The Master of Appleby Part 24

Of the down-stream flitting through the small hours of the warm midsummer night there is no sharp-etched picture on the memory page. As I recall it, no spoken word of Jennifer's or mine came in to break the rhythm of the hasting voyage. Our paddles rose and fell, dipping and sweeping in unison as if we two, kneeling in bow and stern, were separate halves of some relentless mechanism driven by a single impulse.

Overhead the starlit dome circled solemnly to the right or left to match the windings of the stream. On each hand the tree-fringed sh.o.r.es sped backward in the gloom; and beneath the light sh.e.l.l of poplar wood that barely kissed the ripples in pa.s.sing, the river lapped and gurgled, chuckling weirdly at the paddle plungings, and swirling aft in the longer reaches to point at us down the lengthening wake with a wavering finger silver-tipped in the wan starlight.

With the canoe safely hidden at the landing place, which was some little distance from that oak grove where I had twice kept tryst with death, we set out for the manor house, skulking Indian fashion through the wood; and, when we reached the in-fields, looking momently to come upon a sentry.

Thinking the approaches from the road and river would be better guarded than that from the wood, we skirted a widespread thicket tangle, spared by my father twenty years before to be a grouse and pheasant cover, and fetching a compa.s.s of half a mile or more across the maize fields, came in among the oaks and hickories of the manor grounds.

Still there was no sight nor sound of any enemy; no light of candles at the house, or of camp-fires beneath the trees.

A little way within the grove, where the interlacing tree-tops made the darkness like Egyptian night, Jennifer went on all fours to feel around as if in search of something on the sward. Whereat I called softly to know what he would be at.

He rose, muttering, half as to himself: "I thought I'd never be so far out of reckoning." Then to me: "A few hours since, the Cherokees were encamped just here. You are standing in the ashes of their fire."

"So?" said I. "Then they have gone?"

"Gone from this safely enough, to be sure. They have been gone some hours; the cinders are cold and dew wet."

"So much the better," I would say, thinking only that now there would be the fewer enemies to fight.

He clipt my arm suddenly, putting the value of an oath into his gripping of it.

"Come awake, man; this is no time to be a-daze!" His whisper was a sharp behest, with a shake of the gripped arm for emphasis. "If the Indians are gone, it means that the powder train has come and gone, too."

"Well?" said I.

I was still thinking, with less than a clod's wit, that this would send the baronet captain about his master's business, and so Margery would have surcease of him for a time, at least. But Jennifer fetched me awake with another whip-lash word or two.

"Jack! has the night's work gone to your head? If Falconnet has got his marching orders you may be sure he's tried by hook or crook to play 'safe bind, safe find,' with Madge. By heaven! 'twas that she was afeard of, and we are here too late! Come on!"

With that he faced about and ran; and forgetting to loose his grip on my arm, took me with him till I broke away to have my sword hand free. So running, we came presently to the open s.p.a.ce before the house, and, truly, it was well for us that the place was clean deserted; for by this we had both forgot the very name of prudence.

Jennifer outran me to the door by half a length, and fell to hammering fiercely on the panel with the pommel of his broadsword.

"Open! Mr. Stair; open!" he shouted, between the batterings; but it was five full minutes before the fan-light overhead began to show some faint glimmerings of a candle coming from the rooms beyond.

Richard rested at that, and in the pause a thin voice shrilled from within.

"Be off, you runagates! Off, I say! or I fire upon ye through the door!"

Giving no heed to the threat, d.i.c.k set up his clamor again, calling out his name, and bidding the old man open to a friend. In some notching of the hubbub I heard the unmistakable click of a gun-flint on steel. There was barely time to trip my reckless batterer and to fall flat with him on the door-stone when a gun went off within, and a handful of slugs, breaching the oaken panel at the height of a man's middle, went screeching over us.

Before I knew what he would be at, Richard was up with an oath, backing off to hurl himself, shoulder on, against the door. It gave with a splintering crash, letting him in headlong. I followed less hastily. It was as black as a setter's mouth within, the gun fire having snuffed the old man's candle out. But we had flint and steel and tinder-box, and when the punk was alight, Jennifer found the candle under foot and gave it me. It took fire with a fizzing like a rocket fuse, and was well blackened with gunpowder. When the flint had failed to bring the firing spark, the old man had set his piece off with the candle flame.

We found him in the nook made by the turn of the stair, flung thither, as it seemed, by the recoil of the great bell-mouthed blunderbuss which he was still clutching. The fall had partly stunned him, but he was alive enough to protest feebly that he would take a dozen oaths upon his loyalty to the cause; that he had mistook us for some thieving marauders of the other side; craftily leaving cause and party without a name till he should have his cue from us.

Whereupon Richard loosed his neckcloth to give him better breathing s.p.a.ce, and bidding me see if the revelers had left a heel-tap of wine in any bottle nearer than the wine cellar, lifted the old man and propped him in the corner of the high-backed hall settle.

The wine quest led me to the banqueting-room. Here disorder reigned supreme. The table stood as the roisterers had left it; the very wreck and litter of a baccha.n.a.lian feast. Bottles, some with the necks struck off, were scattered all about, and the floor was stained and sticky with spilt wine and well sanded with shattered gla.s.s.

