CHAPTER LIXA SUBSTITUTE
We left Sir George watching in the cold, under a clump of yews, for the chance of seeing his wife’s shadow cross one of the lighted windows in the gallery. He remained there far longer than he supposed. So many thoughts were passing through his mind, so many misgivings for the future, so many memories of the past, that he was conscious neither of bodily discomfort nor lapse of time, the chill night-wind nor the waning evening. At length he roused himself from his abstraction with a smile of self-contempt, and, wrapping his cloak around him, would have departed at once, but that his attention was arrested by a muffled figure passing swiftly and stealthily into the garden through the very door he had been watching so long. A thrill of delight shot through him at the possibility of its being Cerise, followed by one of anger and suspicion, as he thought she might, in sheer despair at her lover’s absence, be preparing to follow Florian in his flight. But the figure walked straight to his hiding-place, and long before it reached him, even in the doubtful light, he recognised the firm step and graceful bearing of the Marquise.
How did she know he was there? How long could she have been watching him? He felt provoked, humiliated; but all such angry feelings dissolved at the sound of her sweet voice, so like her daughter’s, while she asked him softly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be waiting outside within twenty paces of his own house—
“George, what is it? You are disturbed; you areanxious. Can I help you? George, I would do anything in the world for you. Are you not dear to me as my own child,almost?”
He tried to laugh it off, but his mirth was forced and hollow.
“I have so many preparations to make. There are so many trifles to be thought of, even in leaving a place like this, that really, madame, I was only waiting here for a while to remember if I had forgotten anything.”
She laid her hand on his arm, as she had laid it long ago at the masked ball, and perhaps the gesture brought back that time to both.
“Even if you can blind Cerise,” she said, “you cannot deceive me. And Cerise, poor child, is crying her eyes out by herself; miserable, utterly miserable, as if you had gone away from her for ever. But it is no question now of my daughter; it is a question of yourself, George.Youare unhappy, I tell you. I saw it as soon as I came here. And I have been watching ever since you left the house, till it should be quite dark, to come and speak to you before you go, and ask for the confidence that Heaven only knows how fully I, of all people, deserve.”
There was a world of suppressed feeling in her voice while she spoke the last sentence, but he marked it not. He was thinking of Cerise. “Miserable,” said her mother, “utterly miserable, as if he had gone away from her for ever.” Then it was for Florian she was grieving, of course. Bah! he had known it all through. Of what use was it thus to add proof to proof—to pile disgrace upon disgrace? It irritated him, and he answered abruptly—
“You must excuse me, madame; this is no time for explanations, even were any necessary, and I have already loitered here too long.”
She placed herself directly in his path, standing with her hands clasped, as was her habit when moved by any unusual agitation.
“If you had gone away at once,” said she, “I was prepared to follow you. I have watched you from the moment you crossed the threshold. Am I blind? Am I a young inexperienced girl, who has never felt, never suffered, to be imposed on by a haughty bearing and a forced smile?Bah! Do people stand for an hour in the snow reflecting if they have forgotten their luggage? You men think women have no perception, no mind, no heart. You are going, George, and I shall never set eyes on you again—never, never; for I could not bear to see you miserable, and I alone of all the world must not endeavour to console you. Therefore I do not fear to speak frankly now. Listen; something has come between you and Cerise. Do not interrupt me. I know it. I feel it. Do not ask me why. It is not your hand that should add one stripe to my punishment. George, my poor girl is breaking her heart for your sake; and you, you the man of all others qualified to make a woman happy, and to be happy with her yourself, are destroying your home with your own hands. Look at me, George. I have seen the world, as you know. My lot has been brilliant, fortunate, envied by all; and yet—and yet—I have never had the chance that you so recklessly throw away. No, no; though I may have dreamed of it, I never so deceived myself as to fancy for a moment it was mine! Cerise loves you, George, loves the very ground you walk on, and you are leaving her in anger.”
“I wish I could believe it,” he muttered, in a hoarse, choking voice; for he was thinking of the pale, dark-eyed priest bending over the rose-trees with his wife.
“Do you think I can be deceived?” broke out the Marquise, seizing his hand with both her own, and then flinging it off in a burst of sorrowful reproach. “Wilful! heartless! cruel! Go, then, if go you must, and so farewell for ever. But remember, I warned you. I, who know by bitter experience, the madness, the shame, the agony of an impossible love!”
She turned from him and fled into the house, muttering, as she crossed its threshold, “The poor pelican! how it must hurt when she digs her beak into her bosom, and feeds her young with her own heart’s blood!”
