“Nay; I honor and admire her for helping her father,” said the lieutenant, hastily. “I did but grieve that a young lady of so much spirit should take so wrong-headed a view of the matter.”
“Your consideration is wasted upon her, sir, indeed,” said Mrs. Waldron. “But hush! here comes her father with the squire.”
There was no possibility of mistaking the loud, deep, cheery voice of Parson Langney, which could be heard even above the barking of the hounds, which was the first greeting given to every visitor. The next moment the door opened, and Parson Langney, the squire, and his son Bertram, entered, to be joined a few minutes later by a couple of country gentlemen more clownish than their host.
Bertram Waldron was an unhappy cross between the country breeding of his father and the town airs and graces of the ladies. For while he affected the modish cut of the town in his clothes, swore the latest oaths, and swaggered about with a great assumption of the manners of the beau, his rusticity peeped out every moment in his gait, and in his strong provincial accent.
When they all trooped into the dining-parlor, where a huge sirloin was placed smoking on the table, it was not long before the stranger perceived that the sympathy he had met with from the ladies was not shared by the gentlemen.
Not only did they express but faint interest in his collision with the smugglers, and profess the greatest incredulity as to the alleged magnitude of their operations, but by the time the ladies had retired, it began to be hinted to him pretty freely, as the decanters passed round, that the less zeal he showed in the prosecution of his raids against the “free-traders,” the more his discretion would be respected.
“Gad, sir; I don’t say theirs is an honest trade,” said the squire, whose face assumed a purplish and apoplectic tint as the meal wore on; “but I say that ’tis best to let sleeping dogs lie; and that your soldiers will do a monstrous sight more harm than good by driving the trade into wilder parts, where the fellows can be more daring and more dangerous. And what I say to you, who are but a young man, and hot with zeal, is this: that the easier you take things, the easier things will take you. And if you won’t trust the advice of a man of my experience—why, ask the parson there, and take his.”
“Gad’s my life, sir; but I can take no man’s advice who bids me do aught but what seems to me my duty!” cried the young lieutenant with fire. He was incensed at the laxity of morals, which he now perceived to have permeated to every class of society in the neighborhood. “I’m here, under the orders of his Majesty—the stringent orders—to put down smuggling and the wrecking connected with it. And what I’m sent to do, I’ll do, please God, no matter what the difficulties in my way may be, nor what the dangers!”
His words were followed by a dead, an ominous silence.
The day was dying now, and the red fire that glowed and flickered in the wide hearth showed strange lights and shadows on the painted ceiling, the painted and paneled walls, the long spindle-legged sideboard, where more wine was waiting for the jovial band at the table.