The Westcotes Part 19

"Ah, Mademoiselle, what poet taught you that?"

"It was a kinswoman," she answered, and caught herself blus.h.i.+ng. "I do not know the author."

The secret of the Commissary's dinner-party came out early next morning, when the call came for the prisoners to leave Axcester. And, whenever Dorothea looked back on this epoch in her life, what she found most wonderful was the suddenness of its end. As day broke in a drizzle, and before she was well awake, a troop of dragoons, followed by a company of the 52nd Regiment of foot, pa.s.sed the Bayfield gates on the way to Axcester. The troopers entered the town while the Ting-tang was sounding, and before the roll could be called the prisoners were surrounded. Their release had come; and though many had sighed for it for years, it found them quite unprepared.

Their release had come; but first they must be marched through the length of the country to Kelso, there to await the formalities of exchange. At four in the afternoon the infantry marched out with the first great batch. Early next morning the rest--owners of furniture, granted a few hours to arrange for its storage or sale--followed their comrades. There was no cloud of dust upon the road for Dorothea to watch. They departed in sheets of rain and under the dusk of dawn. She never again saw General Rochambeau.

It is recorded that in his fifty-seventh year Endymion Westcote married (but the bride was not Lady Bateson), and that children were born to him. Narcissus lived on at Bayfield and compiled at his leisure a _History of Axcester_, which mentions the decoration of the Orange Room by "a young Frenchman of talent, who has been good enough to a.s.sist the author in a most important work." But Dorothea preferred her independence and a cottage not far from the bridge, where Endymion's children might romp as they listed, but never seemed to disturb its exquisite order.