“Even Borroughcliffe, cold and hardened as he appears to be by habit, would spurn at such dishonor,” added Miss Howard.
“But Mr. Barnstable?” at length Katherine succeeded in saying, when her feelings permitted her utterance, “said you not that soldiers were in quest of him?”
“Ay, ay, young madam,” the cockswain replied, smiling with grim ferocity, “they are in chase, but he has shifted his anchorage, and even if they should find him, his long pikes would make short work of a dozen redcoats. The Lord of tempests and calms have mercy, though, on the schooner! Ah, young madam she, is as lovely to the eyes of an old seafaring man as any of your kind can be to human nature!”
“But why this delay?—away then, honest Tom, and reveal the treachery to your commander; you may not yet be too late—why delay a moment?”
“The ship tarries for want of a pilot.—I could carry three fathom over the shoals of Nantucket, the darkest night that ever shut the windows of heaven, but I should be likely to run upon breakers in this navigation. As it was, I was near getting into company that I should have had to fight my way out of.”
“If that be all, follow me,” cried the ardent Katherine; “I will conduct you to a path that leads to the ocean, without approaching the sentinels.”
Until this moment, Dillon had entertained a secret expectation of a rescue, but when he heard this proposal he felt his blood retreating to his heart, from every part of his agitated frame, and his last hope seemed wrested from him. Raising himself from the abject shrinking attitude, in which both shame and dread had conspired to keep him as though he had been fettered to the spot, he approached Cecilia, and cried, in tones of horror:
“Do not, do not consent, Miss Howard, to abandon me to the fury of this man! Your uncle, your honorable uncle, even now applauded and united with me in my enterprise, which is no more than a common artifice in war.”
“My uncle would unite, Mr. Dillon, in no project of deliberate treachery like this,” said Cecilia, coldly.
“He did, I swear by——”