I told her all she asked to know, and was as meek as mush, hoping she would come finally to telling me something of her plans and Beatrix’s, as she did. And it was very comical, too, if I had been in any laughing mood, for, when she had told me that the rescued Leigh tobacco had been put aboard of a certain coasting schooner named the Nancy Jane, Captain Elijah Sprigg, and that her passage to the James River, and Beatrix’s, had been taken on board the same vessel, she remembered suddenly that she was telling all this to a king’s officer, and her threatenings of me, and her alarm for the safety of the tobacco, were equally matched.
“You’ll never go and tell on us, Dick Page!” she half pleaded, half commanded. “You wouldn’t be such an abandoned and despicable villain as that!”
“Why,” said I, teasing her a little, “haven’t you just been telling me that nothing was too hang-dog and mean for me to do, since I am wearing the king’s coat? Isn’t it my duty—my new duty—to go straight down to Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters with the news that you mean to run the blockade with a contraband cargo of tobacco?”
“Oh, you’d never, never do that, Dickie Page!” she protested, wringing her hands in distress. “Mr. Vandeventer says we are ‘winked at’; that because Beatrix is a brave girl, and the friend of Margaret Shippen, she will be allowed to take her tobacco and go home. But I don’t trust them—any of them. They’ll stop us; send us to prison! Dick, you’ll never be so cruel?”
“I’ll make a bargain with you, Cousin Ju,” I laughed. “Get me speech with Beatrix, and I’ll promise you never to lisp a syllable to a living soul about the tobacco.”
“Oh, but Dick! she protests she will never look on your face again—and serve you right, too! She’ll never come down to you for my urging.”
“Yes, she will. Tell her it’s the price of her cargo of tobacco.”
“You promise?”
“Most faithfully, I assure you.”
Cousin Julianna went away in haste, and I was still laughing over her absurd fears when the door opened to admit Beatrix. And I do think she was more beautiful and winsome and alluring than I had ever seen her, as she stood in the doorway, trying to make me believe she was angry—as she was not.