Cardigan

"What score?" I asked, smiling. "Cannot you appeal to the law to have it settled?"

"La loi permet souvent ce que défend l'honneur," she said, with an innocent emphasis which left me sitting there, uncertain whether to laugh or blush. What the mischief did she mean, anyhow?

She picked up a filbert, tasted the kernel, dropped it, clasped her hands, elbows on the cloth, and gave me a malicious sidelong glance which still was full of that strange sweetness that ever set me on my guard, half angry, half bewitched.

"I wish you would let me alone!" I blurted out, like a country yokel at a quilting.

"I won't," she said.

"Remember what you suffered the first time!" I warned her.

"I do remember."

"Do you – do you dare risk that?" I stammered.

"Et d'avantage – encore," she murmured, setting her teeth on her plump white wrist and watching me uncertainly.

The game was running on too fast for me and my pulse was keeping pace.

"Safely they defy who challenge those in chains," I said, commanding my voice with an effort. "If that is your revenge, I cry you mercy; you have won."

After a long silence she raised her eyes, dancing with a mocking light in each starry pupil.

"I give you joy, Michael," she said, "if, as I take it, these same chains and fetters that you lately wear are riveted by Cupid."

But I answered nothing, attending her to the door, where she dropped me what I do believe was the slowest and lowest curtsey ever dropped by woman.

So I to my own chamber in no amiable frame of mind, and still tingling with the strange charm of my encounter. Head bent, hands clasped behind me, I walked the floor, striving to analyze this woman who had now twice crossed me on the trail of fate, this fair woman whose bright eyes were a menace and a challenge, and whose sweet, curved mouth was set there as eternal provocation to saint and sinner.

Thus for the first time in my life I had known what temptation might have been. Nay, I knew a little more than what it might have been, and, in the overwhelming flood of loyalty to Silver Heels, I cursed myself for a man without faith or shred of honour. For I was too unskilled in combats with the fair temptation to understand that it is no disgrace to falter, yet not fall.

There came a timid scratching at the door; I opened it and Mount sidled in, coy as a cat in a dairy with its chin still wet with cream. He regarded me doubtfully, but sat down when bidden and began to complain:

"Now, if you are minded to chide me for taking the road, I'm going out again. I can't bear any more, lad, that I can't! – what with Cade gone and me in rags, and stopping Councillor Bullock near Johnstown with pockets bare of aught but a cursed sixpence and that crooked as Lady Shelton's legs – and now I must needs fright a lady into a faint like a bad boy with a jack-o'-lanthorn – "

"What on earth is the matter with you?" I broke in, peevishly. "I'm not finding fault, Jack. If you mean to spend your life in endeavours to impoverish every Tory magistrate in America, it's your affair, and I can't help it, though you must know as well as I that there's a carpenter's tree and a rope at the end of your frolic."

"No, there isn't," he said, hastily. "I'm done with the highway save to pat it smooth with my feet. Lord, lad, it's not for the money, but for sport. And soon there'll be fighting enough to fill my stomach; mark me, the crocus that buds white this spring will wither red as blood ere its fouled petals fall!"

"War?" I asked, thrilling to hear him.

He rose and gazed at me most earnestly.

"Ay, surely, surely in the spring. Gad! Boston is that surfeited with redcoats now that when they cram down more next spring she can but throw them up to keep her health. Wait! Boston is sick in bone and body, but in the spring she takes her purge. Oh, I know," he cried, with a strange, prophetic stare in his eyes; "I have word from Shemuel. Now he's off to Boston with the news from Cresap. And I tell you, lad, that the first half-moon of April will start a devil loose in this broad land that state or clergy cannot exorcise!

"Not a devil," he corrected himself, slowly, "no, not a thing from hell, but that same swift angel sent to chasten worlds with fire. Dunmore will burn, and Butler. As for the rest, the honest, the rascals, the witless, the soulless, thieves, poltroons, usurers, and the vast army of well-meaning loyal fools, they will be cleared out o' this our world-wide temple whose roof is the sky and whose pillars are our high pines! – cleared out, scoured out, uprooted, driven forth like those same money-changers in the temple scourged by Christ, – and God is witness I, a sinner, mean no blasphemy, spite of all the sweating load o' guilt I bear."

"Where got you such phrases, Jack?" I asked. "It is not Jack Mount who speaks to me like a crazed preacher in the South who shouts the slaves around him to repent."

Mount looked at me; the dazed, fanatic light in his eyes faded slowly.

"I have a book here," he muttered, "a book I purchased in Johnstown of a man who sold many to patriots. Doubtless grief for Cade and my privations and my conning this same book while starving make me light-headed yet."

"What book is that?" I asked.

"The Rights of Man."

"I, also, would be glad to read it."

"Read, lad. 'Tis fodder for King George's cattle – such as we. And the little calves our wenches cast, they, too, shall feed on it, though they cannot utter moo! for their own mothers' milk!"

