envy of every warrior in the tribe when he vaunts himself at the
Catawbas' council fire."
I let it rest a while at that, casting about for words to shape a
hungrier question.
"Have you no news?" I asked, at length.
"Little or none," he answered shortly.
"But you have had some word--some news--from Appleby Hundred?" I
stammered feebly.
"Nothing you'd care to hear," he rejoined, evasively, I thought. "'Tis
as you left it, save that Tarleton whipped away to the south again as
suddenly as he came, and our cursing baronet has made the manor house
his headquarters in fact, lodging himself and all his troop on Mr.
Stair. From his lying quiet and keeping the Cherokees in tow, there will
be some deviltry afoot, I'll warrant."
I knew that Falconnet was waiting for the powder cargo, but another
matter crowded this aside.
"But--but Margery?" I queried, on sharpest tenter-hooks to know how much
or little he had heard.
I thought his brow darkened at the question, but mayhap it was only a
shadow cast by the flickering fire. At any rate, he laughed hardily.
"She is well--and well content, I dare swear. 'Twas only yesterday I saw
her taking the air on the river road, with Falconnet for an escort. You
told me once he had a sure hand with the women and it made me mad; but,
truly, I have come to think you drew it mild, Jack."
Now though I could ply a decent ready blade, or keep a firing line from
lurching at a pinch, I had not learned to put a snaffle on a blundering
tongue, as I have said before.
"Damn him as you please, Dick, and he'll warrant it. But you must not
judge the lady over harshly, nor always by appearances. She may have
flouted you as a boyish lover, and yet I think--"
I stopped in sheer bewilderment, shot through and through with keenest
agonies of remorseful recollection. For at the moment I had clean forgot
the gulf impassable I had set between these two. So I would have lapsed
into shamed silence, but Jennifer would not suffer it.
"Well, what is it that you think?" he demanded.
"I think--nay, I may say I know that she thinks well of you, Dick," I
blundered on, seeing no way to put him off.
He gripped my hand, and in his eyes there was the light of the old love
reawakening.
"Don't lift me up to fling me down again, Jack! How can you know what
she thinks of me?" he broke in, eagerly.
I should have told him then all there was to tell. He had been thrice my
savior, and his heart was soft and malleable on the side of friendship.
I knew it--knew that the pregnant moment for full confession had
arrived; and yet I could not force my tongue to shape the words. Indeed,
I saw more clearly than before that never any word of mine could make
him understand that I was not a faithless traitor in intention. So I
paltered with the truth, like any wretched coward of them all.
"You forget that I have come to know her well," I said. "I was a month
or more under the same roof with her, and in that time she told me many
things."
Now, this witless speech was no better than a whip to flog him on.
"What things?" he questioned, promptly.
"Oh, many things. She spoke often of you."
"What did she say of me, Jack? Tell me what she said," he begged. "It
can make no difference now; she is less than nothing to me--nay,'tis
even worse than that, since she would play Delilah if she could. But oh,
Jack, I love her!--I should love her if I stood on the gallows and she
stood by to spring the drop and turn me off!"
Truly, if the lash of remorse had lacked its keenest thong, this
passionate outburst of his would have added it. None the less, I must
needs be weaker than water and fall back another step and put him off.
"Another time, Richard. I am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now. By
and by, when I am stronger, I will tell you all."
Taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed
malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed
me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth. And afterward, when I had
drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he
spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven
me to sleep again.
"At any rate, you shall not talk," he promised. "If you are wakeful I
will talk to you and tell you what little I have gleaned about the
fighting."
His news was chiefly a later repetition of Father Matthieu's and Captain
Abram Forney's, but there was this to add: the Congress had appointed
the Englishman, Horatio Gates, chief of the army in the South, and this
new leader was on his way to take command.
De Kalb, with the Maryland and Delaware lines and Colonel Armand's
legion, was encamped on Deep River, waiting for the newly-appointed
general; and Caswell and Griffith Rutherford, with the militia, were
already pressing forward to some handgrips with my Lord Cornwallis in
the South.
Nearer at hand, the partizan war-fire flamed afresh wherever a Tory
company met a patriot, and there were wicked doings, more like savage
massacres than fair-fought battles of the soldier sort.
