The Master of Appleby | Page 6

of fence; but fighting had been my trade, and
he is but a poor craftsman who looks not well to see that his tools are in
order against their time of using.

II
WHICH KNITS UP SOME BROKEN ENDS
It was in the autumn of the year '64, as I was coming of age, that my
father made ready to send me to England. Himself a conscience exile

from Episcopal Virginia, and a descendant of those Nottingham Iretons
whose best-known son fought stoutly against Church and King under
Oliver Cromwell, he was yet willing to humor my bent and to use the
interest of my mother's family to enter me in the king's service.
Accordingly, I took ship at Norfolk for "home," as we called it in those
days; and, after a stormy passage and overmuch waiting as my cousins'
guest in Lincolnshire, had my pair of colors in the Scots Blues, lately
home from garrison duty in the Canadas.
Of the life in barracks of a young ensign with little wit and less wisdom,
and with more guineas in his purse than was good for him, the less said
the better. But of this you may like to know that, what with a good
father's example, and some small heritage of Puritan decency come
down to me from the sound-hearted old Roundhead stock, I won out of
that devil's sponging-house, an army in the time of peace, with
somewhat less to my score than others had to theirs.
It was in this barrack life that I came to know Richard Coverdale and
his evil genius, the man Francis Falconnet. Coverdale was an ensign in
my own regiment, and we were sworn friends from the first. His was a
clean soul and a brave; and it was to him that I owed escape from many
of the grosser chargings on that score above-named.
As for Falconnet, he was even then a ruffler and a bully, though he was
not of the army. He was a younger son, and at that time there were two
lives between him and the baronetcy; but with a mother's bequeathings
to purchase idleness and to gild his iniquities, he was a fair example of
the jeunesse dorée of that England; a libertine, a gamester, a rakehell;
brave as the tiger is brave, and to the full as pitiless. He was a boon
companion of the officers' mess; and for a time--and purpose--posed as
Coverdale's friend, and mine.
Since I would not tell my poor Dick's story to Richard Jennifer, I may
not set it down in cold words here for you. It was the age-old tragic
comedy of a false friend's treachery and a woman's weakness; a duel,
and the wrong man slain. And you may know this; that Falconnet's
most merciful role in it was the part he played one chill November

morning when he put Richard Coverdale to the wall and ran him
through.
As you have guessed, I was Coverdale's next friend and second in this
affair, and but for the upsetting news of the Tryon tyranny in
Carolina,--news which reached me on the very day of the meeting,--I
should there and then have called the slayer to his account.
How my father who, Presbyterian and Ireton though he was, had
always been of the king's side, came to espouse the cause of the
"Regulators," as they called themselves, I know not. In my youthful
memories of him he figures as the feudal lord of his own domain, more
absolute than many of the petty kinglings I came afterward to know in
the German marches. But this, too, I remember; that while his rule at
Appleby Hundred was stern and despotic enough, he was ever ready to
lend a willing ear to any tale of oppression. And if what men say of the
tyrant Tryon's tax-gatherers and law-court robbers be no more than half
truth, there was need for any honest gentleman to oppose them.
What that opposition came to in '71 is now a tale twice told. Taken in
arms against the governor's authority, and with an estate well worth
receiving, my father had little justice and less mercy accorded him.
With many others he was outlawed; his estates were declared forfeit;
and a few days later he, with Benjamin Merrill and four more
captivated at the Alamance, was given some farce of a trial and hanged.
When the news of this came to me you may well suppose that I had no
heart to continue in the service of the king who could sanction and
reward such villainies as these of the butcher William Tryon. So I
threw up my lieutenant's commission in the Blues, took ship for the
Continent, and, after wearing some half-dozen different uniforms in
Germany, was lucky