"Lord!" said he; "did ever you see such sharp-wit work in all your adventures? What a soldier's wife she'd make!"
I smiled at that, being safe to smile in the darkness. For was she not a soldier's wife? I hugged that saying as we cling to the thing that is slipping from us. True, I was here to give her freely over to another and a better soldier; but while she was mine I would claim her, in my heart, at least.
The excitement of the narrow escape somewhat overpast, we sat long on the edge of a wine-bin, speculating in whispers as to what would befall, and listening vainly for the footsteps which would forecast our release or our capture by the enemy. But when no sounds, threatening or encouraging, came from the upper world, we groped about till we found the cellar candle, lighted it with flint and steel and tinder-box, and took a survey of our jail.
'Twas the same old cavernous wine vault of my youthful remembrance, such an one as has not its mate in all Carolina to this good day, as I firmly believe. My father's hobby was to build for all eternity; and this stone-arched cellarage was more like a cathedral crypt than a store-room for a country gentleman's table-stock of wines.
Dick held the candle aloft and scanned the bottle racks, none so greatly depleted as they might have been, had any hand but that close-fisted one of Gilbert Stair's taken the key in charge after my father.
"There is no lack of potables," says my candle-bearer; "but, unhappily, there is never so much as a dry crust to soak in them. And as for the horses, I'll venture they'd give it all, pint for pint, for a good feeding of oats."
"Truly," said I; and then we fell to stripping the straw casings from the bottles of madeira to give the poor beasts a feed of rye-stalks which had grown and ripened their grain many a year before either the sorrel or the gray was foaled.
Having no time-measure save our own impatience, it seemed a weary while before we heard the key rasping in the lock of our prison door.
"'Tis Madge," said Dick, with a true lover's gift of second sight; and 'twas he who went to help her swing the thick-slabbed oak.
What passed between them I did not hear, nor want to hear. But when the door was swung to and locked again I knew we were not free to go abroad.