When he had made an end of his small war budget, I set him on to tell me
how he came to be at hand to help me so in the nick of time on the night
of the cabin sack.
"'Twas partly chance," he said. "A redcoat troop had me in durance at
Jennifer House, and while they affected to hold me at parole, I never
gave consent to that, and so was kept a prisoner. They shut me in the
wine-bin with a guard, and when the fellow was well soaked and silly, I
bound and gagged him and broke jail. I took the river for it, meaning to
outlie until the hue and cry was over; and just at dusk Uncanoola
dropped upon me and told me of your need. From that to helping him cut
you out of your raffle with the Cherokees was but a hand's turn in the
day's work."
"A lucky turn for me," I said; and then at second thought I would deny
the saying, though not for him to hear. But this was dangerous ground
again, and I clawed off from it like a desperate mariner tempest-driven
on a lee shore; asking him how he had learned the broadsword play, and
where he got the antique claymore.
He laughed heartily, and more like my care-free Dick, this time.
"Thereby hangs a tale. I told you how I was out with the Minute Men in
'76 at Moore's Creek, where we fought the Scotchmen. It was our first
pitched battle, and I opine it smelled somewhat of severity on both
sides--no quarter was asked, and the Tory MacDonalds fought like fiends
for King George, small cause as they had to love the House of Hanover."
"How was that?" I would ask, being as little familiar with the low
country settlements as any native-born Carolinian could be.
"They were expatriates for the Pretender's sake, many of them. Mistress
Flora's husband was one of the prisoners we took. But, as I was saying,
they were Tories to a man, and they fought wickedly. When it was over,
the prisoners would have fared hardly but for a woman. In the thick of
the fight, Mistress Mary Slocumb, of Dobbs, whose husband was with us,
came storming down upon the field, having rode a-gallop some forty-odd
miles because she dreamed her goodman was killed. She begged for the
prisoners, and so Caswell hanged only those who were blood guilty--these
and the house burners. A raw-boned piper named M'Gillicuddy fell to my
lot, and he is now my majordomo at Jennifer House; as honest a fellow as
ever skirled a pibroch."
"That was like you," I said; "to make a friend and retainer out of your
prisoner. And so this Highland piper has been your fencing master, has
he?"
"'Twas he taught me what little I know of the claymore play; and this
stout old blade is his. 'Tis as good as a woodman's ax when you have the
knack of swinging it."
"Truly," said I. "Also, you seemed to have the knack, and the strength
as well, in spite of the crippled arm you were carrying in a sling the
night before when they haled you into Colonel Tarleton's court at
Appleby."
"A little ruse of war," he said, laughing and making a fist to show me
his arm was strong and sound again. "'Twas M'Gillicuddy put me up to it,
saying they would be like to deal the gentler with a wounded man. But
how came you to know?"
Here was another chance to tell him what he should be told, but the
words would not say themselves.
"I stood within arm's reach of you that night," said I; and from that I
hastened swiftly through the story of my trial as a spy and what it came
to in the morning, and never mentioned Margery's part in it at all.
"You have a bitter enemy in Frank Falconnet," was his comment, when I
had made an end of this recounting of my adventures. "He knows you are
in hiding hereabouts, and has been scouring the neighborhood well for
you--or, more belike, for both of us."
"How do you know this?" I asked.
"I have both seen and heard. This den of ours opens on the river's edge,
and, two days since, his Indians came within an ace of nabbing me. 'Twas
just at dusk, and I made out to dodge them by doubling past in the
canoe."
"But you say you have heard, as well?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Don't ask me, Jack."
I said I had no right to ask more than he chose to tell; and at this he
blurted out an oath and let me have the sharp-edged truth.
"Falconnet has an ally whose wit is shrewder than his. Can you guess who
it is?"
"No."
"'Tis this same Madge Stair you have been defending, Jack," he said,
bitterly. "It seems that Falconnet made sure we had both gone to join
the army, which was but natural. If she were less than the spiteful
little Tory vixen that she is, she would have been content to let it
rest so. But she would not let it rest so. With her own lips she assured
Falconnet he still had us to reckon with; nay, more--she made a boast of
it that we would never go so far away from her."
Weak and fever-shaken as I was, I yet made shift to get upon my elbow
feebly fierce, denouncing it hotly for a lie.
