"Know? Why, i' faith, of course I know. Is there anything Charles Mordaunt does not know when mischief is in the wind?--Mordanto, as Swift calls me; Sir Tristram, as others describe me; I, whose 'birth was under Venus, Mercury, and Mars,' and who, like those planets, am ever wandering and unfixed. Be sure I know it. As, also, I knew you would come. Yet, kinsman, one thing I do not know--that one thing being, what it is you expect to gain by coming, unless it is the hope of finding the chance to see those Catholics, amongst whom you lived as a youth, beaten down by sturdy Protestants like yourself."
"For that, and to be in the fray. To help in the good cause--the cause we love and venerate. Through you. By you--a kinsman, as you say."
"You to be in the fray--and by me? Yet how is that to be? You are----"
"Ah, yes! I know well. A broken soldier--one at odds with fortune. Yet----"
"Yet?"
"Not disgraced. Not that--never that, God be thanked."
"I say so, too. But still broken, though never disgraced. What you did you did well. That fellow, that Dutchman, that Colonel Sparmann, whom you ran through from breast to back--he may thank his lucky stars your spadroon was an inch to the left of his heart--deserved his fate."
"He insulted England," Bracton exclaimed. "He said that without King William to teach us the art of war we knew not how to combat our enemies. For that I challenged him, and ran him through. Pity 'twas I did not----"
"Nay; disable thine enemy--there is no need to kill him. All the same," Lord Peterborough continued drily, "King William broke you for challenging and almost killing a superior officer."
"King William is dead. Death pays all debts."