CHAPTER X

How Vere Came to Newark, and Bee Consented to be Betrothed to Him.

It was the last day of 1813 when the raid that Ferguson had escaped joining was made, and Buffalo and Black Rock went up in flames. Fortunately the terrified inhabitants had fled, when their troops retreated--it is not very clear why--but everything they left was destroyed or carried off. And so 1813 ended, with black ashes strewn on either side of Niagara River, and a blacker hate in the hearts of Americans and Canadians alike.

Bee shivered, not with cold, but at the thought of the hate of war, as she left the house one brilliantly cold January day. She meant to take a long sledge drive by herself, and think things over. Like many others on both sides, the war hurt her cruelly, because in many ways it was so like a civil war. Yet after seeing the burning of Newark, she could not blame the savage retaliation from the Canadian side, and she could not hate Ned, or Betty and Sir John, with whom her brother had been quite willing to leave her--"But," she thought, "I cannot possibly be happy, or think of marrying a Canadian till this war is over, without anyone I love getting killed."

Then she saw Ned. He had left the house for the first time, to try a short walk, but he had over-rated his strength, and he was staggering, when a cutter drew up beside him, and he looked into Bee's bright face, as she said--"Oh, dear, how foolish men are. When you wanted to go out, why didn't you let someone know, and we would have taken you out. Get in here now."

"Just back to the house, please, Miss Bee," said Ned as he obeyed and sat down among the soft, thick furs. "Your guardians would not allow you to be with me a moment, if they knew what you do of me--what I told you at York--Miss Bee, what are you doing?"

For the wilful girl had let the spirited horse go, and they were flying out of ruined Newark, and away across the open country, where the keen air thrilled Ned like wine. Her horse kept Bee's hands full, but she looked round at Ned for a moment as she spoke, and he wondered that he had never noticed how bright and soft her eyes were. "Listen," she said, "of course I never repeated what you told me, but I know Cousin Betty suspects something--I thought you must have written and told her--and she doesn't mind at all. She said that women must always overlook a few things in a man, and I'm sure I can overlook you being accused of a crime you did not commit."

Ned gasped, realizing that there was a big misunderstanding somewhere--but he was so desperately lonely. Shut in with his secret, it was hard for him to refuse the sweet comradeship of this warm-hearted girl.

"Miss Bee," he began gravely, "you must have mistaken Mrs. Haslem. I believe Sir John will reach Newark to-day, and when he sees my name marked for honour, he may consent that I receive pardon for what I did not do; but I know I shall lose all other rewards; I shall doubtless be allowed to fight in the ranks till the end of the war, and afterwards I can find something to do. I know my father will never forgive me, and I will never go back to Dr. Brown with this stain on my name. You should not ride out with me like this."

Ned spoke with all the bitterness that had been fermenting in his brain so long, and with his hot hands clenched under the furs. Then a small hand, that was cool and very firm was suddenly laid on them, and its touch calmed Ned strangely--"You know very well that I will be your friend till death," said Bee Goode.

Behind them at Newark, Sir John and Vere had arrived, and the baronet sent Vere off to find Bee, while he talked over Ned's case with the Niagara officers.

Vere rode off, greatly disturbed to know that Ned had not deserted with Sells, and dropped forever out of his world. He hated him with all his weak, unwholesome nature, and then he saw him, in the sledge with the girl his grandfather had determined he should marry.

In a moment he was beside them, shouting with an oath--"I thought your dirty American blood would show some time, you minx! What spy work are you plotting with this deserter?"

[Illustration: "Take that! you coward!"]

Instantly Bee was on her feet, and with the strength of anger, struck him across the face with her whip--"Take that, you coward," she cried, "and never dare to speak to me again." Then turning her horse she drove home in a storm of jangling bells and flying hoofs.

She left Ned at the hospital door, and went to find Chloe waiting with her one silk dress--blue with a white flower pattern.

"Missy must dress up fine to-night," said the old nurse. "Mr. Vere is here, the gentleman who is to marry you, honey."

Bee thought Chloe was mad for a moment, but when the woman repeated what Betty had told her, she understood the mistake she had made at York.

