few hundred pounds, more or less--sterling, man, sterling; not Scots,"
he added hastily. And then, as if it were best to leave this nail as it
was driven, he changed the subject abruptly. "I've brought ye that last
will and testament ye signed," handing me the parchment. "No doubt
you'll let it stand; but when the bairns come, ye'll want to be adding a
codicil or two."
Leaving the matter of the estate, I thought it high time to cut to the
marrow of the bigger bone. So I said: "Let us be frank with each other
in this, Mr. Stair. How much has your daughter told you of the matter
between us?"
"She's a jade!" he rasped, lapsing for a moment into his real self. But
he recovered his self-control instantly. "Ye'd no expect a romantic bit
lassie wi' French blood in her veins to be confidencing wi' her old
dried-up wisp of a father, now, would ye? She's no tell't me everything,
I daresay."
"Then I will tell you the plain truth of it," I said. "This marriage was
never anything more than the form we all agreed it should be at the
time; a makeshift to serve a purpose. If you think I would hold your
daughter to it--"
"Hut, tut, man! what will ye be havering about! Ye'll never cast the
poor bit lassie off that way! Ye canna, if ye would; her Church will
have a word to say to that."
For all his aping the manner of the ignored father, I shrewdly suspected
that he knew more about the ins and outs of our affair than he owned to.
Nevertheless, I was forced to meet him on his own ground.
"There is no 'casting off' about it, Mr. Stair; and as to the Church,
there is good ground for an appeal to Rome. The marriage as it stands
is little more than a formal betrothal, as you well know, sound enough
legally to make Mistress Margery my heir-at-law, mayhap, but still
lacking everything of--"
He could not wait to let me finish.
"Lacking, d'ye say?" he rapped out, wrathfully. "And whose fault is
that, ye cold-blooded stick? Tell me this; did I no bundle ye neck and
heels into your own wife's bed-room? And how do you thank me? I'm to
suppose ye quarrel wi' her like the dour-faced imp o' Sawtan that ye
are, and presently ye come raging out, swearing most shamefully at a man
old enough to be your father!"
'Twas far enough in the retrospect now so that I could smile at it. Yet
I would not suffer him to bluster me aside.
"It was an ill thing for you to do, none the less, Mr. Stair; the more
as you must have known that Mistress Margery's faith was plighted to
Richard Jennifer long before all this came to pass."
"Did I know it?" he shrilled. "That lang-legged jackanapes of a Dickie
Jennifer? Light o' love jade that she is, she never cared the snap of a
finger for him."
"You are talking far enough beside the mark now," I retorted. "Your
daughter loves Richard Jennifer well and truly; and with this
entanglement brushed aside she will marry him when he comes back from
the wars."
"She will, ye say? And what will become o' the braw acres of Appleby
that gait, I'd like to know? But ye're daft, man; clean daft. Didn't I
speir her giving him his quittance once for all that night when he rode
away after they had pitten ye to bed? She tell't him flat she loved
another man."
"Another man?" I echoed. "I--explain yourself, if you please, Mr. Stair.
What other man--"
He was at the door by this, and he broke out upon me in such a blast of
cursing as I hope never to hear from the lips of such an old man again.
"Ye cold-blooded, crusty devil!" he quavered, when all his breath was
spent upon the bigger malisons. "Has it never come intil your thick
numbskull that the poor fule lassie is sick wi' love for ye, ye
dour-faced loon?"
And with that he let himself out and slammed the door behind him, and I
heard him go pottering down the corridor, still cursing me by all the
choice phrases he could lay tongue to.
LII
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE JOURNEY'S END
I may confess to you, my dears, that Mr. Gilbert Stair's parting tirade
did not move me greatly, since I would set down everything he had said
to the one account--the miser's.
Yet when I came to second thoughts upon it, this account balanced but
indifferently. Why should he be so eager to make me think small of
Margery's love for Richard Jennifer? And why, misliking me, as I made
sure he did, should he be so hot to make the shadow marriage a thing of
substance? From the miser-father's point of view, Richard, with his
goodly heritage of Jennifer House, was a match to be angled for; yet
here was the man in whose eye house and lands loomed largest flying into
rage because I sought to put his daughter in the way of marrying them.
