Chapter VIII.
“Now, Voltaire, the sooner you are on your way back, to warn and comfort your young lady, the better,” said Skerrett. “I’m sorry for your shins among the Highlands by night.”
“Never mind my shins,” Voltaire replied with a martyr air. “They belong to my country and Miss Lucy.”
He passed his hand tenderly along their curvilinear edges, as if he were feeling a scymitar, before a blow. They were sadly nicked, poor things! They would be lacerated anew, as he brandished them at the briers, and smote with them the stumps along his twenty-mile anabasis.
“Farewell, my trump of trumps,” said the Major. “Remember; be cautious, be secret, be wide awake!”
Same pantomime as before in reply.
“If Mrs. Brothertoft suspects anything, there will be tragedy,” Peter continued.
So all three knew, and shuddered to think.
“I will walk a little way with my friend,” said Brothertoft, “I have a more hopeful message now to send to my dear child.”
Peter watched the two contrasted figures until they disappeared in the glow of the many-colored forest.
“Lovely old gentleman!” he thought. “Yes; ‘lovely’ is the word. My first encounter with a broken heart. It has stopped my glee for a long time to come. I have felt tears in my eyes, all the while, and only kept them down by talking low comedy with the serio-comic black personage. Can a broken heart be mended? That is always woman’s work, I suppose. In this case, too, woman broke, woman must repair. The daughter must make over what the wife spoilt. She shall be saved for his sake and her own, even if I come out of the business an amputated torso. I don’t quite comprehend people that cannot help themselves. But here I see the fact, — there are such. And I suppose exuberant chaps, like myself, are put in the world to help them. I wonder whether any woman will break my heart! I wonder whether Miss Lucy liked any of our fellows, and had a hero in her eye to make Kerr look more caitiff than he is. Could not be Scrammel, — he is a sneak. Could not be Radière, — he is too dyspeptic. Nor Humphreys, — too pompous. Nor Livingston, — he is not sentimental enough. Nor Skerrett, — him she has never seen and will see with his moustache off. Ah! the Chief was right when he told me I should put my foot into some adventure up here. And now the thing is started, I must set it moving.”
He walked toward Jierck Dewitt, still on guard at the gate. His relief was just coming up, and the sentry was at liberty.
“Did you know those two men I was talking with, by the well, Jierck?” Peter asked.
“Yes, sir; Sergeant Lincoln and Lady Brothertoft’s factotum. I’d like to know what old Voltaire wanted here.”
“He does not recognize the ex-Patroon,” Skerrett thought. “Then no one will. Jierck’s eyes always saw a little lighter in the dark, and a little steadier in a glare, than the next man’s. Sorrow must have clapped a thick mask on my friend’s face.”
“I suppose you know the Brothertoft Manor country and the Manor-House thoroughly, Jierck,” the Major said.
“Know the Manor, sir! I should think so. I began with chasing tumble-bugs and crickets over it, and studied it inch by inch. Then I trailed black-snakes and ran rabbits, and got to know it rod by rod. I’ve fished in every brook, and clumb every nut-tree, and poked into every woodcock swamp or patridge brush from end to end of it. I know it, woodland and clearing, side-hill and swale, fields that grow stun and fields that grow corn. I’ve run horses over it, where horses is to be run, — and that’s not much, for its awful humpy country, and boulders won’t stay put anywheres. Deer, too, — there ain’t many pieces of woods on it where I haven’t routed out deers, and when they legged for the Highlands, I legged too, and come to know the Highlands just as well. I used to love, when I was a boy, to go along on the heights above the river, and pick out places where I was going to live; but I sha’n’t live in any of ’em now. What does a man care about home, or living at all, when his woman isn’t true?”
Major Skerrett did not interrupt this burst of remembrances. “Jierck suffers as much in his way,” he thought, “as the ex-Patroon.” “And the house,” he said, “you know that as thoroughly?”
