The Master of Appleby Part 18

"I know this Uncanoola," I said. "My father befriended him in the plague of '60, and was never sorry for it, as I believe." Then I would ask if these Catawbas had ranged themselves on the patriot side, a question which led the young militia captain to give me the news at large while his borderers were breaking camp and making their hasty preparations for the day's march.

"'Tis liberty or death with us now; we've burnt our bridges behind us,"

he said, when he had confirmed the tidings I had had the day before from Father Matthieu. "And since here in Carolina we have to fight each man against his neighbor, 'tis like to go hard with us, lacking help from the North."

"Measured by this morning's work, Captain Forney, these irregulars of yours seem well able to give a good account of themselves," I ventured.

He shook his head doubtfully. He was but a boy in years, but war is a shrewd schoolmaster, and this youth, like many another on the fighting frontier, had matriculated early.

"You've seen us at our best," he amended. "We can ambush like the Indians, fire a volley, yell, charge--and run away."

"What's that ye're saying, youngster?" The grizzled hunter had finished reloading his rifle, and, lounging in earshot with all the freedom of the border, would take the captain up sharply on this last.

"You heard me, Eph Yeates," replied my young captain, curtly.

The old man leaned his rifle against a tree, spat on his hands, cut a clumsy caper in air, and gave tongue in a yell that should have been heard by Tarleton's men at Appleby.

"By the eternal 'c.o.o.nskins! I can gouge the eye out of ary man that says Eph Yeates carn't stand up fair and square and whop his weight in wildcats; and I can do it now, _if_ not sooner!" he shrilled. "Come on, you pap-eating, ap.r.o.n-stringed, French-daddied--"

Where the blast of vituperative insult would have spent itself in natural course we were not to know, for in the midst another of the borderers, a wiry little man in greasy deerskin, came up behind the capering ancient, whipped an arm around his neck, and in a trice the two went down, kicking, scratching, buffeting and mauling, as like to a pair of battling bobcats as was ever seen.

For a moment I thought my youngster would let them have it out to the finish, but he did not. At his order some of the others pulled the twain apart, reluctantly, I fancied; and when the thing was done the old man caught up his rifle and strode away in blackest wrath without a look behind him.

Captain Forney shrugged and spread his hands as his French father might have done.

"Now you know wherein our weakness lies, Captain Ireton," he said.

"There goes as true a man and as keen a shot as ever pulled trigger. Let him fight in his own way, and he'll take cover and name his man for every bullet in his pouch. But as for yielding to decent authority, or standing against trained troops in open field--" He shrugged again and turned to tighten his saddle-girth.

"I see," said I. Then I asked him of his plans and intendings, and was told that he and his handful were a-march to join General Rutherford, who was gone to the Forks of Yadkin to break up some Tory embodiment thereabouts.

"You have your work cut out to dodge the British light-horse, Captain Forney," said I; capping the venture by telling him what little I knew of Tarleton's dispositions, and also of the Indian-arming plot I had overheard.

"We'll dodge the redcoats, never you fear; we're at our best in that,"

he rejoined, carelessly. "And as to the Cherokee upstirring, that's an old story. The king's men have tried it twice and they have not yet caught Jack Sevier or Jimmie Robertson a-napping. Ease your mind on that score, Captain Ireton, and come along with us, if you have nothing better to do. I can promise you hard living, and hard fighting enough to keep it in countenance."

At this I was brought down to some consideration of the present and its demands. As fortune's wheel had twirled, I had my life, to be sure; but by the having of it was made the basest traitor to my friend--to Jennifer, and no whit less to Margery.

'Twas out of any thought that I should take the field against the common enemy, leaving this tangled web of mystery and misery behind. In sheerest decency I owed it first to Jennifer to make a swift and frank confession of the ill-concluded tale of happenings. That done, I owed it equally to him and Margery to find some way to set aside the midnight marriage.

So I fell back upon my wound for an excuse, telling the captain that I was not yet fit to take the field--which was true enough. Whereupon he and his men set me well beyond the danger of immediate pursuit and we parted company.

When I was left alone I had no plan that reached beyond the day's end.

Since to go to Jennifer House by daylight would be to run my neck afresh into the noose, I saw nothing for it but to lie in hiding till nightfall. The hiding place that promised best was the old hunting lodge in the forest, and thitherward I turned my face.

It was a wise man who said that he who goes with heavy heart drags heavy feet as well; but while I live I shall remember how that saying clogged the path for me that morning, making the shrub-sweet summer air grow thick and lifeless as I toiled along. For sober second thought, and the unnerving reaction which comes upon the heels of some sharp peril overpast, left me aghast at the coil in which a tricky fate had entangled me.

The second thought made plain the dispiteous hardness of it all, showing me how I had reasoned like a boy in planning for retrieval. Would Jennifer believe my tale, though I should swear it out word for word on the Holy Evangelists? I doubted it; and striving to see it through his eyes, was made to doubt it more. For death should have been my justifier, and death had played me false.

As for setting the midnight marriage aside, I made sure the lawyer tribe could find a way, if that were all. But here there was a loyal daughter of the Church to reckon with. Loathing her bonds, as any true-hearted maiden must, would Margery consent to have them broken by the law? I knew well she would not. Though our poor knotting of the tie had been little better than a tragic farce, it lacked nothing of force to bind the tender conscience of a woman bred to look upon the churchly rite as final.

