The Master of Appleby Part 63

What followed after was over and done with in a dozen fluttering heart-beats. Seeing the case was desperate, General Davidson gathered Graham's fifty into his flying column, flogged his rear into the retreat, and was pitched out of his saddle by a Tory rifle-bullet whilst he was doing it. And when the way to our horses was clear of the galloping Carolinians, and we would have run to mount and ride after them, the swarming redcoat van was upon us.

"Up with you and out of this!" cried Jennifer, setting me the example.

"We must e'en gallop as we can. Quick, man!"

But in the gathering and the retreat our old sharpshooter under his holly bush had been left behind; and now we heard him again, chanting his terrible imprecations on the enemy.

d.i.c.k saw the meaning in my look, and together we pounced to drag the old man out of hiding. When we burst down upon him, Yeates had his piece to his face and was drawing a bead on a stout man in c.o.c.ked hat and plain regimentals whose horse was curveting and sidling in the nearer shallows; no less a figure, in truth, than my Lord Cornwallis himself, cheering his men on to the attack.

We had scarce made out the old hunter's target when the rifle spat fire, the curveting charger reared in its death plunge, and the British commander-in-chief, unhurt, as it seemed, was dragged from the entanglement of his stirrups by his aides.

The old marksman sprang up in a fury of wrath. "Dad blast ye for a pair of aim-sp'ilin'--"

A roar of musketry cut the rebuke in half, and a storm of bullets smote through the branches overhead. A falling bough knocked my hat off, and I stooped to recover it. When I rose, d.i.c.k was clipping the old man tightly in his arms. Yeates's belt was cut, and a little oozing well-spring of red was slowly soaking the fringe of his hunting-s.h.i.+rt.

"Ease me down, Cap'n d.i.c.k; ease me down. The old man's done for, this time, ez I allow--spang in the innards. Ease me down and get off for yerselves, if so be ye can, im--me--jit--"

The wagging jaw dropped and the keen old eyes went dim and sightless.

d.i.c.k's oath was more a sob than an imprecation; and now it was I who said: "Come on--the living before the dead!" and so we made the well-nigh hopeless dash for the horses.

How we rode free out of that hurly-burly at the ford-head you must figure for yourselves, if you can. The men of the British vanguard were all about us when we got to the scrub oak thicket and mounted, but no one of them raised a hand to stay us. I have thought since that mayhap they took us for a pair of their own Tory allies who were not above wearing the stolen uniforms of the dead. Be that as it may, we rode away unhindered, d.i.c.k in all the bravery of his captain's slas.h.i.+ngs, and I in light-horse buff and blue, taking the road toward the manor house because that was the only one open to us, and ambling leisurely till we were beyond the sight and sound of the victors at the ford.

But once at large, we put spurs to our horses in true _ritter_ fas.h.i.+on; and we had galloped half way to Appleby house before d.i.c.k said:

"Now we are well out of that, what next? We can not go to Margery with the whole British army at our heels."

"Nay, but we shall, if only for a short half-hour," I a.s.serted. Then, as once before, I gave him my best bow. "For the last time, it may be, let me play the lord of the manor. You are very welcome to my father's demesne, Richard, and to all of its holdings."

"All?" said he, giving me a quick eye-shot as we pressed on side by side.

"Yes, all," said I; and I meant it in good faith. He should have the lady, too; that precious holding of the old manse without whom my father's acres would be but a bauble to be lost or won indifferently.

"Then you do not love Madge more?" he queried, his eye kindling.

"Nay, I did not say that. But I did say the other; that you should have the house and all its holdings."

We were cantering up the oak-sentried avenue to that door which Gilbert Stair had once sought to keep against us with his bell-mouthed blunderbuss. There was no sign of any living thing about the place; and when we had no answer to our sword-hilt knockings on the door, the lad turned upon me with a flash of anger in his eyes and his lip a-curl.

"You knew full well what you were promising, John Ireton!" he said. "She is not here."

XLIX

IN WHICH A LAWYER HATH HIS FEE

What Richard's most natural resentment would have led to, in what new tangle of the net of bitterness we might have been enmeshed, we were spared the knowing. For when he said, "She is not here," two happenings intervened to give us both other things to think of.

The first was the advent, at the far end of the oak-lined avenue, of a troop of British light-horse, trotting leisurely; the second was the swinging inward of the door of unwelcome, with old Anthony grinning and bowing behind it.

Now when you have fairly surprised a fox in the open, he asks nothing more than a hole to hide him in. There were the hunters coming up the avenue; and here was our dodge-hole gaping before us. So, as hunted things will, we took earth quickly; though, truly, 'twas an ostrich-trick rather than a fox's, since we left the horses standing without to advertise our presence to all and sundry.

