“Surrender?” says I, smiling. “Come, cousin, what do you take me for?”
“I have better thoughts of you than that,” says she. She turned and looked at the door that separated us from Sir Nicholas. “He is near the end,” she says sadly. “Let him die a free man, Richard, even if the old house is tumbling about his death-bed.”
“Give me your hand on it, cousin,” says I, strangely moved. She put her hand in mine and looked into my eyes. “I trust you,” she says, and withdrew her hand, and went back into Sir Nicholas’s chamber.
I called John Stirk to me as I ran down the stairs, and with his aid I moved sufficient of the barricade that secured the window in the herb-room to enable me to get out. “Wait there with your musket until my safe return, John,” says I, and hurried round the corner of the house into the flower-garden. The officer waited me there, leaning against his horse. “So we are to talk, sir,” says I, coming up to him.
“And I am glad of the chance, Master Coope,” says he, frankly. “This is a strange business, and to tell you the truth, though I must and shall do my duty as a soldier. I am loth to be mixed up in it.”
“Sir,” says I, “I am utterly at a loss to understand you.”
“Are you so?” says he. “Look you, Master Coope, how would you explain such things as these? Three days ago, Fairfax issues his warrant for the attachment of Sir Nicholas, your uncle, who has been mighty active of late in vexing and annoying the Parliamentarian forces now investing Pomfret Castle. In order that the thing may be done with as little violence as possible to the old knight’s feelings, he entrusts the warrant to your kinsman, Master Dacre, who on coming to the house, finds it already prepared to withstand a siege. Now within twenty-four hours of his sitting down before it——”
“Or skulking in the stable,” says I, “but I interrupt you, sir,” I says. “Pray proceed.”
“Within twenty-four hours of its investment,” he says, “you secretly hand a most important despatch to one of his troopers, bidding him——”
“Bribing him,” says I.