Sir George Hamilton stood looking after her for a moment; then he shook his head, drew his cloak tighter round him, and strode resolutely across the park to the “Hamilton Arms.”
Thus it fell out that when he arrived there, he found thehostelry, lately so full of guests, occupied only by Florian and the two seamen; the first depressed, silent, preoccupied; the others obviously swelling with importance, and bursting to communicate some great intelligence at once.
It was fortunate that the former commander of ‘The Bashful Maid,’ retained enough of his old habits to comprehend the tale Slap-Jack had to tell, garnished as it was with professional phrases and queer sea-going metaphors that no landsman could have followed out. From his faithful retainer the baronet learned all the particulars of the Jacobite meeting, and the conspiracy so carefully organised against the throne, discovered by no less futile a contingency than the freak of a barmaid to frighten a highwayman. Sir George believed it his duty now to warn the Government at once. Yet even while reflecting on the importance of his information, and the noble reward it might obtain, he was pondering how he could escape the delay of an hour in London, and longing for the moment when he should find himself face to face with Florian on the coast of France.
It was characteristic of the man that he gave little thought to the attack meditated upon his own person, simply examining his arms as usual, and desiring Slap-Jack, who had come unprovided, to borrow a brace of pistols wherever he could get them, while he bestowed on Smoke-Jack, who piteously entreated leave to “join the expedition,” a careless permission “to take his share in the spree if he liked.”
So these four men waited in the warm inn-parlour for the roll of the lumbering coach that was to bear them, so each well knew, into a struggle for life and death.
When their vehicle arrived at last, they found themselves its only passengers. The burly coachman descending from his seat to refresh, cursed the cold weather heartily, and in the same breath tendered a gruff salutation to Sir George. The guard, whose face was redder, whose shoulders were broader, and whose voice was huskier even than the coachman’s, endorsed his companion’s remarks, and followed suit in his greetings to the baronet, observing, at the same time, that he should “take a glass of brandy neat, to drivethe cold out of his stomach.” This stimulant was accordingly administered by Alice, and paid for by Sir George, who had not lived at Hamilton Hill without learning the etiquette of coach travelling as practised on the north road. While he placed some silver on the counter, it did not escape him that both functionaries had been drinking freely, possibly to console them for the lack of company, while Slap-Jack, grinning in delight, whispered to his mate—
“If you an’ me was to go for to takeourspell at the wheel, half-slewed, like them chaps, my eyes, wot a twistin’weshould get to-morrow mornin’ afore eight bells!”
With so light a freight there was less delay in changing horses than usual. Scarcely a quarter of an hour had elapsed since its arrival ere four moderate-looking animals were harnessed to the coach. The luggage was hoisted on, old Robin rewarded, Mrs. Dodge paid, Alice kissed with much energy by her sweetheart, and Sir George, with Florian, invited to take their places on the front seat behind the driver; then the two seamen clambered up beside the guard, the whip cracked, the hoofs clattered, the whole machine creaked and jingled, while Smoke-Jack, removing the pipe from his mouth with a certain gravity, expressed his devout hope that “old brandy-face would keep her well up in the wind and steer small!”
It was a cold night, and a cheerless, though light as day, for the moon had risen and the ground was white with snow. Sir George, wrapped in his cloak, with his hand on the butt of a pistol, after some vague remarks about the weather, which Florian appeared not to hear, relapsed into the silence of one who prepares all his energies for an approaching crisis.
The Jesuit seemed unconscious of his companion’s existence. Pale as death, even to the lips, his face set, his teeth clenched, his eyes fixed on the horizon before him, as his mental sight projected itself into the unknown future he had this night resolved to penetrate, there pervaded the whole bearing of the man that unearthly air of abstraction peculiar to those who are doomed, whose trial is over, whose sentence is recorded, for whom henceforth there can be neither hope nor fear.
Sir George meditated on a thousand possible contingencies. Already his mind had overleaped the immediateaffairs of the night, the coming skirmish, and its possible disaster. These were but every-day matters, familiar to his old habits, and scarce worth thinking of. But there was one scene beyond which his imagination could not be forced; it seemed, as it were, to limit his future in its bounds, and afterwards there would be no aim, no purpose, no relish in life. It represented a spit of sand on the coast of Picardy, and a man with shirt-sleeves rolled up, grasping a bloody rapier in his hand, who was smiling bitterly down on a dead face white and rigid at his feet.
