The trader again looked sideways at the speaker, shrugged his shoulders and waved his hand. "Oh, he—he despises me too much for that! Eh bien! to-day I love to see him live. When there is no wine in the cup, but only dregs that are bitter, I laugh to see it at his lips. She,—Ma'm'selle Audrey, that never before could I coax into my boat,—she reached me her hand, she came with me down the river, through the night-time, and left him behind at Westover. Ha! think you not that was bitter, that drink which she gave him, Mr. Marmaduke Haward of Fair View? Since then, if I go to that house, that garden at Williamsburgh, she hides, she will not see me; the man and his wife make excuse! Bad! But also he sees her never. He writes to her: she answers not. Good! Let him live, with the fire built around him and the splinters in his heart!"
He laughed again, and, dismissing the subject with airiness somewhat exaggerated, drew out his huge gilt snuffbox. The snow was now falling more thickly, drawing a white and fleecy veil between the two upon the road and the story-teller and his audience beneath the distant elm. "Are you for Williamsburgh?" demanded the Highlander, when he had somewhat abruptly declined to take snuff with Monsieur Jean Hugon.
That worthy nodded, pocketing his box and incidentally making a great jingling of coins.
"Then," quoth MacLean, "since I prefer to travel alone, twill wait here until you have passed the rolling-house in the distance yonder. Good-day to you!"
He seated himself upon the stump of a tree, and, giving all his attention to the snow, began to whistle a thoughtful air. Hugon glanced at him with fierce black eyes and twitching lips, much desiring a quarrel; then thought better of it, and before the tune had come to an end was making with his long and noiseless stride his lonely way to Williamsburgh, and the ordinary in Nicholson Street.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE PLAYER
About this time, Mr. Charles Stagg, of the Williamsburgh theatre in Virginia, sent by the Horn of Plenty, bound for London, a long letter to an ancient comrade and player of small parts at Drury Lane. A few days later, young Mr. Lee, writing by the Golden Lucy to an agreeable rake of his acquaintance, burst into a five-page panegyric upon the Arpasia, the Belvidera, the Monimia, who had so marvelously dawned upon the colonial horizon. The recipient of this communication, being a frequenter of Button's, and chancing one day to crack a bottle there with Mr. Colley Cibber, drew from his pocket and read to that gentleman the eulogy of Darden's Audrey, with the remark that the writer was an Oxford man and must know whereof he wrote.
Cibber borrowed the letter, and the next day, in the company of Wilks and a bottle of Burgundy, compared it with that of Mr. Charles Stagg,—the latter's correspondent having also brought the matter to the great man's notice.
"She might offset that pretty jade Fenton at the Fields, eh, Bob?" said Cibber. "They're of an age. If the town took to her"—