“It is nothing,” he turned to call back to her with a reassuring smile, although his face was white with pain.
He set off again, but his pace grew ever slower and more faltering. Across the field sounded once more the high, loud neighing of his horse.
Clotilde, glancing in that direction, saw suddenly that two more men had been left at the edge of the lane and were now crouching behind a clump of bayberry bushes close to where the English officer must pass. As she watched one of them rose to his knees, levelled his musket and took deliberate aim.
“Stop,” she cried out, turning to run toward them through the deep drifts. Although her feet would scarcely carry her, she managed somehow to make her way along until she caught up with the wavering scarlet figure that was struggling nearer and nearer to the hidden enemy.
“You shall not shoot!” she called out loudly as she grasped him by the dripping sleeve of his red coat. “You shall not touch him; he is my prisoner!”
And to this the young officer made no remonstrance, for he had fallen face downward in the snow.
CHAPTER XVIII
QUAKER LADIES
When Stephen returned at mid-morning of that same day, his horses steaming in the cold air and his two serving-men trailing out behind him, unable to keep up with the furious pace their master had set, he found that, for the first time, there was no one at the door to greet him. He had spent the night at a small town twenty miles from Hopewell and, on hearing at dawn of the successful British expedition, he had pushed forward with all haste, quite ignorant still of the happenings at his own house. His eyes opened wide at the sight of blue-coated soldiers scattered about his grounds, but he did not stop to question them. He came into the hall and found no one there, he mounted the stairs and on the landing met Mother Jeanne, who greeted him with such a torrent of incoherent French that he had not the slightest idea of what she sought to tell him. After looking in at several of the open doors, his expression of wonder growing every moment, he finally encountered Doctor Thorndyke, just coming downstairs after a lengthy examination of the wounded officer.
“In Heaven’s name,” said Stephen to him, “will some one tell me what is amiss in this house? I come home to find my garden in the possession of soldiers, Mère Jeanne apparently quite out of her senses, Clotilde asleep, a total stranger installed in my best bedroom and a scarlet coat, covered with blood, hanging over the back of a chair. Is all the world gone mad, or is it only I?”