I was pondering thoughtfully on this, giving the pinching old man credit
for any and every motive save that which he had so cursingly avowed, to
wit, the furthering of his daughter's happiness, when there came a tap
at the door and Mistress Margery entered.
"Dear heart! Do they limit you to a single candle when my back is
turned?" she said, in mock pity; and saying it, went to light the
candles in the mantel sconces.
The sight of her standing a-tiptoe to touch off the candles on the
chimney breast set the old lovespell at work to make my heart beat
faster. What if there were a hint of truth in Gilbert Stair's wrathful
protest? What if, after all, she cared less for Richard and more for me?
Do not, I pray you, my dears, think too hardly of the man who thus lays
bare the secret thoughts of his heart for you. 'Twas but a passing gust
of the tempest of disloyalty, and I was not swept wholly from my
moorings. Nay, when she came to sit on the hassock at my feet, as she
used to do in that other halcyon-time of convalescence, I was myself
again and could look upon her sweet face with eyes that saw beyond her
to the camp or battle-field where my dear lad was spending himself.
For a time we sat in silence, and 'twas she who spoke first.
"My father has been with you," she said. "I hope you did not quarrel
with him."
"No," I denied, salving my conscience with the remembering that it takes
two to make a quarrel; and I had done none of the cursing. "He came to
give me this," I added, handing her the will.
She opened the folded parchment, reading a line of it here and there
softly to herself.
--"'Being of sound mind, doth bequeath and devise to his loving wife,
Margery--' Ah, had you been writing it you would not have written it so,
would you, Monsieur John?"
"'Tis but a form," I would say. "All wives are 'loving' in lawyers'
speech."
She smiled up at me so like an innocent and fearless child that for the
moment I could figure her no otherwise. Yet her rejoinder was a woman's.
"I say you would not have written it so; is not that the truth?"
I would not let her pin me down.
"If I should write it now, it should be written in great letters, dear
lady. Though it is but a form, though that which followed was but
another form, you have not failed in any wifely duty, Mistress Margery."
"Not once?"
"No, not once. Three times you have done what the lovingest wife could
do to save a husband's life; and I do greatly suspect there was a fourth
and earlier time. Tell me, little one; was it not you who sent the
Indian to Captain Forney to tell him a patriot spy was to be executed at
day-dawn in the oak glade?"
She would not answer me direct.
"'Twas I who brought you to that pass," she said, speaking soft and low.
"But for my riding down upon you one other morning in that same oak
glade, you would not have had Sir Francis Falconnet's sword in your
shoulder. And but for that sword wound, nothing that followed would have
followed."
Saying this she fell silent for a space, and when she spoke again she
was become by some subtle transmutation my trusting little maid of the
by-gone halcyon-time.
"Do you remember how you used to make a comrade of me in the old days,
Monsieur John, telling me things my elder brother might have told me,
had I had one?"
I said I remembered; that I was not likely to forget.
"Are you strong enough to stand in that elder brother's place again
to-night?"
"Try me and see, dear lady."
"Not whilst you say 'dear lady,'" she pouted. "'Twas 'Margery' and
'Monsieur John' a year agone."
"Have it as you will; I will even call you 'Madge' if it pleases you
better."
"No," she said; "that is Dick's name for me; and--and it is of Dick that
I would speak. You love him well, do you not, Monsieur John?"
I said I could never make her, or any woman, fully understand the bond
there was between us.
"Truly?" There was the merest flavor of playful sarcasm in the uptilt of
the word, but it was gone when she went on.
"Being so good a friend to Dick, then, you can advise me the better.
Tell me, if you please, must I marry him--when--"
"When you are free to do it?" I finished for her. "Why should you not,
my dear?"
She was pulling the threads from the lace edging of her kerchief and
would not for a king's ransom let her eyes meet mine.
"You used to say--in that other time--that love should go before a
marriage; did you not? Or do I remember badly?"
"You remember well. I said it then, and I say it again at this present.
But Dick loves you well and truly, sweetheart; and you--"
She looked up quickly with the little laugh that used to mind me of
happy children at play.