"Who slandered her like this, Dick? Put a name to the cur, and as I live
and get my strength again, I'll hunt him down and choke him with that
lie!"
"Nay," he objected soberly; "that would be my quarrel, were there ever a
peg to hang a quarrel on. But it came by a sure hand, and one that is
friendly enough to all concerned. An old free borderer, Ephraim Yeates
by name, brought me the tale. He had been spying round at Appleby
Hundred, wanting to know, for some purpose of his own, why the redcoats
and Cherokees were hanging on so long; and this much he overheard one
night when he was outlying under the window of the withdrawing-room. He
says she was in a pretty passion at the baronet's slackness, stamping
her foot at him and lashing him with the taunt that he was afeard of one
or both of us."
I fell back on the bearskins to shut my eyes and call up all the might
of love to grapple with this fresh misery. It was in this fierce
conflict of faith against apparent fact that I descried the parting of
the ways for the lover and the husband.
Jennifer believed this most incredible thing, and yet he loved
her--would go on loving her, as he had said, in spite of all. That was
the lover's road, and I could never bear him company on it. Could I
believe her so pitiless cruel as this, I made sure no husband-love could
live beyond that moment of conviction.
But at this perilous pass the husband's road ran truer than the lover's.
Richard believed her capable of this hard-hearted thing and went on
loving her blindly in spite of it. But as for me, I said I would never
give belief an inch of standing-room; that had I stood in Ephraim
Yeates's shoes, having the witness of my own eyes and ears, I would
still have found excuse and exculpation for her.
I stole a glance at Jennifer. He was sitting with his face in his hands,
a silent figure of a strong man humbled. He had called her a Delilah,
and the green withes of her binding cut sore into the flesh.
"You say you love her, Dick; can you believe her capable of this, and
yet go on loving her?" I asked.
He let me see his face. It was haggard and grief-marred.
"I'd pay the devil's own price could I say 'no' to that, Jack. But I can
not."
"Then I swear I love her better than you do, Richard Jennifer. She hates
me well--God knows she has good cause to hate me fiercely; yet I would
trust her with my life."
I looked to see him pin me down at this; and though the words had
fairly shaped and said themselves, I laid fast hold of my courage and
was prepared to make them good. But he would only smile and draw the
bearskin cover over me, tucking me in as tenderly as a mother, and
saying very gently:
"So she has bewitched you, too; and now there are two poor fools of love
instead of one. But you are stronger than I, Jack. You will break the
spell and put it down and live beyond it, and that I never shall--God
help me!" And with that, he went to his own bed beside the fire, telling
me I must lie quiet and try to sleep.
I did lie quiet, but sleep came not, nor did I woo it. For long past the
time when I could hear his measured breathing, I lay awake to plan how I
might draw the baronet's man-hunt to myself, and so free my loyal
Richard of the peril that by rights was mine.
XVII
SHOWING HOW LOVE TOOK TOLL OF FRIENDSHIP
For some few days after Jennifer's narrow escape at the entrance to our
hiding place, the Cherokees were hot upon our scent, quartering the
forest on both banks of the river, determined, as it seemed, to hunt or
starve us out.
It was in this time of siege that I came to know, as I had not known
before, the depth and tenderness of my dear lad's love for me. While the
life-tide was at its ebb and I was querulous and helpless weak, he was
my leech and nurse and heartening friend in one. And later, when the
tide was fairly turned and I had found my soldier's appetite again, he
spent many of the nights abroad and never let me guess what risks he ran
to fetch me dainties from the outer world.
In this night raiding no danger was too great to hold him back from
serving me. Once, when we were washing down our evening meal of meat and
maize cake with plain cold water, I mourned the good wine idling in its
bin at Jennifer House. At that, without a word to me, he took the whole
night for a perilous adventure and fetched a dozen bottles of the
Jennifer port to make me choke and strangle at the thought of what its
bringing had cost in toil and hazard.
Another time I spoke of English beef, saying how it would rebuild a man
at need--how it had made the English soldier what he is. Whereupon, as
before, my loving forager took a hint where none was intended; was gone
the night long, and slaughtered me some Tory yearling,--'twas Mr.
Gilbert Stair's, I mistrusted, though Dick would never name the owner,
and so I had a sirloin to my breakfast.
