Well, she brings a chair out on the verandah, and Sir Ferdinand he sat down on a bench there for half-an-hour, talking away and laughing, just as gentlemen will to pretty girls, no matter who they are. And I could see Aileen look up and laugh now and then, pleased like. She couldn’t help it. And there was I stuck in the confounded barn among the straw all the time looking out through one of the cracks and wondering if he was ever going to clear out. Sometimes I thought the trooper, who was getting tired of dodging about doing nothing, couldn’t be off seeing my horse’s tracks leading slap into the barn door. But he was thinking of something else, or else wasn’t much in the tracking line. Some men would see a whole army of fresh tracks, as plain as print, right under their noses and wouldn’t drop down to anything.
However, last of all I saw him unhitch his horse and take the bridle on his arm, and then Aileen put on her hat and walked up to the top of the ridge along the stony track with him. Then I saw him mount and start off at a rattling good bat along the road to Turon and the trooper after him. I felt all right again then, and watched Aileen come slowly down the road again with her head down, quite thoughtful like, very different from the way she went up. She didn’t stop at the house, but walked straight down to the barn and came in at the door. I wondered what she would do when she saw my horse. But she didn’t start, only said—
“You may come out now, Dick; I knew you were here. I saw you ride in just as Sir Ferdinand and the trooper came up.”
“So that’s why you were making yourself so pleasant,” says I laughingly. “I mustn’t tell Starlight, I suppose, or we shall be having a new yarn in the newspapers—‘Duel between Sir Ferdinand Morringer and Captain Starlight.’ ”
She laughed too, and then looked sad and serious like again.
“I wonder if we shall ever have an end to this wretched hide-and-seek work. God knows I would do anything that an honest girl could do for you boys and him, but it sometimes looks dark enough, and I have dreadful fears that all will be in vain, and that we are fated to death and ruin at the end.”
“Come, come, don’t break down before the time,” I said. “It’s been a close shave, though; but Sir Ferdinand won’t be back for a bit, so we may as well take it easy. I’ve got a lot to say to you.”
“He said he wouldn’t be back this way till Friday week,” says she. “He has an escort to see to then, and he expected to be at Stony Creek in a couple of hours from this. He’ll have to ride for it.”
We walked over to the house. Neither of us said anything for a bit. Mother was sitting in her old chair by the fire knitting. Many a good pair of woollen socks she’d sent us, and many’s the time we’d had call to bless her and her knitting—as we sat our horses, night after night, in a perishing frost, or when the rain set in that run of wet winters we had, when we’d hardly a dry stitch on us by the week together, when we had enough of them and the neck wrappers, I expect plenty of others round about were glad to get ’em. It was partly for good nature, for mother was always a kindhearted poor soul as ever was, and would give away the shoes off her feet—like most Irish people I’ve met—to anyone that wanted them worse than herself, and partly for the ease it gave her mind to be always doing something steady like. Mother hadn’t book-learning, and didn’t always understand the things Aileen read to her. She was getting too old to do much in the house now. But her eyes were wonderful good still, and this knitting was about the greatest pleasure she had left in the world. If anything had happened to stop her from going on with that, I don’t believe she would have lived a month.
Her poor old face brightened up when she seen me, and for a few minutes you’d have said no thought of trouble could come anigh her. Then the tears rolled down her cheeks, and I could see her lips moving, though she did not speak the words. I knew what she was doing, and if that could have kept us right we’d never have gone wrong in the world. But
