He poured out a glass of port for Martin, and pushed the cigars towards him, then spoke,—­

“Drink.  It’s very good.  And try one of those.  I shall not post that letter.”

“Man, I knew it!  I knew it well, without hearing so from you.  Destroy the thing, dear fellow, and so take the first step to a peace I fear you have not known for many days.  All this suffering will vanish quicker than a dream then.  Justice is great, but mercy is greater.  Yours is the privilege of mercy, and yet justice shall not suffer either—­not if I know Will Blanchard.”

They talked long and drank more than usual, while the elder man’s grim and moody spirit lightened a little before his determination and his wine.  The reek of past passions, the wreckage of dead things, seemed to be sweeping out of his mind.  He forgot the hour and their engagement until the time fixed for that conference was past.  Then he looked at his watch, rose from the table, and hurried to the hall.

“Let us not go,” urged Martin.  “They will do very well without us, I am sure.”

But John’s only answer was to pull on his driving gloves.  He anticipated some satisfaction from the committee meeting; he suspected, indeed, that he would be asked to take the chair at it, and, like most men, he was not averse to the exercise of a little power in a small corner.

“We must go,” he said.  “I have important suggestions to make, especially concerning the volunteers.  A sham fight on Scorhill would be a happy thought.  We’ll drive fast, and only be twenty minutes late.”

A dog-cart had been waiting half an hour, and soon the brothers quickly whirled down Red House avenue.  A groom dropped from behind and opened the gate; then it was all his agility could accomplish to scramble into his seat again as a fine horse, swinging along at twenty miles an hour, trotted towards Chagford.

CHAPTER XV

A BATTLE

Silent and motionless sat Blanchard, on the fringe of a bank at the coppice edge.  He watched the stars move onward and the shadows cast by moonlight creep from west to north, from north to east.  Hawthorn scented the night and stood like masses of virgin silver under the moon; from the Red House ’owl tree’—­a pollarded elm, sacred to the wise bird—­came mewing of brown owls; and once a white one struck, swift as a streak of feathered moonlight, on the copse edge, and passed so near to Blanchard that he saw the wretched shrew-mouse in its talons. “’Tis for the young birds somewheers,” he thought; “an’ so they’ll thrive an’ turn out braave owlets come bimebye; but the li’l, squeakin’, blind shrews, what’ll they do when no mother comes home-along to ’em?”

He mused drearily upon this theme, but suddenly started, for there came the echo of slow steps in the underwood behind him.  They sank into silence and set Will wondering as to what they might mean.  Then another sound, that of a galloping horse and the crisp ring of wheels, reached him, and, believing that John Grimbal was come, he strung himself to the matter in hand.  But the vehicle did not stop.  A flash of yellow light leapt through the distance as a mail-cart rattled past upon its way to Moreton.  This circumstance told Will the hour and he knew that his vigil could not be much longer protracted.