I found a remnant draining in one of the broken bottles, and a cup to pour it in; and with this salvage from the wreck returned to Jennifer and his charge. The old man had come to some better sensing of things,--he had been vastly more frightened than hurt, as I suspected,--and to Richard's eager questionings was able to give some feebly querulous replies.

"Yes, they're gone--all gone, curse 'em; and they've taken every plack and bawbee they could lay their thieving hands upon," he mumbled. "'Tis like the dogs; to stay on here and eat and drink me out of house and home, and then to scurry off when I'm most like to need protection."

"But Madge?" says Richard. "Is she safe in bed?"

"She's a jade!" was all the answer he got. Then the old man sat up and peered around the end of the settle to where I stood, cup and bottle in hand. "'Tis a Christian thought," he quavered. "Give me a sup of the wine, man."

I served him and had a Scottish blessing for my wastefulness, because, forsooth, the broken bottle spilt a thimbleful in the pouring. I saw he did not recognize me, and was well enough content to let it rest thus.

Richard suffered him to drink in peace, but when the cup was empty he renewed his asking for Margery. At this the master of the house, heartened somewhat by my father's good madeira, made shift to get upon his feet in some tremulous fashion.

"Madge, d'ye say? She's gone; gone where neither you nor that dour-faced deevil that befooled us all will find her soon, I promise you, d.i.c.kie Jennifer!" he snapped; and I gave them my back and stumbled blindly to the door, making sure his next word would tell my poor wronged lad all that he should have learned from never any other lips but mine own. But Richard himself parried the impending stroke of truth, saying:

"So she is safe and well, Mr. Stair, 'tis all I ask to know."

"She is safe enough; safer by far than you are at this minute, my young c.o.c.k-a-hoop rebel, now that the king--G.o.d save him!--has his own again."

I turned quickly on the broad door-stone to look within. Out of doors the early August dawn was graying mistily overhead, but in the house the sputtering tallow dip still struggled feebly with the gloom. They stood facing each other, these two, my handsome lad, the pick and choice of a comely race, looking, for all his toils and vigils, fresh and fit; and the old man in his woolen dressing-gown, his wig awry, and his lean face yellow in the candle-light.

"How is that you say, Mr. Stair?" says d.i.c.k. "The king--but that is only the old Tory cry. There will never be a king again this side of the water."

The old man reached out and hooked a lean finger in the lad's b.u.t.tonhole. "Say you so, Richard Jennifer? Then you will never have heard the glorious news?" This with a leer that might have been of triumph or the mere whetting of gossip eagerness--I could not tell.

"No," says Richard, with much indifference.

"Hear it, then. 'Twas at Camden, four days since. They came together in the murk of the Wednesday morning, my Lord Cornwallis and that poor fool Gates. De Kalb is dead; your blethering Irishman, Rutherford, is captured; and your rag-tag rebel army is scattered to the four winds.

And that's not all. On the Friday, Colonel Tarleton came up with Sumter at Fishing Creek and caught him napping. Whereupon, Charlie McDowell and the over-mountain men, seeing all was lost, broke their camp on the Broad and took to their heels, every man jack of them for himself. So ye see, d.i.c.kie Jennifer, there's never a cursed corporal's guard left in either Carolina to stand in the king's way."

He rattled all this off glibly, like a child repeating some lesson got by heart; but when I would have found a grain of comfort in the hope that it was a farrago of Falconnet's lies, Jennifer made the truth appear in answer to a curt question.

"'Tis beyond doubt?--all this, Mr. Stair?"

The old loyalist--loyalist now, if never certainly before--sat down on the settle and laughed; a dry wizened cackle of a laugh that sounded like the crumpling of new parchment.

"You'd best be off, light foot and tight foot, Master Richard, lest you learn shrewdly for yourself. 'Tis in everybody's mouth by this. There were some five-and-forty of the king's friends come together here no longer ago than yestere'en to drink his Majesty's health, and eh, man!

but it will cost me a pretty penny! Will that satisfy ye?"

"Yes," said Jennifer, thinking, mayhap, as I did, that nothing short of gospel-true news would have sufficed to unlock this poor old miser's wine cellar.

"Well, then; you'd best be off while you may; d'ye hear? I bear ye no ill-will, Richard Jennifer; and if Mr. Tarleton lays hold of you, you'll hang higher than Haman for evading your parole, I promise you. We'll say naught about this rape of the door-lock, though 'tis actionable, sir, and I'll warn you the law would make you smart finely for it. But we'll enter a _nolle prosequi_ on that till you're amnestied and back, then you can pay me the damage of the broken lock and we'll cry quits."

At this my straightforward Richard snorted in wrathful derision. However much he loved the daughter, 'twas clear he had small regard for the father.

"Seeing we came to do you a service, Mr. Stair, I think we may set the blunderbuss and the handful of slugs over against the smashed door. And that fetches me back to our errand here. You say Madge is safe. Does that mean that you have spirited her away since last night?"

"Dinna fash yoursel' about Madge, Richard Jennifer. She's meat for your betters, sir!" rasped the old man, lapsing into the mother tongue, as he did now and then in fear or anger.

"Still I would know what you mean when you say she is safe," says Richard, whose determination to crack a nut was always proportioned to the hardness of the sh.e.l.l.