Florian, too, sitting by his side, had his own vision. This, also, was of blood, but blood freely offered in atonement to friendship, and expiation for love.
The night was still, and the moonlight tempered by a misty sky that denoted there would be more snow before morning. The coachman dozed over his wheelers. The guard, overcome with brandy, laid his head on a hamper, and went fast asleep. The two seamen, silently consoling themselves with tobacco, shut an eye apiece, and screwed their faces into the expression of inscrutable sagacity affected by their class when they expect bad weather of any kind. The horses, taking counsel together, as such beasts do, jogged on at the slowest possible pace that could not be stigmatised for a walk, and the heavy machine lumbered wearily up the gradual ascent, which half a mile further on, where the hill became steeper and the road worse, was known as Borrodaile Rise.
Now the Abbé, in command of his little troop, had intended to conceal them behind a clump of thorns that diversified the plain surface of the moor, almost on the summit of this acclivity, and so pounce out upon his prey at the moment it was most hampered by the difficulties of its path; but, like other good generals, he suffered his plans to be modified by circumstances, and would change them, if advisable, at the very moment of execution.
On the right of the road, if road that could be called, which was but a soft and deeply-rutted track through the heather, stood the four walls of a roofless building, uninhabited within the memory of man, about twenty paces from a deep holding slough, through which the coach must pass; this post, with the concurrence of Bold and his confederates,the Abbé seized at once. It offered them some shelter against the storms of sleet that drove at intervals across the moor, while it afforded a covert from which, though mounted, they could reconnoitre unseen, for two miles in every direction, and rush out at a moment’s notice on their unsuspecting prey.
So, behind those grey, weather-stained walls, the little party sat their horses, erect and vigilant, reins shortened, firearms primed, swords loosened in the sheath, like a picket of light-cavalry when the alarm has sounded, and its outposts have been driven in.
The advancing coach made but little noise as it crept slowly onward through the snow, nevertheless a muttered oath from Blood Humphrey, and the scowl on Black George’s brow, announced its arrival ere it came in sight. By the time it could emerge from a certain hollow at fifty yards’ distance, and gain the slough, through which it moved heavily and wearily, like a hearse, its huge black mass brought out against the dead white of the misty, moonlit sky, afforded as fair a target for close shooting as a marksman need desire.
Captain Bold had been trembling all over but a few minutes back, now he was firm as a rock, but it cost him a desperate effort thus to man himself, and even while he cocked the pistol in his right hand, gathering his mare at the same time, for a dash to the front, he wished, from the bottom of his heart, he had undertaken any job but this.
“Steady, my friend!” whispered the Abbé. “In ten more paces the whole machine must come to a halt. At the instant it stops, cover your man, and level low!”
Then Malletort placed himself behind the others in readiness for any emergency that should arrive.
The slough reached nearly to the axles, the wheels scarce moved, the horses laboured—failed—stopped; the coachman, waking with a jerk, swore lustily as he nearly fell from his seat; the guard jumped up and shook himself; Florian’s eyes flashed, and a strange, wild smile played over his wan face, while Slap-Jack protested angrily, that “the lubber was aground, d’ye see? and however could he expect the poor thing would answer her helm, when she hadn’t got no steerage-way!”
Even while he spoke, a horseman, rising, as it seemed, from the earth, dashed out before the leaders, followed by three more, who, in the hurry and confusion of the moment, looked like a dozen at least.
“Stand and deliver!” exclaimed the foremost, in the customary language of “the road”; but, without waiting to see if this formidable command would be obeyed, he pulled his bay mare together, till she stood motionless like a statue, covered the larger of the two figures behind the coachman, as it rose from its seat, and—fired!
Bold’s hand and eye had never served him better than in this, his last crime; but he was anticipated, foiled by a quicker eye, a readier hand than his own. With the very flash of the pistol, even ere the smoke that curled above their heads had melted into air, a heavy body, falling across Sir George’s knees, knocked him back into his seat, and Florian, shot through the lungs, lay gasping out his life in jets of blood with every breath he drew.
It was instinct, rather than inhumanity, that caused the old Musketeer to take steady aim at the assassin over the very body of his preserver. Ever coolest in extremity of danger, Sir George was, perhaps, surer of his mark than he would have been shooting for a wager in the galleries of Marly or Versailles. Ere a man could have counted ten, his finger pressed the trigger, and Bolt, shot clean through the heart, fell from the saddle in a heap, nor, after one quiver of the muscles, did he ever move again.
