“Unfortunately,” he answered dryly, “it’s not my little finger, my dear, that’s in peril! It’s my—”
“Father!” she cried, pain in her voice. “How can you! How can you!”
“There, there,” he said, soothing her, “a man can but die once, and how he dies does not matter much! Courage, Con, courage, girl! Many is the awkward corner I have been in, as you know, and I’ve got out of it. You may be sure I shall take all the care I can.”
“But you don’t!” she retorted. “You don’t! Or you would never let this man—” I lost the rest in the movement of a second chair.
For some minutes the two blacks had made hardly a pretence of attending to me. They had listened with all their ears. Once or twice when what was said had touched me nearly they had goggled their eyes at me between wonder and amazement. And I, too, wondered. I, too, saw that here was something that needed explanation. Why should this girl, scarcely out of her teens—I judged her to be no more that twenty—feel so strongly, so cruelly, so inhumanly? Why should she show herself so hard, so unnatural, where even her father betrayed the touch of nature that makes us all akin? This was a question, but it was one that I must consider to-morrow. For the present I was too comfortable, too drowsy, too weary. Sleep pressed on me irresistibly—the blessed sleep of the exhausted, of the wounded, of the broken, who are at last at rest! The room grew hazy, the light a dim halo. And yet before I slept I had a last impression of the things about me.
The girl came to the open door and stood on the threshold, gazing down at me. She was tall, slender, dark, and very handsome. She looked at me in silence for a long time, and with such a look and such a curiosity as one might turn on a crushed thing lying beside the road. It hurt me, but not for long.
For I slept, and dreamt of the Border and of home. I was in the small oak parlor at Osgodby. There was no fire on the hearth, it was summer and the bow-pots were full of roses. The windows were open, the garden, viewed through them, simmered in the sunshine.
My mother was sitting on the other side of the empty hearth, fanning herself with a great yellow fan, and we were both looking at the picture of Henrietta Craven that is set in the overmantel. “Ill will come of it, ill will come of it,” my mother was repeating over and over again. And then I found that it was not my mother who was saying it but the portrait over the fireplace; and—which did not seem to surprise me at the time—it was no longer the portrait of Henrietta Craven in her yellow sacque that spoke, but a woman in white, tall and slender and dark and very handsome.
It was noon when I awoke; not the sultry noon of Charles Town, for the rains had come and the day was grey and cool. I was alone, in the pleasant stillness, but the door into the living-room was ajar, perhaps that I might be heard if I called. Pigeons were cooing without, and not far away, probably on the veranda, some one was crooning in tune to the pleasant hum of a spinning-wheel. Sleep had made another man of me. My head was clear, I was free from fever, I was hungry; such pain as I felt was confined to the shoulder and arm. Yesterday I had come near to envying those who had fallen in the fight. To-day I was myself again, glad to be alive, free to hope, ready to look forward. After all, things might be worse; our Headquarters were at Charlotte, barely thirty-five miles away, and if my Lord Cornwallis moved towards King’s Mountain, to avenge Ferguson, I might be rescued. If he did not, I must contrive to be sent, as soon as I was well enough to travel, to the rebel Headquarters in the northern colony, whence I might be exchanged. I should be safe there—I was not safe here. I must see this man Wilmer by and by and talk to him about it. He had shown a measure of humanity and some generosity, mingled with his dry and saturnine humor. And he had saved my life, I had no doubt of that. In the meantime I was famished, positively famished!