In these and many other ways he spent himself freely for love of me. If
he had been a younger brother of my own blood the common parentage could
not have made him tenderer.
'Twas not the mere outgushing of a nature open-armed to make a bosom
friend of all the world; nor any feminine softness on his part. If I
have drawn him thus my pen is but a clumsy quill, for he was manly-rough
and masterful, with all the native strength and vigor of the
border-born.
But on the side of love and friendship no woman ever had a truer heart,
a keener eye or a lighter hand. And in a service for friend or mistress
he would spend himself as recklessly as those old knights you read about
who made a business of their chivalry.
With his daily offerings of unselfishness to shame me, you may be sure
that I was flayed alive; self-flogged like a miserable monk, with all
the woundings of the whip well salted by remorse. As you have guessed,
I had not yet summoned up the courage to tell him how I had staked his
chance of happiness upon a casting of the die of fate--staked and lost
it. Now that it was gone, I saw how I had missed the golden opportunity;
how I had weakly hesitated when delay could only make the telling
harder.
By tacit consent we never spoke of Margery. Richard's silence hung upon
despair, I thought; and as for mine, since the husband's road and the
lover's lay so far apart, I could not bring myself to speak of her. But
she was always first in my thoughts in that time of convalescence, as I
made sure she was in his; and at the last the hidden thing between us
was brought to light.
It was on a night some three weeks or more after my fever turn. Our
larder had run low again, and Jennifer had spent the earlier hours of
the night abroad--to little purpose, as it chanced. 'Twas midnight or
thereabouts when he came swearing in to tell me that the Tories were out
again to harry our side of the river afresh, and to make a refugee's
begging of a bag of meal a thing of peril.
"They'll starve us out in shortest measure at this rate," he prophesied.
"They have trampled down all the standing corn for miles around, and
this morning they burned the mill. 'Tis our notice to quit, and we'd
best take it. There has been fighting to the south of us--a plenty of
it--at Rocky Mount and Hanging Rock, and elsewhere, and every man is
needed. If you are strong enough to stand the march, we'll run the
gantlet down the river in the pirogue and cut across from the lower ford
to join Major Davie or Mr. Gates."
I said I was fit enough, and would do whatever he thought best. And then
I took a step upon the forbidden ground.
"Falconnet is still at Appleby Hundred?" I said.
He nodded.
"And you will join the army at the front and leave Margery to his tender
mercies?"
His laugh was bitter; so bitter that I scarce knew it for Richard
Jennifer's.
"Mistress Margery Stair is well, and well content, as I told you once
before. She has no wish for you or me, unless it be to see us well
hanged."
"Nay, Richard; you judge her over-harshly. I fear you do not love her as
her lover should."
"Say you so? Listen: to-night I got as far as the manor house, being
fool enough to risk my neck for another sight of her. God help me, Jack!
I had it. They have scraped together all the Tory riff-raff this side of
the river--Falconnet and the others--and are holding high revel at
Appleby. Since it is still our true-blue borderland, they are scant
enough of women of their own kidney, and I saw Madge dancing like any
light o' love with every jackanapes that offered."
"In her father's house she could not well do less," I averred, cut to
the heart, as he was, and yet without his younger lover's jealousy to
make me unjust.
"Or more," he added, savagely. "'Tis as I say; she lacks nothing we can
give her, and we'd as well be off about our business."
I think he never had it in his heart to leave her in any threat of
danger. But from his point of view there was no danger threatening her
save that which she seemed willing enough to rush upon--a life of titled
misery as Lady Falconnet. I saw how he would see it; saw, too, that his
was the saner summing of it up. And yet--
He broke into my musings with a pointed question. "What say you, Jack?
'Tis but a little whiffet of a Tory jade who cares not the snap of her
finger for either of us. The night is fine and dark. Shall we float the
canoe and give them all the slip?"
This was how it came to turn upon a "yes" or "no" of mine. I hesitated,
I know not why. In the little pause the fire burned low between us, and
the shadows deepened in the burrow cavern until they strangled the eye
as mephitic vapors scant a man of breath. The silence, too, was
stifling. There was no sound to breach it save the gurgling murmur of
the river, and this was subdued and intermittent like the death-rattle
in the throat of the dying.
