“At last I gave up, and the captain and Pike took the foils, while we sat and watched them. He was more than a match for Pike, and at last crying, ‘Take care! here is a botte you do not know,’ caught him fair in the left chest.
“‘By George! Mr. Wynne, that is a pretty piece of play! I remember now Major Montresor tried to show it to me. He said it was that way you killed Lord Charles Trevor.’
“I was shocked to know he had killed a man, and Hugh looked up with his big mother-eyes, while the captain said coolly:
“‘Yes; a sad business, and about a woman, of course. It is dreadful to have that kind of a disposition, boys, that makes you dangerous to some one who wants what you want. He was very young too. A pity! a pity!’
“Hugh and I said nothing; but I had the odd notion that he was threatening us. One gets these ideas vaguely in youth, and sometimes after-events justify them. However, the fancy soon took me to fence with Hugh in his room, for I dared not risk asking my father’s leave. As Hugh got his lessons both from Pike and the captain, and became very expert, I got on pretty nearly as fast as he.
“At times we practised in our shirt-sleeves in the garden at Miss Wynne’s, or fenced with Graydon, who was later the most expert small sword we had in the army. Hugh soon became nearly as skilful, but I was never as clever at it.”
One day we were busy, as Jack has described, when who should come out into the garden but Mistress Wynne and Darthea, and behind them the captain. We dropped our points, but Miss Peniston cried out, “Go on! go on!” and, laughing, we fell to again.
Presently I, a bit distracted, for I was facing Darthea’s eyes, felt Jack’s foil full on my chest. Darthea clapped her hands, and, running forward, would pin a bunch of red ribbons she took from her shoulder on Jack’s sleeve. Jack fell back, as red as the ribbons, and my aunt cried out, “Darthea, you are too forward!”
The young woman flushed, and cast down the bow, and as Arthur Wynne bent to pick it up set her foot on it. I saw the captain rise, and stand with the half-shut eyes and the little drop of the jaw I have already mentioned. My aunt, who liked the girl well, went after her at once as she left us in a pet to return to the house. I saw my aunt put a hand on her shoulder, and then the captain, looking vexed, followed after. An hour later I went to look for the ribbon. It was gone, and for years I knew not where, till, in a little box in Jack’s desk, I came upon it neatly tied up.
Young as I was, I began to see that here were Captain Wynne, and possibly my friend, in the toils of a girl,—she was but seventeen,—and I, alas! no better off; but of this I breathed not a word to any. Jack hung about her and fell back when any less shy man wanted his place. I felt that he was little likely to have his way, and that neither he nor I had much chance in such a game against a man like my cousin. He had played with hearts before, and the maid listened like Desdemona to this dark-browed soldier when he talked of courts and kings, and faraway Eastern battles, and the splendour of the Orient. My aunt, whom nothing escaped, looked on much amused. Perhaps she did not take as serious the love-affairs of lads like Jack and me. We were like enough to have a dozen before we were really captured. That I was becoming at twenty-one more thoughtful and resolute than far older people, she did not see, and she was sometimes vexed at my sober ways. I was at times gay enough, but at others she would reproach me with not taking more pains to please her guests. Society, she said, had duties as well as pleasures. My friend Jack no one fully understood in those days, nor knew the sweet manhood and the unselfishness that lay beneath his girl-like exterior.