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قراءة كتاب Joscelyn Cheshire: A Story of Revolutionary Days in the Carolinas
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Joscelyn Cheshire: A Story of Revolutionary Days in the Carolinas
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
| FACING PAGE | |
| “She swept him a courtesy full of open defiance and ridicule.” | Frontispiece |
| “Thus they passed, with small parley, the picket-posts.” | 48 |
| “Richard was dragged along with the British until their position was regained.” | 81 |
| “... The Prisoners lined up and answered to their names.” | 149 |
| “For a long minute he stood there, trembling, horror-stricken.” | 164 |
| “‘My God, Joscelyn, you will not give me up like that!’” | 226 |
| “‘I have seen no human being save our party of three.’” | 262 |
| “‘My Heart’s prisoner for time and eternity.’” | 331 |
JOSCELYN CHESHIRE.
CHAPTER I.
CUPID AND MARS.
“Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat.”
—Shakespeare.
He threw the door wide open and, with one foot advanced and his weight on the other hip, stood at pose with uplifted arm and sword; as gallant a figure as ever melted a maiden’s heart or stormed a foeman’s citadel. There was great suggestion of power in the straight limbs, a marvellous promise of strength in the upward sweep of the arm, which, for a moment, held the inmates of the room in silence of admiration. Then an avalanche of exclamations broke loose.
“Richard, Richard!”
“Master Clevering!”
“A health to the young Continental!”
“Oh, the new uniform, how bravely it doth become him!”
“The buff and blue forever!”
“What an air the coat gives him.”
“And the breeches have never a wrinkle in them. I have ever said, my son, that you were not over fair of feature, but that the Lord made it up to you in the shape o’ your legs.” The last speaker was his mother, who, passing behind him, ran her fingers caressingly along the seams of his military outfit.
The young man lowered his sword and answered with a boyish laugh: “And truly did the Lord owe me a debt in that He gave me not your beauty, mother.”
“He balanced His account,” was the complacent answer, “for you are a fit figure to please even a king.”
“Nay, I care not to please the king—but the assembled queens!” He doffed his hat, and bowed with courtly grace to the group of young women in the centre of the room.
Full of laughter and chaffing they crowded about him—his sister Betty, her friend Patience Ruffin, Mistress Dorothy Graham, who had come in to learn a new knitting stitch of Betty, and pretty Janet Cameron, who had followed Dorothy to hear the gossip which must necessarily flow freely where so many women were assembled. Immediately they surrounded the young soldier, and there was much laughter and talking as they relieved him of his sword and gun.
“Only a private in the ranks, and yet here am I attended like a commander-in-chief,” he said, laughing. “Methinks no hero of olden romance had ever such charming squirage. Are you going to give me your gloves and fasten your colours on my helmet, that I may go forth to battle as did the knights of yore?”
“Yes; kill me a Redcoat for this,” and Janet tossed him her glove, while Dorothy tied a strand of the bright wool from her knitting ball upon his sleeve. “An you win not a battle for each of us, you are no knight of ours.”
But the fifth girl of the group, after one glance at him upon his entrance, had turned abruptly to the window and stood gazing into the street, tapping the air to “King George, Our Royal Ruler” upon the panes. No part of her face was visible, but her attitude was spirited, and the poise of her head bespoke defiance. Richard Clevering’s eyes travelled every few minutes to that straight, lithe figure, and anon he called out banteringly:—
“Hey, you, there at the window, are King George and his army passing by that you have no eyes for other folk?”
“I would that they were,” was the short answer, and the fingers went on with their strumming.
“Come, Joscelyn, leave off sulking and see how brave Richard’s uniform doth make him,” said Betty, coaxingly, eager that her brother’s unspoken wish should be gratified.
“And truly doth he need somewhat to make him brave, seeing he is in arms against his king,” Joscelyn retorted, but turned not her head.
“In arms against the king? Aye, truly am I; and yours be not the only Royalist back I shall see ’twixt this and the end of the campaign, Mistress Joscelyn Cheshire.”
“Then, forsooth, will they be in luck—not having you to look at.”
But the others had caught his meaning, and her retort was half lost in the shout of laughter that greeted him.
“Aye, I warrant me when the fighting comes you