"Jack, Jack," I cried, "you are strangely changed! I do not know you in this bitter mood, and your mouth full o' words that burn your silly lips. Wake to life, man! Gay! Gay! Jack! A pest on books and those who write 'em! I have ever despised your printed stuff, and damme if I'll sit and hear it through your lips!"

But it was like rousing a man from a sleeping-draught, for the book had so bewitched his senses in these long weeks he had wandered alone that I had all I could do to drag him out of his strange, dreamy enthusiasms, back into his old, guileless, sunny, open-hearted self. And I feel sure that I could not have succeeded at all had not the shock of his encounter with Mrs. Hamilton on the highway first scared him back to partial common-sense. Added to this my entreaties, and he became docile, and then, little by little, dropped his preacher's mad harangue to talk like a reasonable creature and wag his tongue unlarded with his garbled metaphors and his half-baked parables which no doubt no simple forest-runner could digest on the raw printed page. I pitied him sincerely. Truly, a little learning makes one wondrous kind.

I put the book in my shirt-front, meaning to be of those who ride and read, even as Jack was of those others who both read and run.

"Why did you desert me, Jack?" I asked, sitting chin on hand to watch him smoke the pipe which no kind fate had filled for him since he left Johnstown.

"Faith, I hung about with Cade, doing no harm, sitting in the sun to wait for news from you. Mr. Duncan, a kind officer, gave us news and made us welcome on the benches in front of the guard-house. And Mistress Warren would have us to eat with her – only I was ashamed. But Cade went and supped with her.

"Lad, Sir John Johnson is not a gentleman I should grow too fond of. His courtesy is a shallow spring, I'm thinking, dry at the first taste, and over-sour to suit my teeth."

"What did Sir John do?" I asked, growing red. "Surely he thanked you and Cade for saving his kinsman's life; surely he made you welcome at the Hall, Jack?"

"Surely, he did nothing of the kind," grunted Mount, puffing his pipe. "Sir John sent word to the guard that we had best find quarters in Johnstown taverns and not set the hounds barking in his kennels."

It was like a blow in the face to me. Jack saw it and laughed.

"It's not your fault," he said; "show me two eggs and I'll name two birds, but I won't swear they'll fight alike. If he's your kin, it's to be borne, lad, and that's all there is to it."

I set my teeth and swallowed my shame.

"So we went to Rideup's old camp," he continued; "a fair inn where a man may drink to whom he pleases and no questions asked nor any yokel to bawl 'God save the King!' or turn your ale sour with Tory whining. And there I lay and – tippled, lad. I'll not deny it, no! Like a fish in sweet water my gills did open and shut while the ale flowed into me, day and night perdu.

"Cade never drank. God! how that man changed – since he saw your sweet Mistress Warren there on the hillock at Roanoke Plain! Mad, lad, quite mad. But such a dear, good comrade – I – I can scarce speak o' him but I wink with tears."

The great fellow dug one fist into his eyes, and then the other, replacing his pipe in his mouth with an unmistakable snivel.

"Quite mad, Mr. Cardigan. He thought he saw his little daughter in Miss Warren, without offence to any one in all the world and least of all to you, and he waited all day to see her come out to the guard-house and give the news of your sick-bed to your Lieutenant Duncan. So one day, when you were surely out of danger and ready to fatten, comes Cade to the tavern and bids me good-bye, talking wildly of his lost daughter, and I, Heaven help me, lay abed with my head like a top all humming for the ale I'd had, and thinking nothing of what he said save that his madness grew apace.

"And that night he went away while I slept in my cups. When he came not I hunted the town for him as I had never hunted trail in all my life before. And I warrant you I left no stone unturned in that same town. I was half-crazy; I could not think he'd left me there of his own free will. Many a fight I had with the soldiers, many a bruise and broken head I left behind me ere I shook my moccasins free o' dust in Johnstown streets. They'll tell you, and that fat, purple-pitted councillor – Bullock, I mean – why, he would have me jailed for a matter of damaging his Tory constable. So I gave him a fright on the highway and left your Tryon County for a quieter one. That's all, lad."

What he had told me of Cade Renard troubled me. If Felicity had been strangely lost to her own family, and had been restored, doubtless she was now happy and full of wonder for the dear, amazing chance that had brought to her those honoured parents she had so long deemed to be with God. Yet she must be shy and over-sensitive also, having been brought up to believe she had no nearer kin than Sir Peter Warren. And now that he, after all, was no kin to her, nor she to us, if a mad forest-runner like Cade Renard should come to vex her with his luny fancies, it might hurt her or seem like reproach and mockery for her new parents.

"Do you think Cade followed Miss Warren to Boston?" I asked.

"My journey is to find that out," he said. "Ah, lad, a noble mind was wrecked in Renard's head. I know – others know nothing. What fate sent him like a wild thing to the forests, I only know, as you know, nothing but what he has told us both. If his madness has waxed so fiercely since he saw Miss Warren, it may be a sign that the end is near. I do not know. I miss him, and I must look for him while I can move these clumsy feet of mine."