The Master of Appleby Part 54

For a moment I thought they would hew me limb from limb, but my Lord quelled the fierce outburst with a word.

"Put up your swords, gentlemen. We shall know how to deal with this traitor," he said. And then to me: "Go on, sir, if you please; there has been a battle, as I take it?"

"There has, indeed. The mountain men came up with us in the afternoon of the Sat.u.r.day. In an hour one-third of the major's force was dead or dying, the major himself was slain, and every living man left on the field was a prisoner."

Again a dozen swords hissed from their scabbards, and again I heard the little cry of misery from the table-foot. I bowed my head, looking momently to pay the penalty; but once more my Lord put the swords aside.

"Let us have a clean breast of it this time, Captain Ireton," he said.

"You know well what you have earned, and nothing you can say will make it better or worse for you. Was this your purpose in making your submission to me?"

"It was."

"And you have been a rebel from the first?"

I met the cold anger in the womanish eyes as a condemned man might.

"I have, my Lord--since the day nine years agone when I learned that your king's minions had hanged my father in the Regulation."

"Then it was a farrago of lies you told me about your adventures in the western mountains?"

"Not wholly. It was your Lordship's good pleasure to send succors of powder and lead to your allies, the western savages. I and three others followed Captain Falconnet and his Indians, and I have the honor to report that we overtook and exploded them with their own powder cargo."

"And Captain Sir Francis Falconnet with them?"

"I do so hope and trust, my Lord."

He turned short on his heel, and for a moment a silence as of death fell upon the room. Then he took the Ferara from the table and sought to break it over his knee; but the good blade, like the cause it stood for, bent like a withe and would not snap.

"Put this spy in irons and clear the room," he ordered sharply. And this is how the little drama ended: with the supper guests crowding to the door; with my Lord pacing back and forth at the table-head; with two sergeants bearing me away to await, where and how I knew not, the word which should efface me.

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 hobn.o.bbing 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: "Grat.i.tude does not seem to be amongst your gifts."

At this I broke out in all a sick man's pettishness.

"Grat.i.tude! 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 G.o.d'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.

"G.o.d 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."