Chapter V

IN WHICH CAPTAIN JERMAIN'S MEMORY IS USEFUL.

Andrew entered the dining-parlor timorously. He made his way thither by the little passage into which opened the outer kitchen containing the Highland prisoner and his guards. It was shut. The servants, who questioned him eagerly as to Lord Armitage's security, told him that to knock at the door was only to have one of the guards come to it and slam it in his face. They would allow nobody within but themselves.

His father sat at the head of the long table, only half of which was laid. The three cavaliers had begun hungrily on meats, bread, and potables.

"Come and sit down here, my lad," called out Captain Jermain kindly, well-disposed to pay some attention to his host's attractive son; "you are a fine, tall fellow. I dare say you will be carrying the king's colors yourself one of these days--eh?"

Andrew seated himself between the captain and Gilbert. A glance passed between father and boy as he did so. Boyd read in it a quick reassurance upon the state of mind of Lord Armitage above-stairs.

A man who better liked plain-dealing than Gilbert Boyd of Windlestrae it would be hard to light upon. To seem to be what he was not stifled him. Nevertheless, his feeling of sacred duty to the fugitive, to whom he had sworn protection by every lawful means, induced him to waive scruples and to preside at this supper with a remarkable simulation of calmness and of desire to make the three soldiers at ease in the Manor. As far as possible, he diverted the talk from politics, where he must and would betray himself rather than lie! "I have been rumored a Whig so long to no good," he thought, resignedly, "that I may as well let the error keep alive on such a night as this, when it can save a life. Humph."

Presently he said aloud: "Help yourselves freely, gentlemen. I am sorry, by the way, that the Manor can offer you no better liquors than our own ales and usquebaugh."

"Oh, no apologies, no apologies," replied Captain Jermain. "This is the very lap of luxury for us. I trust that when these troubled times end--and his ragged Princeship with his bare-legged support are hanged--many a hospitable Whig like yourself will call upon us in London, or anywhere else, and be repaid for your trouble in kind. To your health, Mr. Boyd!"

"Be entirely at ease, sir, as to trouble," Gilbert answered, raising his ale-glass; "there is always room and to spare in this old nook."

Andrew nerved himself in the instant of silence ensuing: "Was the prisoner that you captured--was he--a person of consequence, sir?" he faltered.

Roxley, the elder of the two other troopers (and who, Gilbert soon decided, was a special favorite with the young captain and a man of some petty rank), exclaimed, with a sneering oath: "Consequence? I should scarce think so!" Jermain, however, bent his eyes pleasantly on the embarrassed boy, and replied: "Faith, no, my young warrior! A tattered and villainous hind, lurking about, whom we sighted slipping into a copse two or three miles above the crossroads."

Our hero longed to put the captive upstairs in possession of even this slight portion of what he desired to know. But Boyd took up the cue intuitively.

"Did you run him down?"

"Ay. By some awkwardness the villain tripped; and though he wrestled with Roxley like a tiger, and won sundry thumps and cuts for his pains, we managed to master him. He is all bone and muscle, I verily believe."

"Simply a wandering spy, Captain, depend upon it!" affirmed Dawkin. "Whatever he was busy about," he continued, to Andrew's father, "he refused to speak a syllable of, in spite of all our little measures--ha, ha, Captain! But we will see what the guard-room at Neith can do for him to-morrow. Here's to his obstinacy after Danforth gets hold of him!"

"His straps must be looked to sharply before we go to bed," suggested Roxley.

"Yes," added the captain, drinking; "'tis a pity that Tracey and Saville must lose their sleep to-night on his account."

Boyd shuddered at the mention of those "little measures," and the persuasions of the Neith guard-room. The Spanish boots, the whip-corded eyeballs, the thumb-screw, and brimstone-sliver were meant. God help the poor wretch who became Danforth's victim! Clearly nothing more was to be discovered as to the prisoner from his captors. Andrew determined to slip back to the outer kitchen, and thence up to Lord Armitage with just so much intelligence as he had come by. But he would do well to wait until the exactly right excuse should offer for his leaving the room. The troopers pushed back their chairs and refilled their glasses of whiskey-and-water. Good cheer began to tell on their tongues. Jermain rose, stretched himself, and stared about the room in great good-humor. He noticed a small hanging-shelf with half a dozen books on it, and thereupon turned amiably to Andrew.

