"I'll go with you," I replied, grasping Plummer's hand again, "and God bless you!"
"The Young Eagle, then, at Stonington, eh?" He slapped his pockets and started off. "I'm bound up-country to see my sweetheart," he shouted back from over his shoulder, and I heard him chanting the "Sailor's Return" as he disappeared about a bend in the road.
I gathered my rags and made for the brook, where I looked at myself until I became fairly ashamed, and threw a stone at my reflection in the water. Then taking off my clothes, I donned the old ones, and hiding my bundle beneath the old flat rock where I kept the Robinson Crusoe, an old horse-pistol, and many treasures (including a half-score of the De Brienne buttons), I went up to the house. I could see that my uncle was in a strange excitement (that he was going mad I have no doubt of now). Gaston cast a suspicious look at me, in return for which I, elated by the doings of the day, made a threatening gesture. Of a truth, I think the man had grown afraid of me, for he cringed.
At twelve o'clock that night I was awakened by some one stirring in my room. I looked up. It was my uncle. He was in his night-dress, and his gray hair straggled over his ears. Held close to his side, as if it rested in a scabbard, was a narrow court sword, whose naked blade flashed in the ray of the moonlight that came in at the curtainless window.
"No, by St. Michel, they shall not enter!" he cried, and he stopped suddenly, rigid, as if he were listening for some one coming up the stairs. Then he turned to the bed on which I lay.
"Arise, your Majesty!" he said. "They're upon us. Come, gentlemen, stand fast!"
Again he listened. "No, they're gone," he whispered, softly. "Is the Princess calling for me?" He made as if to sheathe the sword, and I saw, in doing so, the sharp blade cut into the palm of his left hand; but he paid no attention to it, and went down stairs.
To say that I had shuddered would not express it. And suddenly, as if a burst of light had come upon me, the idea that I need no longer stay flooded my brain.
"Why, he might murder me!" I thought, the conviction coming then for the first time that he had turned mad-man. I arose, and only putting on half my clothing and my shoes, I lowered myself out of the window.
It was cloudless, and the moon was at the full. My shadow chased before me as I ran down the path. Freedom! freedom! seemed to beckon me. I breathed the same sensation that I had on that clear moonlight night when the salt breeze was in my hair, and when the wide sea rose and fell and the little brig dashed through it—as if she had caught my exultation of I hers.