“Stop!” he cried. He was on his feet in a moment, a changed man, sharp, eager, angry. “Lower than me, you say? By G—d, let there be no mistake, Major! If you think I’m ashamed of the work I am doing, I am not! And I’ll not let it be said that I am! I am proud of it! I am doing work that not one in ten thousand could do or dare do. Plenty will shoot off guns and face death in hot blood—it’s a boy’s task. But to face death in cold blood, and daily and hourly without rest or respite; to know that the halter may enter with every man who comes into the room, with every letter that is laid on the table, with a dropped word or a careless look. To know that it’s waiting for you outside every house you leave. To face that, day and night, week in week out—that needs nerve! That calls for courage, I say it, sir, who know! And what is the upshot?” He swelled himself out. “Where others strike blows, I win battles!”
“Ay,” I cried—he had more to say, had I let him go on—“but sometimes you lose, and this time you have lost. And having lost, you look to me to pay! You look to me, sir! You take the honor, d—n you, and you leave me the dishonor! But by G—d, if it were not for your daughter,—”
“Ah!” he said, low-voiced and attentive.
“You should pay your losings this time, though you saved my life twice over!”
“Oh, oh!” he said in the same low voice. He sat back on the bed again, and stared at me, as if he saw a different man before him. After a pause, “Well,” he said, “I was a fool, Major, to blow my trumpet, and ruffle your temper. If I wanted to put my head in your folks’ noose, that was the way to do it. But every mother dotes on her own booby. Well, you’ll hear no more singing from me. I’m silent!”
“When I think,” I cried, “of your boasts of what you have done!”
“Don’t think of them,” he answered. “Set me dawn for a fool, Major, and let it rest there. Or think of the Bluff and Con. She’s a good girl, and fond of her father and—well, you know how it is with us.”
I was able to collect myself within a minute or two, and—“Mark me,” I said firmly, “I will give you up, Wilmer, I will give you up still, if you depart one jot from what I tell you. You will remain in this room for twenty-four hours. By that time Major Wemyss will have done his work, and as the time of the attack has been advanced by a night, what you may have communicated to your people should not change the issue. To-morrow I will release you, and give you two hours start. You will be wise to avail yourself of it, for at the end of that time I shall see Lord Rawdon, make a clean breast of it, and take the consequences. I shall be dismissed, and if I get my deserts I shall be shot; in any case my name will be disgraced. But if I am not to give you up, there is no other way out of the pit in which you have caught me.”
He thought for a moment. Then “I will give you,” he said, “my word if you like, Craven, not to pass on any more—”
“What, a spy’s word?” I cried—and very foolish it was of me to say it. But the man had brought so much evil on me that I longed to wound him. “No! I’ll have no truck with you and no bargain, Captain Wilmer. It shall be as I have said, exactly as I have said,” I repeated, “or I call in the nearest guard. That is plain speaking.”