“Woe be to them that reject!” said the Secretary of the Commissioners, stalking out of the room—the rest was lost in shutting the door, or suppressed for fear of offence. “And now, fool Wildrake, begone to thy bed—yonder it lies,” pointing to the knight’s apartment. “What, thou hast secured the lady’s for thyself? I saw thee put the key in thy pocket.” “I would not—indeed I could not sleep in that apartment—I can sleep nowhere—but I will watch in this arm-chair.—I have made him place wood for repairing the fire.—Good now, go to bed thyself, and sleep off thy liquor.” “Liquor!—I laugh thee to scorn, Mark—thou art a milksop, and the son of a milksop, and know’st not what a good fellow can do in the way of crushing an honest cup.” “The whole vices of his faction are in this poor fellow individually,” said the Colonel to himself, eyeing his protegé askance, as the other retreated into the bedroom, with no very steady pace—“He is reckless, intemperate, dissolute;—and if I cannot get him safely shipped for France, he will certainly be both his own ruin and mine.—Yet, withal, he is kind, brave, and generous, and would have kept the faith with me which he now expects from me; and in what consists the merit of our truth, if we observe not our plighted word when we have promised, to our hurt? I will take the liberty, however, to secure myself against farther interruption on his part.” So saying, he locked the door of communication betwixt the sleeping-room, to which the cavalier had retreated, and the parlour;— and then, after pacing the floor thoughtfully, returned to his seat, trimmed the lamp, and drew out a number of letters.—“I will read these over once more,” he said, “that, if possible, the thought of public affairs may expel this keen sense of personal sorrow. Gracious Providence, where is this to end! We have sacrificed the peace of our families, the warmest wishes of our young hearts, to right the country in which we were born, and to free her from oppression; yet it appears, that every step we have made towards liberty, has but brought us in view of new and more terrific perils, as he who travels in a mountainous region, is by every step which elevates him higher, placed in a situation of more imminent hazard.” He read long and attentively, various tedious and embarrassed letters, in which the writers, placing before him the glory of God, and the freedom and liberties of England, as their supreme ends, could not, by all the ambagitory expressions they made use of, prevent the shrewd eye of Markham Everard from seeing, that self-interest and views of ambition, were the principal moving springs at the bottom of their plots. CHAPTER THE SIXTH.