‘I’ll take him with me as far as the post of the Devon militia,’ said the gruff field-officer, who had now completed the tightening of his belt and the adjustment of his cloak. ‘My orderly must look after him, sergeant.’
Lord Harrogate, in the act of receiving the reports for the night, with some surprise beheld Richard Hold, master-mariner, marched up under escort to the door of his hastily pitched tent. He knew the man at once. That sallow, swarthy countenance had attracted some notice in the quiet Devonshire country-side near High Tor.
‘You want me, then, it seems, Mr’—— began the future Earl of Wolverhampton.
‘Hold, my lord! Dick Hold, very much at your service!’ returned the seaman, ‘if these men’—with a half-angry glance at the file of militia privates to left and right, and the pink-faced young corporal who, stiff as a ramrod, commanded the guard—‘would give a fellow breathing-time.’
At a sign from Lord Harrogate, the escort fell back, and Richard Hold was at liberty to speak. ‘Did your lordship ever hear what happens to a pig when he swims?’ asked the seaman abruptly; and without giving his auditor leisure to reply to the queer question, he resumed: ‘He cuts his throat, they say; and so do I, maybe, in speaking as I’m going to do. I’ve been paid for silence until it goes agin me to speak, even to spoil the game of one who hasn’t used me well.’
Lord Harrogate, smiling, looked steadily at the man, and read a good deal of his character at a glance.
‘Vain, shrewd, boastful, and a bully;’ such was his rapid summary of Hold’s qualities; ‘but with a stout heart to back his bullying, which is not a common conjunction. The fellow must be smarting under some sense of injury, or he would not be here.’
He saw too that Mr Hold was in that peculiar condition as to the effects of liquor which police constables delicately define when they say that the prisoner at the bar ‘had been drinking, but was not tipsy.’
Now, no suspicion that the stranger was even flustered by drink had entered the minds of his late military custodians, or he would never have been admitted within the pickets. Hold, when questioned before, had seemed as sober as a Good Templar. There is, however, as men of the world know, such a thing as latent intoxication, precisely as there is such a thing as latent heat; and even such a seasoned vessel as Richard Hold may suddenly, under excitement, feel the staggering effects of brandy swallowed hours ago.