"But I won't dress, I'll stay in my room, and lock the door while that cowardly liar is in the house," she cried. "And to-night we will run away, you and I to my brother."

"We can't, honey," said Chloe sympathetically. "There's miles of snow and burnt houses, and soldiers who would stop us, and that almighty wild river that nobody can't get over nohow. Let me dress you, honey, and make you look pretty, then you can go down and ask Mr. Percy to help you--he's here now."

Percy had not seen Bee since he left her, a slip of a girl, to go on to York, a year before, and for an instant he hardly recognized this silk-robed, pale-faced young woman, with her haughty poise, and flashing eyes. Then she was speaking to him, passionately and impulsively, repeating what Ned had told her at York, until he said, so sternly that she started at him--"That's enough, Bee, this is the first time you have shown yourself untrue to the Haslem name, let it be the last. Vere has his faults, but no man of our family could be a coward or lie."

"My name is Goode, sir," said Bee, at white heat now, "and I am sorry that I am half a Haslem if their family pride makes them blind to the vices of a relative. Sir, I demand that you send me across to my brother--to my father's people."

"Bee!" exclaimed Betty aghast, but Percy, after a keen look at the girl, said slowly and sternly--"I have just come from considering Ned Edgar's case. If he admits to having been afraid to deliver the note at York, we can pardon his panic--seeing what his record has been since--on his first day under fire, unless he persists in this attempt to smirch the name of another man."

Bee read a threat to Ned in the emphasis Percy put on his last words, and she forgot herself, thinking of Ned's possible danger. Then in came Sir John, furious, for Vere had given him his version of the red welt on his face, but the angry words on the old man's lips were checked as he saw the child he had left at York shot up into young womanhood--"Bless me," he exclaimed, "I didn't know you."

She made a mocking little courtesy to him. "My cousin did not know me either, it would seem, sir. I met a sick soldier and was driving him home, when Vere met us and spoke insultingly to me; I hope sir, you will say I did right to strike him."

"Bless me," Sir John repeated helplessly. "I don't know what the world is coming to."

He was relieved at hearing the summons to dinner then, the dinner which was to publicly announce the betrothal of Vere and Bee. Such family arrangements for the marriage of young people who hardly knew one another were not uncommon then, and the guests did not pay particular attention to the sulky boy, who felt that he hated this "Yankee girl," as he called her in his heart, who had so openly shown that she was on his enemy's side. And the girl herself, who in white-faced silence heard her grandfather's speech, felt trapped, believing that if she resisted it meant further injustice and suffering for Ned.

The evening was almost over when Archy got Bee away by herself. "I thought you would like to know about Ned," he said bluntly. "He just wouldn't say anything, only that him or Vere Haslem was a blamed liar, and we could decide which it was."

"What are you going to do with him?"

"Because of what he did here, he will be pardoned for what he did, or didn't, at York."

"Then you don't think he is guilty?"

"Not so fast, young lady. I don't know, and the only way to find out, is to wait and watch them both. The liar will act the coward and lie again, sure."

"You may have to wait a long time for that; and while you are watching both, you treat Vere Haslem as if he were innocent, and Ned as if he were guilty. You are cruelly hard on him."

"There's a heap of hard things in life; one of them is that the day we clear Ned, we break Sir John's heart."

* * *

And Bee, who remembered that she loved her grandfather, shivered.

She had not expected to sleep that night, but health and youth asserted themselves and she rested well, and woke in the sunny morning feeling that somehow things could not be as bad as she had thought them in the night. She was greatly helped to this comparative cheerfulness by a talk she heard under her window, where Ferguson was energetically telling Kawque, the Mohawk scout, the story of Ned and Vere. The Indian grunted such emphatic assent to Ferguson's belief in his friend, that Bee was half comforted. At least Ned had true friends.

Ferguson's friendship was doubly warm now that he knew the reason for Ned's "backsliding", and it helped the boy through the ordeal of returning to his comrades, reduced in rank.

