Murray had risen from his seat, and stood before the astonished man with burning eyes and a brow of iron.
“What the deuce have I said?” muttered Butler.
“You have said that which I cannot allow to remain unanswered, Captain Butler,” answered Sir John, with more dignity than he had yet assumed. “One portion of your question I can answer without betraying confidence which was sacred with Sir William, and rests so with me. You ask why a high-born English lady forsook her own land to become the wife of an Indian chief? Why she left England, I am not at liberty to say; but, upon the honor of a gentleman, it was from no unworthy act or motive—her career had been a proud and blameless one, as this gentleman can, doubtless, testify; but the deeper reasons which influenced this expatriation no human being except herself has ever possessed the power to explain.”
“Nor why she took up with a swarthy Indian, when she got here—that is one of her delicate mysteries also, I dare say,” retorted Butler, growing insolent under the stern glances turned upon him by the English Commissioner. “Come, come, Johnson, it’s hardly worth while exhausting eloquence on the subject; the whole affair has given me a picturesque little wildcat of a wife, who loves me like a tempest. Better than this, she promises to make me a potentate one of these days, unless the lady-mother outlives her, which may happen after all, for she has the vigor and health of a tigress. As for disinheriting her child, or anything of that sort, she hasn’t the power, thank my stars! But the main question is left out, after all: how and where was Catharine Montour married to the Shawnee chief? Was it a ceremony which our English laws hold valid? If not, my wild bird has nothing but her pretty plumage after all.”
“Do you consider this nothing?” said Sir John, holding up the draft.
“Faith, I don’t know. It seemed a good deal when I presented it; but now that I have learned how much remains behind, it seems as if my queenly mamma had treated me rather shabbily.”
“Sir John, forgive me, but you have not answered Captain Butler’s question: by what train of circumstances was a lady so delicate in all her tastes as Lady Granby led into a union with a savage? Surely it could not have been of her own free will,” said the commissioner.
“If a martyr ever went to the stake of his own will—if self-abnegation of any kind is free—this lady did voluntarily marry the Indian chief. It was a sublime sacrifice, which every true man must regard with homage—an act of chivalric humanity of which few women, and scarcely a man on earth, would have been capable.”
“I can well believe it,” exclaimed Murray, with kindling eyes.
“Then she was decidedly married,” cried Butler, faithful to his mercenary instincts, and hunting that one fact down like a hound.