It was Richard who first found the wit to realize the ostrich-play.

"The horses!--we may as well have left the town crier outside to ring his bell and tell the redcoats we are here," he would say; and before I knew what he would be at he had s.n.a.t.c.hed the door open and was whistling softly to the big gray.

Hearing his master's call, the gray p.r.i.c.ked his ears and came obediently, with the sorrel tagging at his heels. A moment later, when the up-coming troop was hidden by a turn in the avenue, we had the pair of them in the hall with the door shut and barred behind them.

"So far, so good," quoth d.i.c.k. Then to the old black, who had stood by, saucer-eyed and speechless, the while: "Anthony, do you be as big a numbskull as you were born to be, and hold these redcoat gentlemen in palaver till we can win out at the back."

The old majordomo nodded his good-will, but now my slow wit came in play. "We've done it now," said I. "The horses will go out as they came in, or not at all. Had you forgotten the stair at the back?"

Judge for yourselves, my dears, if this were the time, place or crisis for a man to fling himself upon the hall settle, grip his ribs and laugh like any lack-wit. Yet this is what Richard Jennifer did.

It was in the very midst of his gust of ill-timed merriment, while the horses were nosing niftily at their strange surroundings, and the hoof-strokes of the redcoat troop could be plainly heard on the gravel of the avenue, that I chanced to lift my eyes to the stair. There, looking down upon us with speechless astoundment in the blue-gray eyes, stood our dear lady.

Another instant and she was with us, stamping her foot and crying: "_Mon Dieu!_ what is this? Are you gone mad, both of you?"

d.i.c.k's answer was another burst of laughter, loud enough, you would think, to be heard by those beyond the door.

"Behold four witless brute beasts, Mistress Madge--two horses and two a.s.ses," he said. And then to old Anthony: "Open the door, Tony, and invite the gentlemen in."

But Margery was before him. Ah, my dears, a man's wit is like a matchlock, fizzing and sputtering its way noisily to find the powder whilst the enemy hath time to ride up and saber the musketeer; but a woman's is like the spark in a tinder-box--a quick snip of flint and steel and you have your fire. In a flash my lady had torn down the heavy curtains from an inner doorway and was carpeting a horse path for us to the rear.

"Quick!" she cried; "lead them gently, for the love of heaven!"

She went before us, padding the way with whatever came first to hand, rugs, curtains, table-coverings, and I know not what besides; and by the time the British troopers were hammering at the outer door, we were deep within the old mansion and had made s.h.i.+ft to drag the unwilling horses by one and two-step descents to a room half under and half out of ground, which served as a sort of ante-dungeon to the wine cellar.

Here I thought we might be safe for the moment, but not so my lady.

Calling d.i.c.k to help her--in all the fierce haste of it I marked that she called to d.i.c.k and not to me--she unlocked and opened the door to the wine vault, and in a trice we two and the luckless horses were safely jailed in pitchy darkness, with the stout oaken door slammed behind us, the bolt shot in the lock, and the key withdrawn, as we could see by the spot of light which came through the keyhole.

Richard was the first to break the grave-like silence of our dungeon.

"Lord!" said he; "did ever you see such sharp-wit work in all your adventures? What a soldier's wife she'd make!"

I smiled at that, being safe to smile in the darkness. For was she not a soldier's wife? I hugged that saying as we cling to the thing that is slipping from us. True, I was here to give her freely over to another and a better soldier; but while she was mine I would claim her, in my heart, at least.

The excitement of the narrow escape somewhat overpast, we sat long on the edge of a wine-bin, speculating in whispers as to what would befall, and listening vainly for the footsteps which would forecast our release or our capture by the enemy. But when no sounds, threatening or encouraging, came from the upper world, we groped about till we found the cellar candle, lighted it with flint and steel and tinder-box, and took a survey of our jail.

'Twas the same old cavernous wine vault of my youthful remembrance, such an one as has not its mate in all Carolina to this good day, as I firmly believe. My father's hobby was to build for all eternity; and this stone-arched cellarage was more like a cathedral crypt than a store-room for a country gentleman's table-stock of wines.

d.i.c.k held the candle aloft and scanned the bottle racks, none so greatly depleted as they might have been, had any hand but that close-fisted one of Gilbert Stair's taken the key in charge after my father.

"There is no lack of potables," says my candle-bearer; "but, unhappily, there is never so much as a dry crust to soak in them. And as for the horses, I'll venture they'd give it all, pint for pint, for a good feeding of oats."

"Truly," said I; and then we fell to stripping the straw casings from the bottles of madeira to give the poor beasts a feed of rye-stalks which had grown and ripened their grain many a year before either the sorrel or the gray was foaled.