“You shall not shoot!” she called out loudly as she grasped him by the dripping sleeve of his red coat. “You shall not touch him; he is my prisoner!”
And to this the young officer made no remonstrance, for he had fallen face downward in the snow.
When Stephen returned at mid-morning of that same day, his horses steaming in the cold air and his two serving-men trailing out behind him, unable to keep up with the furious pace their master had set, he found that, for the first time, there was no one at the door to greet him. He had spent the night at a small town twenty miles from Hopewell and, on hearing at dawn of the successful British expedition, he had pushed forward with all haste, quite ignorant still of the happenings at his own house. His eyes opened wide at the sight of blue-coated soldiers scattered about his grounds, but he did not stop to question them. He came into the hall and found no one there, he mounted the stairs and on the landing met Mother Jeanne, who greeted him with such a torrent of incoherent French that he had not the slightest idea of what she sought to tell him. After looking in at several of the open doors, his expression of wonder growing every moment, he finally encountered Doctor Thorndyke, just coming downstairs after a lengthy examination of the wounded officer.
“In Heaven’s name,” said Stephen to him, “will some one tell me what is amiss in this house? I come home to find my garden in the possession of soldiers, Mère Jeanne apparently quite out of her senses, Clotilde asleep, a total stranger installed in my best bedroom and a scarlet coat, covered with blood, hanging over the back of a chair. Is all the world gone mad, or is it only I?”
“It is indeed somewhat disturbing,” he said, “to come home to a peaceful house and find a wounded prisoner of war, a young heroine whose praises every one is singing and a frantic Frenchwoman whom excitement seems to have robbed of all her English. But come downstairs, Stephen, and I will give you the whole story as well as I have managed to learn it from a dozen different people who all sought to tell me at once. The one who knows the most is up yonder in your guest room and will be unable to state his version of the matter for some time to come.”