It was the old name again. He had never earned it through the least malice, however. Fool-hardiness perhaps, added to indomitable high spirits and good health, but malice, never.
How Father O’Brady had chuckled over the prank that had first earned him the title,—the holding up of the coach that ran between Byestry and Kingsleigh, Nick at the head of a band of half a dozen young scapegraces clad in black masks and huge hats, and armed with old pistols purloined from the historic gun-room of the old Hall! It had been a leaf from the book of Claude Duval with a slight difference.
Nick had re-acted the scene for him. He was an inimitable mimic. He had taken off old Lady Fanshawe’s cackling fright to the life. As the stoutest and oldest dowager of the lot he had obliged her to dance a minuet with him, the terrified coachman, postilion, and solitary male passenger covered by his companions’ pistols the while. The fluttered younger occupants of the coach had frankly envied the terrified dowager, yet Nick had bestowed but the most perfunctory of glances upon them, and that for a reason best known to himself.
Later the truth of the affair had leaked out, and Lady Fanshawe could never chaperon one of her numerous nieces to a ball, without being besieged by young men imploring the favour of a dance. Being a sporting old lady—when not out of her wits with terror—she had taken it all in good part. Once, even, she had danced the very same minuet with Nick, the whole ballroom looking on and applauding.
It had been the first of a series of pranks each madder than the last, but each equally light-hearted and gay.
That is till Cecilia Lester married Basil Percy.
The world, namely the small circle in which Cecilia and Nick moved, had heard of the marriage with amazement. If Nick was amazed he did not show it, but his pranks held less of gaiety, more of a grim foolhardiness. Father O’Brady no longer chuckled over their recitation. Maybe because they mainly reached his ears from outside sources. Nick, who was not of his fold, seldom sought his society in these days. Later he heard them not at all, being removed to another mission.
And then, at last, came the day when Nick played his final prank in the hunting field,—his maddest prank, in which Baccarat failed him. The horse was shot where he lay. His rider was carried home half dead; and half dead, literally, he had been for fifteen years.
And there was yet one more year left to him.