“Nay, he speaks the truth,” said Mobray; “and I thank God ’t is so. Don’t cry. I am glad to go; and though I have wasted my life, ’t is a happier death than poor John André’s.”
For a moment only the sobs of the girl could be heard, then the dying man gaspingly resumed: “A comrade I once had whom I loved best in this world till I knew you. By a strange chance we loved the same girl; I wish I might die with the knowledge that he is to have the happiness that was denied to me.”
“Oh, Sir Frederick, you must not ask it! He—”
“His was so bitter a story that he deserves a love such as yours would be to make it up to him. I can remember him the merriest of us all, loved by every man in the regiment, from batman to colonel.”
“And what changed him?” Janice could not help asking.
“T was one evening at the mess of the Fusileers, when Powel, too deep in drink to know what he was saying, blurted out something concerning Mrs. Loring’s relations with Sir William. Poor Charlie was the one man in the force who knew not why such favouritism had been shown in his being put so young into Howe’s regiment. But that we were eight to one, he’d have killed Powel then and there. Prevented in that, he set off to slay his colonel, never dreaming he was his own father. He burst in on me late that night, crazed with grief, and told me how he had found him at his mother’s, and how she had robbed him of his vengeance by a word. The next day he disappeared, and never news had I of him until that encounter at Greenwood. Does he not deserve something to sweeten his life?”
“I feel for him deeply,” replied the girl, sadly, “the more that I did him a grave wrong in my thoughts, and by some words I spoke must have cut him to the quick and added pain to pain.”
“Then you will make him happy?”
“No, Sir Frederick, that I cannot.”
“Don’t punish him for what was not his fault.”