So, twist and turn it as I might, the coil was desperate; and as I strode on gloomily, measuring this the first stage in a pilgrimage I had never thought to make, a fire of sullen anger began to smoke and smolder within me, and I could find it in my heart to curse the cruel kindness of my rescuers; to sorrow in my inmost soul that they had come between to make a living recreant of one who would fain have died an honest man.

XIV

HOW THE BARONET PLAYED ROUGE-ET-NOIR

The sun was well above the tree-tops, and the morning was abroad for all the furred and feathered wood-folk, when I forsook the Indian path to make a prudent circle of reconnaissance around the cabin in the maple grove.

Happily, there was no need for the cautionary measure. The hunting lodge was undiscovered as yet by any enemy; and when I showed myself my poor black va.s.sals ran to do my bidding, weeping with childish joy to have me back again.

Since old Darius was still at Appleby Hundred, Tomas ranked as majordomo; and I bade him post the blacks in a loosely drawn sentry line about the cabin, this against the chance that Falconnet might stumble on the place in searching for me. For I made no doubt his Tory spies would quickly pa.s.s the word that I was not with Abram Forney's band, and hence must be in hiding.

When all was done I flung myself upon the couch of panther-skins, hoping against hope that sleep might come to help me through the hours of waiting. 'Twas a vain hope. There was never a wink of forgetfulness for me in all the long watches of the summer day, and I must lie wide-eyed and haggard, thinking night would never come, and making sure that fate had never before walled a man in such a dungeon of despair.

There was no loophole of escape with honor; The heavens were bra.s.s, with all the horizons narrowed to a bounding wall to hem me in on every side.

There was no sally-port in all this wall save one--the one that death had promised to open at the dawn. The promise had been broken. True, death had thrust the key within the lock, and I had heard the grating of the bolts; and yet the key had been withdrawn and I was left a prisoner of life.

There was no hope of other outlet. Now there was s.p.a.ce to view it calmly, I saw how foolish was the thought that Margery would connive at any breaking of the marriage bond. She would bear my name, and hate me for the giving of it; would go on hating me, I thought, to all eternity; but she would never take her freedom back again, save at a dead man's hands.

It was thus that each fresh scanning of the prison wall that shut me in this dungeon of dishonor fetched me once and again to this one sally-port of death. And when it came to this; that I had searched in vain for other outlet, you will not think it strange that I sat down in spirit at this postern to see if I might open it with my own hands.

It was not love of life that made me hesitate. At two-score years he who has lived at all has lived his best; and if he live beyond the turning point of youthful ardor he must beg the grace of younger men to linger yet a little longer on the stage which once was his and now is theirs.

No, it was not any love of life for life's own sake that held me back.

'Twas rather that the Ireton blood is linked up with that thing we call a conscience, a heritage from those simple-hearted ancestors to whom the suicide was a soul accurst--a soul impenitent, whose very outer husk of flesh and bones they used to bury at the crossing of the ways, with a sharpened stake to pinion it.

'Twas this ancestral conscience made me cowardly; and when the sight of my father's sword--Darius had rescued and restored it to its place upon the chimney-breast--would set me thinking of the Israelitish king, and how, when all was lost, he fell upon his blade and died, this horror of the suicide came to give me pause.

Besides, that way to right the double wrong was not so clear as it might seem. As matters stood, my living for the present was Margery's best safeguard. Till she became my widow and my heir-at-law, the mercenary baronet would play his cards to win her honorably. I doubted not he'd make hot love to her; but while she stayed a wife, and was not yet a widow, he'd keep his pa.s.sion decently in bounds, if only for the better compa.s.sing of his end.

But from this horn of the dilemma I slipped to fall upon the other. If my living on as Margery's husband was her safety for the time, it was an offering of idol-meats upon the altar of my dear lad's friends.h.i.+p. What would he think of me? How could I go about to make it plain that I had robbed him for his own honor's sake?--that it was not I but fate that was to blame?

These questions came up answerless, like deep-sea plummets where no bottom is. I saw the way no farther on than this; that I must go straightway to Jennifer and tell him all. Beyond that point the darkness was Egyptian, and I could only hope that tricky fate would turn again and blot me out, and make it plain to Richard, and to my dear lady, that love, and not base treachery, had set me on to do as I had done.

In some such dismal grindings of the mill of thought the hours of waiting were outworn at length; and when the sun was dipping to the mountains in the west I rose and washed me in the brook, and afterward constrained myself to eat what Tomas had prepared for me.

The sunset glow was fading in the upper air, and underneath the canopy of leaves the wood was darkening on to twilight, when I made ready to be gone. Because I thought I might have need of it before the night was done, I buckled on the heirloom sword; and telling Tomas and the other blacks for their own safety to keep an alarm guard waking through the night, I sallied forth upon my errand.

I've wished a thousand times, as I sit here before the fire and jot these memories down in crabbed black on white, that I could conjure up for you some speaking picture of this scene primeval in which the story moves.

True, its hills and valleys are the same; the river keeps its course; and in the west the mountain sky-line is unchanged. But here similitude is at an end. You've hacked the virgin forest into shapes and fringes where once it was an ample mantle seamed only by the rivers, and frayed here and there at distant intervals by the settler's ax.

Beneath this mantle lay a world unlike the world you know. Plunged in its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature's mystery upon you; the mystery of the h.o.a.ry wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the centuries. In brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles, became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way.

But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe and affright the alien-born.

I was not alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as if with sinister intent.