He clapped his hands. "Oh, excellent!" he cried.
Then, each having caught my drift, we heaped up a pile of broken boughs and twigs and brushwood on the bridge, all three gathering it together. And I wondered if the moon, that is co-partner in the antics of most rogues and lovers, had often beheld a sight more reasonless than the foregathering of a marquis, a peer's daughter, and a fool at dead of night to make fagots.
When we had done I handed him the flint and steel. "My lord," said I, "the honor is yours."
"Udsfoot!" he murmured, in a moment, swearing and striking futile sparks, "but the late rain has so wet the wood that it will not kindle."
I said, "Assuredly, in such matters a fool is indispensable." I heaped before him the papers that made an honest woman of my mother and a marquis of me, and seizing the flint, I cast a spark among them that set them crackling cheerily. Oh, I knew well enough that patience would coax a flame from those twigs without my paper's aid, but to be patient does not afford the posturing which youth loves. So it was a comfort to wreck all magnificently: and I knew that, too, as we three drew back upon the western bank and watched the writhing twigs splutter and snap and burn.
The bridge caught apace and in five minutes afforded passage to nothing short of the ardent equipage of the prophet Elias. Five minutes later the bridge did not exist: only the stone arches towered above the roaring waters that glistened in the light of the fire, which had, by this, reached the other side of the river, to find quick employment in the woods of Tiverton. Our pursuers rode through a glare which was that of Hell's kitchen on baking-day, and so reached the Exe only to curse vainly and to shriek idle imprecations at us, who were as immune from their anger as though the severing river had been Pyriphlegethon.
"My lord," I presently suggested, "it may be that your priest expects you?"
"Indeed," said he, laughing, "it is possible. Let us go." Thereupon they mounted the two sound horses. "Most useful burr," said he, "do you follow on foot to Teignmouth; and there--"
"Sir," I replied, "my home is at Tiverton."
He wheeled about. "Do you not fear--?"
"The whip?" said I. "Ah, my lord, I have been whipped ere this. It is not the greatest ill in life to be whipped."