“Get cups and water, Jim,” commanded my Gouverneur Faulkner with a smile. “Don’t drink it straight, Captain. It will knock you down.”
“I will procure the cups and the water,” I said with rapidity, for I longed to leave that room for a few moments in which to shake from my eyes some of the tears that were making a mist before them.
“Git a fresh bucket from the spring up the gulch, Bob, while I go beat the boys outen the bushes with the news that they ain’t no revenue. They’ll want to see Bill,” was the direction that wild Jim gave to me as he placed in my hand a rude bucket and pointed up the side of the hill of great steepness. After so doing he descended around the rock by the path which we had ascended.
“What is it that you shall do now, Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye?” I wept a question to myself as I dipped that bucket into a clear pool and made ready to return to the hut. “All is lost to you.
“I do not know,” I answered to myself.
And when I had made a safe return to the hut with a small portion of the water only remaining in the bucket, for the cause of many slides in the steep descent from the pool, I found my Gouverneur Faulkner and my Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, engaged deeply in a mass of papers on the table between them and with no thanks to Roberta, the Marquise of Grez and Bye, when she served to them tin cups of the water and a liquid that I had ascertained by tasting to be of fire. I believe it to be thus that in affairs of business, in the minds of men all women are become drowned.
“Will you write this out for His Excellency, my dear Mademoiselle?” would request my good Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles.
“Thank you,” would be the reply I received from the Gouverneur Faulkner of the State of Harpeth, with never one small look into my eyes that so besought his.
And for all of the hours of that very long afternoon I sat on a low stool beside the feet of those two great gentlemen and served them in their communications while the heart in my breast was going into death by a slow, cruel torture.
The exact meaning of those papers and words of business I did not know, but once I observed my Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, throw down his pencil and look into the face of the Gouverneur Faulkner with a great and stern astonishment.