"So you go to school up in this forsaken region of the kingdom, do you, Andrew? You remind me not a little of a fair young cousin of mine, Eustace Jermain, down in Warwickshire. He is now a scholar, too, prosing away at some Oxford college."

"I have always been at school when there was any school to go to, sir. But my father has taught me for the most part, and once or twice I had a tutor, by good luck."

"And I, too, by ill-luck!" The young man laughed, sauntering up to the shelf and glancing over the titles. "What a life I led them! Ah! 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' 'The Call to Truth,' 'Common Prayer,' 'An History of Rome,' 'Virgil's Æneid--' So you know Latin here, friend Boyd? I used to know it myself. How begins old Virgil?--

"'Ar--arma v_o_rumque can_i_,'

it goes, don't it?" He opened the volume idly. In so doing his eye fell upon the title-page.

He read the name written there with an exclamation of surprise. Then holding the Virgil he came back to his chair, puzzling over the fly-leaf. Next he smote his hand upon the board with an impetuous, "By the sword of Claver'se! 'Jonas Lockett, His Book.' Can it be the man? What Jonas, except our long-legged Jonas, wrote that cramped fist? Tell me, friend Boyd, was Jonas Lockett, an Edinboro' pedagogue, ever in _your_ house, here, a certain winter?"

"One of my son's instructors, years ago, was so named," replied Boyd, cautiously. He did not like to give these interlopers the least significant bit of information upon his family or its history.

"Was he from Edinboro'? Tell me of him. Well, well, well--Jonas Lockett! Ha!"

"There is little to tell, sir. I understood that he was from Edinboro'. His health suffered there and he travelled into Perthshire and Inverness to recruit it. He was poor and somehow came to me for help. Andrew's ignorance enabled me to give it him. But he only stayed with us a season. I have scarce thought of him since. Did you know him also?"

"Know him! Truly I did. I recollect that he came from Scotland directly before he entered my father's employ. A tall, lean, quick-spoken fellow, with a sly eye and many odd stories at his tongue's end."

"The same, I dare say," Boyd assented, indifferently; "an odd coincidence. But the world is a narrow place, Captain."

Andrew glanced uneasily from one face to the other. Was even this trivial discovery likely to breed the seed of any fresh danger? Danger lurked in every turn of thought or speech.

Jermain continued turning over the leaves of the Virgil absently.

"Upon my honor!" he suddenly cried, throwing down the book; "of what have I been thinking? This, too, must be the very old Scotch house that Lockett told me all about one evening at the Parsonage! I declare--I have heard of you and it before this night, friend Boyd. I remembered it not until now."

"Ah!" came Gilbert's dry monosyllable. Boyd's whole being was at once wholly on the alert. Andrew thought it best not to make for that outer door quite yet.

"Nor is that all," continued the young officer, draining his glass. "I dare wager that through Lockett's describing his life here that winter, besides his being a famous hand to poke and pry about and meddle with other people's concerns, I know a rare little secret of you and your Manor House, friend Boyd."

"Captain Jermain! How--what?--I do not understand you, sir!" exclaimed Gilbert, growing pale and turning sharply upon the young soldier. Andrew grasped the arm of his chair so tightly that his knuckles were white. Peril, relentless peril--could it be possible?--and from so remote a chance! Dawkin and Roxley looked around from their discussion, surprised at the excited turn the talk behind them had taken.

"What's all this in the wind now?" asked Dawkin.

"Nothing, except that I am in possession of a family mystery of friend Boyd's here," returned Jermain gayly, "or I think I am. Forgive me, Boyd, but the jest is too good! Let me explain. You must know that Lockett slept sometimes in a room in your old house called--what the mischief was it called?--the Green--the Red--no, the Purple Chamber! That's it, the Purple Chamber; and opening out of this Purple Chamber is a secret room, to be got at by a spring-panel in the wall; a most curious old place altogether--and, by the by, perhaps just the sort of strong room that Tracey and Saville have been wishing for to shut that slippery rascal into to-night. Ha! ha! ha! Boyd, I'm sorry for you, for you see that I did know this little family secret after all, did I not? Oh, man, don't look so tragic over it. See his face, Roxley! By all that is hospitable to mad wags like ourselves here, you shall make amends for your soberness by taking us all upstairs and helping us to find out this wonderful hole. Up, Roxley! Up, Dawkin!" continued the domineering young trooper, already excited by the usquebaugh and full of a boyish delight at having someone to tease who was quite in his power; "you, too, my blue-eyed Andrew! Your father must pilot us upstairs at once, or he is no honest host. Huzzah!"