The bay mare, snorting wildly, would not leave her master, but snuffed wistfully and tenderly round that tumbled wisp of tawdry clothes, from which a crimson stain was soaking slowly into the snow.
Then Sir George turned to Florian, and rested the dying, drooping form against his own broad breast. Where was the spit of sand, the lonely duel, now?—the pitiless arm, the bloody rapier, and all the hideous vision of revenge? Gone—vanished—as if it had never been; and, in its stead, a tried, beloved comrade, pale, sinking, prostrate, bleeding helplessly to death.
“Courage, Florian!” whispered Sir George, tenderly. “Lean on me while I stanch the blood. You will pull through yet. We will have you back at the Hill in anhour. D— it, man! Lady Hamilton shall nurse you herself till you get well!”
A gleam came over the dying face, like a ray of sunlight gilding the close of a bleak winter’s day.
“I have never been false,” he murmured, “never false really in my heart. I swore to save you, George, life for life, and I have kept my oath. I shall not live to see Lady Hamilton again, but—but—you will tell her that it wasmybody which—”
He turned fainter now, and lay half-propped against the seat he had lately occupied, holding Sir George’s hand, and effectually preventing the baronet from taking any further part in the fray.
It is not to be supposed that the two seamen in the back of the coach had been idle witnesses of a tumult which so exactly coincided with their notions of what they termed “a spree.” Protected from the fire of the horsemen by a pile of luggage on its roof, or, as Slap-Jack called it, by the deck-cargo, they had made an excellent defence, and better practice than might have been looked for with a brace of borrowed pistols, apt to hang fire and throw high. The guard, too, after a careful and protracted aim, discharged his blunderbuss, with a loud explosion; and the result of their joint efforts was, that the highwaymen, as the last-named functionary believed them, were beaten off. Blood Humphrey’s horse was shot through the flank, though the poor brute made shift to carry his rider swiftly away. Black George had his ankle-bone broken, but managed to gallop across the moor after his comrade, writhing in pain, and with his boot full of blood. Bold lay dead on the ground. There was but one of the assailants left—a well-armed man in a cassock, who had kept somewhat in the background; andhishorse, too, was badly wounded behind its girths.
Sir George was occupied with Florian, but the others sprang down to take the last of their foes captive; ere they could reach him, however, he had leaped into the bay mare’s saddle, and was urging her over the heather at a pace that promised soon to place him in safety, for the bay mare was the fastest galloper in Yorkshire, and her rider knew it was a race for life and death.
“By heavens, it is Malletort!” exclaimed Sir George, looking up from his charge, at sound of the flying hoofs, to observe something in the fugitive’s seat and figure that identified him with the Abbé, and gazing after him so intently, that he did not mark the expression of satisfaction on Florian’s pain-stricken face when he learned the other had escaped. “I never thought he could ride so well,” muttered the baronet, while he watched the good bay mare speeding steadily over the open, and saw the Frenchman put her straight at a high stone wall, beyond which he knew, by his own experience, there was a considerable drop into a ravine. The mare jumped it like a deer, and after a time rose the opposite slope at a swifter pace than ever. Sir George could only make her out very indistinctly now, yet something in the headlong manner of her career caused him to fancy she was going without a rider.
He had more important matters to occupy him. It had begun to snow heavily, and Florian was growing weaker every minute. With a dying man for their freight; with the absence of other passengers; above all, with the prospect of increased difficulty in progression at every yard they advanced, for the sky had darkened, and the flakes fell thicker, guard and driver were easily persuaded to turn their horses’ heads, and make the best of their way back to Hamilton Hill.
It was but a few miles distant, and Sir George, hoping against hope, tried to persuade himself that if he could only get Florian under his own roof alive, he might be saved.
They were good nurses, that tried campaigner and his two rough, hardy seamen. Tenderly, like women, they stanched the welling life-blood, supported the nerveless, drooping figure, and wiped the froth from the dry, white lips that could no longer speak, but yet made shift to smile. Tenderly, too, they whispered soothing words, in soft, hushed voices, looking blankly in each other’s faces for the hope their hearts denied; and thus slowly, sadly, solemnly, the dark procession laboured back, taking the road they had lately travelled, passed the well-known hostelry, and so wearily climbed the long ascent to the grim, looming towers of Hamilton Hill.
Not a word was spoken. Scarce a sound betrayed their progress. The air was hushed—the flakes fell softly, heavily—the earth lay wrapped in a winding-sheet of snow—and Florian was dead before they reached the house!