“Now, Emblem,” says I, when the coffee was prepared, “let me see you put this powder in the pot, and as you always were an absent-minded sort of wench, ’twere best that you forgot that you had done so.”
“Very good, my lady,” Emblem says, with a wonderfully sagacious look. And immediately she had poured the contents of the packet in the coffee. I took up the pot and said, with an air of notable severity:
“Of course, this coffee is as pure as possible, and could not be doctored any way? I think that is so, Emblem?”
“Oh! lord yes, ma’am; it is indeed,” cries Emblem the immaculate.
“Well,” says I, “so soon as we can be positive that the gentlemen are abed, and at their ease in slumber’s lap, the fun shall get afoot.”
We sat down by the hearth for the thereabouts of half an hour, that they might have ample time to attain this Elysian state. Later I wrapped the admirable Emblem up the very model of a plotter, and despatched her to the sentry on guard at the stable door, with the compliments of her mistress and a pot of coffee, to keep the cold out.
“For I’m sure, poor man,” I piously observed, “it must be perishing out there in a frosty, wintry night of this sort.”
“It must, indeed, my lady,” Emblem says, with the gravity of a church; “and had I not better wait while he drinks it, ma’am, and bring the empty pot back? And had I not better put my carpet slippers on, and steal out carefully and without committing the faintest sound when I unbolt the kitchen door?”
“Emblem,” cries I, dealing her a light box on the ears, “to-night I will discard this darling of a gown I’m wearing. To-morrow it is yours.”
Faith, my Emblem ever was a treasure, if only because she was not subject ever to any bother in her soul. But when she had gone upon her errand to the soldier at the stable door, and I was left alone with my designs, for the first time meditation came, and a most unwelcome feeling of uneasiness crept on me. There was a certain danger in the thing I was determined to attempt; but then, I argued, the pleasure that any sport affords must primarily spring from the risks involved in its pursuit. That is unless one is a Puritan. Her greatest enemy has never accused my Lady Barbarity of that, however. Yet my mind still ran upon that grim guardian of the tight-kept rebel, and again I saw the night about him, and his fixed bayonet glaring at me through the gloom. Then for the second time that evening did I convince myself that adventure in the fairy-books and Mr. Daniel Defoe is one thing, but that at twelve o’clock of a winter’s night their cold and black reality is quite another. But here the imps of mirth woke up and tickled me, till again I fell a-rippling with glee. They proudly showed me half-a-score right worthy men nonplussed and mocked by the wit of woman. ’Twould make a pretty story for the town; and my faith! that was a true presentiment. But the long chapter that was in the end excited to my dear friends of St. James’s I would a’ paid a thousand pounds to have remained untold. But just now the mirth of the affair was too irresistible, and I laughed all cowardice to scorn. Besides, I remembered the wondrous gaze of poor Mr. Anthony Dare, that sweetly handsome youth, that desperate rebel, that chained and tattered captive, whose fate was to be a dreadful death upon the Tree. I remembered him, and although pity is the name that I resolutely refuse to have writ down as the motive for this merry plot, as all the world knows that I never had a heart in which to kindle it; but remembering that lad, I say, straight had I done with indecision, for I sprang up smartly, with a rude word for the King. And I make bold to declare that she who pulled the blinds aside an instant later to gaze into the night was the most determined rebel that ever grinned through hemp.