“I should have done it for any woman,” says I. “So no thanks, if you please, mistress.”
And I looked out of the window again. The dawn was come by that time, and the east was covered with a broad belt of dun-coloured light. When I looked round again I could see her face quite plainly under the hood of her cloak.
“But this danger of yours?” she says, looking at me and then away from me. “I think I—perhaps it might be well—will you tell me what it is?” she says, turning her eyes full on mine again.
“Why,” says I, “’tis just this, cousin. I bear a despatch from Cromwell to Fairfax—here it is, stitched in my doublet. I should have delivered it last night, and because I have not done so, I shall certainly be hanged if Fairfax or Cromwell get hold of me. ’Tis a most grave dereliction of duty that cannot be pardoned. I shall most certainly die for it. So that you see, between being shot here and hanged before Fairfax’s tent door, I have a pretty choice; and faith!” I says, “it causes me some concern, for I am not tired of life, I assure you.”
“And if you had not heard of our danger, you would have delivered your despatch last night?” she says.
“Why,” I says, “I was horseless; but I should have made shift into camp somehow.”
“And did you reflect?” she says, rising from her chair and standing before me, “upon what the consequences would be if you came here to warn us instead of going forward with your despatch? You knew that it was a question of our safety against your own——?”
But what else she meant to say—and I scarce knew what she was anxious to get at—I had no opportunity of learning, for at that moment there rang out a discharge of musketry from the fold, answered by the shots from the corridor where Peter and Benjamin were stationed. “That’s a beginning,” says I, and ran off, leaving her there without further ceremony.