Ferguson had ridden home with Percy that evening, and the men had scattered to their messes, busy getting supper and preparing for the night. Each mess consisted of about a dozen men who divided the work among them, the non-commissioned officers always being exempt. Ned, to whom no one had yet spoken, picked up a pail to fetch water, washing to take his part in the work before he was ordered to by the sergeant. But Tim snatched the pail from him.

"Me Swaddler friend," he said earnestly, "unless you are wishful to go back to hospital immediate, you won't try to work round this mess."

Perplexed, Ned looked at his sergeant, but that man only said, "Better put off arguing with Tim for a few years, Ned, you haven't the weight to stand up to him yet."

So Ned knew he had been tried and acquitted by a very powerful court--the opinion of the men among whom he lived. After hearing of Ned's condemnation at Kingston the regiment had talked of nothing else for a week. They had also compared notes with a company just arrived, and decided which man had lied. Now with rough delicacy they let Ned know what their verdict had been, and that they knew his reduction was only temporary.

* * *

Betty had moved to St. Davids, a village by Queenston Heights, where Percy and Sir John came often, and Vere seldom. He managed to find duties, any duties, to keep him from meeting the fiancée he now detested. And still Sir John delighted in Bee's brightness, and believed that in practically forcing her to marry Vere he was doing the best for the girl he really loved, and for the family whose honour was rooted in his heart.

Spring came, and there was some skirmishing on Lake Ontario. Erie was entirely in American hands. But on land there were only a few raids by the Americans, who had a new general, Winfield Scott, who was carefully training the army with which he meant to take Upper Canada that summer. If he did not, he well knew Canada would not be taken at all, for England was making peace with France. Earnestly Canadians were praying that peace might be made with the United States also, though they were as ready as ever to fight if the American flag should again be carried across their border by armed men.

A breathless June evening Bee stood alone in Betty's garden, thinking that July was very near, and feeling desperately afraid. Betty had spoken to her very decidedly--"Of course you will marry Vere in three weeks." To herself she said, "The boy is steady enough now, and this wretched business of Ned Edgar's refusing to take back his shameful lie that Vere never gave him the letter, makes it all the more necessary that we should stand by him."

Alone in the hot June dusk Bee shivered. She was too young and too affectionate to be able to defy Sir John and Betty, and as she helplessly prayed for some one who could advise her, a man who walked noiselessly as an Indian, came beside her, and she held out her hands to him with a little cry of joy. "Papa Edgar; you have escaped! But you are so thin!"

"Prisons aren't palaces," said Edgar indifferently, "In the winter there was no fire and in the summer no air, below decks, where we were. We lay on the bare planking. But down in Montreal harbour, our prisoners were on similar other prison hulks so I had nothing to complain of--it was the fortune of war. At last Tahata came one night and helped me to escape."

Edgar bore his enemies no grudge for his rough prison--he lived in a rough age--it was really the memory of Ned that had aged him, and he tried fiercely to stop Bee when she mentioned his name. He still thought him with Sells the deserter. But the girl insisted on telling him all, and the light of her faith in his son kindled hope in his heart again. Ned might be, nay, must be, soon proved innocent. Then another thought made him exclaim, "But you must not marry this villain, child."

"You will help me not to, sir," said Bee confidently as she clung to him, and Edgar frowned to himself. He was on duty, scouting with his Indians, and he had snatched only a moment to speak to his one-time ward. He knew he was helpless to aid her; he could not possibly take her from the Haslems. Then among the bushes he saw the dark face of Kawque the scout.

Kawque was to stay at St. Davids, and used to quick thinking and daring action, Edgar spoke reassuring farewell as on sudden impulse he went to the Indian.

The first thing he had meant to tell the Mohawk was unnecessary. Kawque was quite sure already of Ned's innocence, and Edgar looked visibly younger as he heard what Kawque could tell him--"Blessings on that Methodist after all," he thought, then spoke earnestly to the Indian about Bee. Kawque nodded; he never wasted words.

"Bee Goode not marry till you say so, all right," he said decidedly.

And so Edgar went off, not stopping to think that the methods of an Iroquois warrior in preventing a formally arranged aristocratic wedding might prove startling.