tell me, Monsieur John; was it nasty bitter?”
“Good Lord!” I groaned; “are you a woman, or a fiend?”
“Either, or both, as you like to hold me, sir. But come what might, I said you should not die a felon’s death. And you have not, as yet.”
“Better a thousand times the rope and tree than that I should rot by inches here with you to sit by and gird at me. Ah, my lady, you are having your revenge of me.”
“Merci, encore. Shall I go away and leave you?”
“No, not that.” A cold sweat broke out upon me in a sudden childish horror of the solitude and the darkness and the fetters. And then I added: “But ’twould be angel kindness if you would leave off torturing me. I am but a man, dear lady, and a sick man at that.”
All in a flash her mood changed and she bent to lay a cool palm on my throbbing temples.
“Poor Monsieur John!” she said softly; “I meant not to make you suffer more, but rather less.” Then she found water and a napkin to wring out and bind upon my aching head.
At the touch and the word of womanly sympathy I forgot all, and the love-madness came again to blot out the very present memory of how she had brought me to this.
“Ah, that is better—better,” I sighed, when the pounding hammers in my temples gave me some surcease of the agony.
“Then you forgive me?” she asked, whether jestingly or in earnest I could not tell.
“There is none so much to forgive,” I replied. “One hopeless day last summer I put my life in pledge to you; and you—in common justice you have the right to do what you will with it.”
“Ah; now you talk more like my old-time Monsieur John with the healing sword-thrust. But that day you speak of was not more hopeless for you than for me.”
“I know it,” said I, thinking only of how the loveless marriage must grind upon her. “But it must needs be hopeless for both till death steps in to break the bond.”
Again she laughed, that same bitter little laugh.
“Indeed, it was a great wrong you did that night, sir. I could wish, as heartily as you, that it might be undone. But this is idle talk. Let me see if this key will fit your manacles. I have been all day finding out who had it, and I am not sure it will be the right one, after all.”
But it did prove to be the right one; and when the irons were off I felt more like a man and less like a baited bear.
“That is better,” said I, drawing breath of unfeigned relief. “I bear my Lord Charles no malice, but ’twas a needless precaution, this ironing of a man who was never minded to run away.”
“But you are going to run away,” she said, decisively; “and that as soon as ever you are able to hold a horse between your knees. Shall I bring you another dish of tea? Nay, never look so horrified; I shall not poison you this time.”
“Stay,” I cried. “You mean that you are going to help me escape? ’Tis a needless prolonging of the agony. Go and tell the guards where they can find me.”
She stopped midway to the wainscot door and turned to give me my answer.
“No; you are a soldier, and—and I will not be a gallows-widow. Do you hear, sir? If you are so eager to die, there is always the battle-field.” And with that she left me.
I may pass over the two succeeding days in the silence I was condemned to endure through the major part of them. After that first visit, Margery came only at stated intervals to bring me food and drink, and my nurse was an old black beldame, either deaf and dumb, or else so newly from the Guinea Coast as to be unable to twist her tongue to the English.
And in the food-bringings I could neither make my lady stay nor answer any question; this though I was hungering to know what was going on beyond the walls of my garret prison. Indeed, she would not even tell me how I had been spirited away from the two sergeants keeping watch over me in her father’s strong-room below stairs. “That is Scipio’s secret,” she would say, laughing at me, “and he shall keep it.”
But in the evening of the third day the mystery bubble was burst, and I learned from Margery’s lips the thing I longed to know. Lord Cornwallis had decided to abandon North Carolina, and in an hour or two the army would be in motion for withdrawal to the southward.
“Now, thanks be to God!” I said, most fervently. “King’s Mountain has begun the good work, and we shall show Farmer George a thing or two he had not guessed.”
On this, my lady drew herself up most proudly and her lip curled.
“You forget, sir, you are speaking to Mr. Gilbert Stair’s daughter.”
“True,” said I; “I did forget. We are at cross purposes in this, as in all things else. I crave your pardon, Madam.”
Her eyes were snapping by now. Never tell me, my dears, that eyes of the blue-gray can not flash fire when they will.
“How painstakingly you will go about to make me hate you!” she burst out. And then, all in the same breath: “But you will be rid of me presently, for good and all.”
“Nay, then, Mistress Margery, you are always taking an ell of meaning for my inch of speech. ’Tis I who should do the ridding.”
“Mon Dieu!” she cried, in a sudden burst of petulance; “I am sick to death of all this! Is there no way out of this coil that is strangling us both, Captain Ireton?”
“I had thought to make a way three days ago; did so make it, but you kept me from walking in it. Yet that way is still open—if you will but drop a word in my Lord’s ear when you go below stairs.”
“Oh, yes—a fine thing; the wife betray the husband!” This with another lip-curl of scorn. “I have some shreds and patches of pride left, sir, if you have not.”
“Then free me of my obligation to you and let me do it myself. I am well enough to hang.”
“And so make me a consenting accomplice? Truly, as I have said before, you have a most knightly soul, Captain Ireton.”
I closed my eyes in very weariness.
“You are hard to please, my lady.”
“You have not to try to please me, sir. I am going away—to-night.”
“Going away?” I echoed. “Whither, if I may ask?”
“My father has taken protection and we shall go south with the army. As Lord Cornwallis says, Mecklenburg is a hornets’ nest of rebellion, and in an hour or two after we are gone you will be amongst your friends.”
She made to leave me now, but I would not let her go without trying the last blunt-pointed arrow in the quiver of expedients.
“Stay a moment,” I begged. “You are leaving the untangling of this coil you speak of to a chance bullet on a battle-field. Had you ever thought that the Church can undo what the Church has done?”
Again I had that bitter laugh which was to rankle afterward in memory.
“You are a most desperate, pertinacious man, Captain Ireton. Failing all else, you would even storm Heaven itself to gain your end,” she scoffed; then, at the very pitch-point of the scornful outburst she put her face in her hands and fell a-sobbing as if her heart would break.
I knew not what to say or do, and ended, man-like, by saying and doing nothing. And so, still crying softly, she let herself out at the wainscot door, and this was our leave-taking.