I've always made a scoff of superstition, and yet, my dears, a thousand
questions in this life of ours must hang answerless to the crack of doom
if you deny it standing-room. I knew no more than I have set down here
of Margery's besetment; nay, I had every reason Richard Jennifer had to
believe that she was well and well content, lacking nothing, save,
mayhap, the freedom to marry where she chose.
And yet, out of the stifling silence there came a sudden cry for help; a
cry voiceless to the outward ear, but sharp and piercing to that finer
inward sense; a cry so real that I would start and listen, marveling
that Jennifer made no sign of having heard it.
In the harkening instant there was a faint twang like the thrumming of a
distant harp string, and then the grave-like silence was rent smartly by
the whistling hiss of an arrow, the shaft passing evenly between us and
scattering the handful of fire where it struck.
Jennifer came alive with a start, leaping up with a malediction between
his teeth upon our dallying.
"Too late, by God!" he cried. "They've trapped us like a pair of blind
moles!" And with that he caught up the ancient broadsword, only to swear
again when he found no room to swing it in.
Having the handier weapon, I slipped out before him, creeping on hands
and knees till I could see the leafy screen at the den's mouth, and the
shimmering reflection of the stars upon the water beyond it. There was
no sight nor sound of any enemy, and the canoe lay safe as Jennifer had
left it.
To make assurance sure, I would have scrambled to the bank above; but
at the moment Jennifer hallooed softly to me, and so I crept back into
the burrow.
"See here," he said, excitedly. "What a devil will you make of this?"
He had drawn the scattered embers together, fanning them ablaze again,
and had sought and found the arrow. It was a blunt-head reed and no war
shaft. And around the middle of it, tightly wrapped and tied with silken
threads, was a little scroll of parchment.
"'Tis the Catawba's arrow," said Jennifer, though how he knew I could
not guess; and then he cut the threads to free the scroll.
Unrolled and spread at large, the parchment proved to be that map of
Captain Stuart's that I had found and lost again. And on the margin of
it was my note to Jennifer, written in that trying moment when the
bribed sentry waited at the door and my sweet lady stood trembling
beside me, murmuring her "Holy Marys."
"Read it," said I. "It explains itself. Tarleton had laid me by the
heels to wait for the hangman, and I would have passed the word about
the Indian-arming on to you. But my messenger was overhauled, and--"
"Yes, yes," he broke in; "I've spelled it out. But this line added at
the bottom--surely, that is never your crabbed fist. By heaven! 'tis in
Madge's hand!"
He knelt to hold it closer to the flickering firelight, and we
deciphered it together. It was but a line, as he had said, with neither
greeting nor leave-taking, address nor signature.
"If this should come into the hands of any true-hearted gentleman"--here
was a blot as if the pen had slipped from the fingers holding it; and
then, in French, the very wording of the inarticulate cry that had come
to me out of the darkness and silence: "_A moi! pour l'amour de Dieu!_"
We fell apart, each to his own side of the handful of embers.
"You make it out?" said I, after a moment of strained silence.
He nodded. "She has prattled the parlez-vous to me ever since we were
boy and maid together."
A full minute more of the threatening silence, and at the end of it we
were glaring at each other like two wild creatures crouching for the
spring.
It was Jennifer who spoke first. "'Twas meant for me," he said; and his
voice had the warning of a mastiff's growl in it.
"No!" said I, curtly.
"I say it was!"
"Then you say the thing which is not."
Had I been Richard Jennifer, I know not what bitter reproach I should
have found to hurl at the man who had thrice owed his life to me. But he
said no word of what had gone before.
"You may give me the lie, if you like, John Ireton; I shall not strike
you." He said it slowly, but his face was gray with anger. Then he
added, hotly: "You know well that word was meant for me!"
At this--God forgive me!--my jealous wrath broke bounds and I cursed him
for a beardless coxcomb who must needs think he stood alone in the eye
of every woman he should meet. "She needs a man!" I raged, lost now to
every sense of decent justice, "a man, I say! And to whom would she send
if not to her--"
I choked upon the word. He had risen with me, and we stood face to face
in that grim earth-womb, snarling fiercely at each other across the
narrow firelit space; two men with every tie to knit us close together,
and yet--God save us all!--a pair of wild beasts strung up to the
killing pitch because, forsooth, we must needs front each other across a
deadline drawn by the finger of a woman!