“La! How well you speak their language, Mr. Mervyn, to be sure. Oh-h, how musical! As lovely as Italian! Oh-h-h—how I wish I could learn it before I go back to England! Sure, ’twould be monstrous genteel to know Cherokee in London. Neusse anantoge. I’ll remember that. ‘The sleeping sun.’ I’ll say that again. Neusse anantoge. Neusse anantoge.”
“Neusse anantoge!” cried Raymond, with a fleering laugh. “Gad, Mervyn, you are moon-struck.”
His bright dark eyes were angry, although laughing. They seemed to hold a light like coals of fire, sometimes all a-smoulder, and again vivid with caloric or choler. With his florid complexion and dark hair and eyes the powder had a decorative emphasis which the appearance of neither of the other men attained. The lace cravat about his throat was of fine texture and delicately adjusted, but it was frayed along the edge in more than one place and the lapels of his red coat hardly concealed this. Woman-like she was quick to discern the insignia of genteel poverty, and she pitied him with a sympathy which she would not have felt for a rent of the skin or a broken bone. These were but the natural incidents of a soldier’s life; blows and bruises must needs be cogeners. She divined that his education and his commission were all of value at his command,—the younger son of a good family, but poor and proud,—and it was hard to live in a world of lace and powder on so slender an endowment. She began to hate the precise and priggish George Mervyn who roused him so, although the provocation came from Raymond, and she was already wondering at her father that this dashing man, who had a thousand appeals to a poetic imagination, stood no higher in favor. She did not realize that a long command at Fort Prince George was no promoter of a poetic imagination.
As Raymond spoke Miss Howard turned eagerly toward him, the dark red curtain still in her hand, showing a section of the bleak, moonlit, wintry scene in the distance, and in the foreground the stockaded ramparts, the guard-house, its open door emitting an orange-tinted flare of fire, the blue-and-black shadows lurking about the block-house and the hard-trodden snow of the deserted parade.
“What do you say it should be, then?” she demanded peremptorily, as if she were determined not to be brought to confusion by venturing incorrect Cherokee in London,—as if there a slip of the tongue would be easily detected!
“How much Cherokee does he know?” interposed Mervyn, satirically. “We keep an interpreter in constant employ,—expressly for him.”
Raymond was spurred on to assert himself.
“Neusse anantoge!” he jeered. “Then what do you make of Nu-da-su-na-ye-hi? That is ‘the sun sleeping in the night.’ And see here, Nu-da-ige-hi. That is ‘the sun living in the day.’”
“That?—why, that is the Lower town dialect.”
“Oh, the Lower town dialect!” Raymond, in derision, whirled about on the heels of his pumps, for he too was displaying all the glory of silk hose. “The Lower town dialect,—save the mark! It is Overhill Cherokee.”