"And I?--now you will read a woman's heart for me, Monsieur John. Tell
me; do I love him as his mistress should?"
"Nay, surely," said I, gravely, for somehow her laugh jarred upon me,
"surely that is for you to say. But you have said it, long since."
"Have I?" she queried, with an arch lifting of the penciled brows that
came straight from her French mother. "Mayhap you overheard me say it,
Monsieur Eavesdropper?"
"God help me, little one--so I did," said I.
All in a flash her laughing mood was gone and she stood before me like
an accusing goddess.
"You told me once the past was like a dream to you; you must have
dreamed that part of it, sir. And yet you said a little while ago that
I had not failed in any wifely duty!"
"The time and circumstance were their own best excuse. Sure I am far
from blaming you, my dear. But let it pass, 'tis enough that I know you
love him as he loves you."
Again her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye. She sank down upon
the hassock, laughing merrily.
"O wise Monsieur John! how well you read a woman's heart! 'Tis you
should be the lover, instead of Dick. He rides a-courting as he would
charge a legion on a battle-field. But nothing would ever tempt you to
be so masterful rough, would it, Monsieur John? You would look deep into
your sweetheart's eyes and say--Tell me what you would say, _mon ami_?"
Ah, my dears, I hope no one of you will ever be tempted as I was tempted
then. I forgot my dear lad, forgot honor, forgot everything save that I
had leave to tell her how I had loved her from the first; how I should
go on loving her to the end. So for a moment I hung trembling on the
brink; and then she pushed me over.
"Is this how you would do, Monsieur--Monsieur Ogre?--sit stock still and
glower at the poor thing as if you were between two minds as to loving
her or eating her?"
I bent quickly, took her face between my hands and kissed her
twice--thrice.
"That is what I should do. Now that you have made me what I was not
before, are you satisfied?"
'Twas long before she gave me a word. And when she spoke it was only to
say: "Are you not most monstrous ashamed, Monsieur John?"
"No!" said I. "I am but a man, and you have roused that part of me that
knows neither shame nor remorse. I love you, Mistress Margery; do you
hear? I have loved you since that day in June when I came back from
death's door to find you sitting here to bear me company."
She locked her fingers across her knee and would not look at me.
"But by your own showing you should be ashamed, sir," she insisted.
"What of the dear friend to whom you would give up even the love of your
mistress?"
"You may flay me as you will; I shall neither flinch nor go back from my
word. You are mine, and I shall give you up to no man. I know I have not
your love--shall never have it. Also, I know that I have gained an enemy
where once I had a loving friend. Richard Jennifer may kill me if he
please--he shall have the chance to do it; but you are mine and shall be
whilst I live to claim and hold you."
There was something less than anger in the blue-gray eyes when she let
me see them; nay, I could have sworn there was a flash of playful
mockery in them when she said: "Dear heart! how masterful rough you
have grown, all in a moment, my Lord." And then the beautiful eyes
filled and she said, "Poor Dick!" in a way to make me suffer all the
torments of that old myth-king who could never quaff the water that was
ever rising to his lips.
"Aye, you may love him, if you must and will," I gloomed. "God pity me!
I know you do love him."
She looked up quickly. "So you have said a dozen times before. Tell me,
Monsieur Oracle, how do you know it?"
"If I tell you, you will hate me more than you do now."
"That would be hard, indeed," she murmured. "Yet I would hear you say
it."
"Listen, then: once, when we three were at the very door and threshold
of death, you wrote the cry of your heart out on a bit of paper for a
leave-taking and sent it to the man you loved. You said, 'Though you
must needs believe my love is pledged to your dear friend and mine, 'tis
yours, and yours alone.' Were not these your very words?"
Her "yes" was but the lightest whisper, but I heard it and went on.
"That is all, save this; the Indian bearer of your letter blundered and
gave it me instead of Dick."
She looked me full in the eyes and my soul went all afire. Then she laid
her cheek against my knee and I heard her dear voice as it had been a
chime of sweet-toned joy-bells:
"Ah, Monsieur John; how blind this thing called love can make us all.
Suppose--suppose the Indian did not blunder, dear lord and master of
me?"