"Huzzah! huzzah!" chimed in Roxley and Dawkin. Jermain seized the candles, and, laughing boisterously, forced one of them into the terrified Boyd's hand. Roxley caught hold of the master's arm. Boyd stood between them, the color of the wall, rigid, his eyes conveying to Andrew a despairing signal. Through the crack of the door were peering Mistress Annan and some women-servants, with blanched cheeks.

Ruin had stalked in a few seconds into their midst.

Terrible was the temptation to Gilbert Boyd as he was held there in the half-sportive, half-brutal grasp of the dragoons. Yet might one bold falsehood save everything! How easy to cry out, "That wing of my house was burnt to the ground years ago!" or to declare that the Mouse's Nest itself had been opened up and its secrecy destroyed--one of a half-dozen other excuses, proffered with the dignity of a man in his own house might avert the calamity precipitating. Hospitality--the saving of a guest's life--did not these cry out for a lie?

But he did not utter it. Not he, Gilbert Boyd, of Windlestrae. It was not because with the thought of falsehood he remembered that those beside him would probably exact proof. It was because too keenly upon his conscience pressed the acted-out departures from strict truth of which this bitter evening had already made him guilty. These must be none worse henceforth. He would obey his God; and God would sustain him and his. Nevertheless he was mortal man enough to protest, as he wrested his wrist from the familiar grasp of the leering Dawkin and stood commandingly before the trio: "Gentlemen--Captain Jermain--you have forgotten yourselves! It--it is impossible! The room--the room is all in unreadiness. Mistress Annan hath charge of it--I cannot take you into it to-night. Let me go, I beg, Captain! You carry your wild humors too far."

"Oh, no, Boyd, not a step too far," retorted Roxley, "provided you carry us upstairs with you."

"But--but--I assure you, gentlemen, the--the Nest is wholly unfit for the purposes of a prison. Listen to me, Captain Jermain, I pray. Only be reasonable, Mr. Roxley! It is not in repair; and we have under our roof another, a much securer place of the sort, if you insist on one----"

"Hardly, Mr. Boyd, I dare wager," interrupted Captain Jermain, laughing afresh at what he counted Gilbert's absurd annoyance over the "family secret."

"A strong, well-barred room in the East Wing, overhead, that was fitted up for a gaol, and hath been so employed before now. I will send and have it made ready to show you, gentlemen. Release my arm, Captain, I insist! I will _not_ consent."

Jermain, Dawkin, and Roxley seemed the more amused at his annoyance. It was plain that only forcible resistance would check their folly, and forcible resistance was not to be, for an instant, considered.

Had Lord Armitage been listening? Ought not he to be within the Mouse's Nest--out of earshot? He must be warned and extricated. Andrew responded to that intense look from his father's eyes by a quick step toward the hall-door, frantic to dash headlong up the dark stairs and transmit an alarm through the panel in the Purple Chamber. Ah, by his own pledge he had made more certain the doom of his friend! By his own pledge!

But the captain interrupted him by a single stride. "Hold there, friend Andrew, my bonny Highland chiel! No dodging upward to warn any pretty faces that have shut themselves into this same old room. They shall be gallantly surprised by a serenade before their portal. Here!" continued Jermain, snatching a candle from the elder Boyd, and bestowing it in Andrew's unwilling grasp; "you shall head the exploring party! Huzzah!"

With one arm about Boyd's neck, and holding Andrew between Roxley and himself, Jermain set the unsteady procession on the march from the dining-parlor and out into the hall, the three shouting boisterously: "Above-stairs, all of us! Huzzah!" and singing, like the caricature of a death-hymn, as they approached the first step, that roystering refrain:

"King George, God bless him forever!
And down with the _White Cockades!_"