“And if he doesn’t send word soon do you come and see me again, Randal,” said her grace; “we’ll quicken him. He’s well enough; but he’s growing old, and his wits is sluggish.”
And the great man, whose eye had daunted armies, smiled benignly upon his termagant.
Colonel Holles knelt on the window-seat at the open casement of his parlour at the Paul’s Head. Leaning on the sill, he seemed to contemplate the little sunlit garden with its two cherry trees on which some of those belated blossoms lingered still. Cherry blossoms he was contemplating, but not those before him. The two trees of this little oasis in the City of London had multiplied themselves into a cherry orchard set in Devon and in the years that were gone beyond reclaiming.
The phenomenon was not new to him. Cherry blossoms had ever possessed the power to move him thus. The contemplation of them never failed to bring him the vision that was now spread before his wistful eyes. Mrs. Quinn’s few perches of garden had dissolved into an acre of sunlit flowering orchard. Above the trees in the background to the right a spire thrust up into the blue, surmounted by a weather-vane in the shape of a fish—which he vaguely knew to be an emblem of Christianity. Through a gap on the left he beheld a wall, ivy-clad, crumbling at its summit. Over this a lad was climbing stealthily—a long-limbed, graceful, fair-haired stripling, whose features were recognizable for his own if from the latter you removed the haggard lines that the years and hard living had imprinted. Softly and nimbly as a cat he dropped to earth on the wall’s hither side, and stood there half crouching, a smile on his young lips and laughter in his grey eyes. He was watching a girl who—utterly unconscious of his presence—swept to and fro through the air on a swing that was formed of a single rope passed from one tree to another.
She was a child, no more; yet of a well-grown, lissom grace that deceived folk into giving her more than the bare fifteen years she counted to her age. Hers was no rose-and-lily complexion. She displayed the healthy tan that comes of a life lived in the open far away from cities. Yet one glance into the long-shaped, deeply blue eyes that were the glory of her lovely little face sufficed to warn you that though rustic she was not simple. Here was one who possessed a full share of that feminine guile which is the heritage from Mother Eve to her favoured daughters. If you were a man and wise, you would be most wary when she was most demure.
Swinging now, her loosened brown hair streamed behind her as she flew forward, and tossed itself into a cloud about her face as she went back. And she sang as nearly as possible in rhythm with her swinging:
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!Where do you tarry?Whiles here I stay for youWaiting to marry.Hey, young love! Ho, young....”
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!Where do you tarry?Whiles here I stay for youWaiting to marry.Hey, young love! Ho, young....”
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!Where do you tarry?Whiles here I stay for youWaiting to marry.Hey, young love! Ho, young....”
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!
Where do you tarry?
Whiles here I stay for you
Waiting to marry.
Hey, young love! Ho, young....”
The song ended in a scream. Unheard, unsuspected, the stripling had crept forward through the trees. At the top of her backward swing he had caught her about the waist in his strong young arms. There was a momentary flutter of two black legs amid an agitated cloud of petticoat, then the rope swung forward, and the nymph was left in the arms of her young satyr. But only for a moment. Out of that grip she broke in a fury—real or pretended—and came to earth breathless, with flushed cheeks and flashing eye.
“You give yourself strange liberties, young Randal,” said she, and boxed his ears. “Who bade you here?”
“I ... I thought you called me,” said he, grinning, no whit abashed by either blow or look. “Come, now, Nan. Confess it!”
“I called you? I?” She laughed indignantly. “’Tis very likely! Oh, very likely!”
“You’ll deny it, of course, being a woman in the making. But I heard you.” And he quoted for her, singing:
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!Where do you tarry?”
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!Where do you tarry?”
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!Where do you tarry?”
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!
Where do you tarry?”
“I was hiding on the other side of the wall. I came at once. And all I get for my pains and the risk to a fairly new pair of breeches is a blow and a denial.”
“You may get more if you remain.”
“I hope so. I had not come else.”
“But it’ll be as little to your liking.”
“That’s as may be. Meanwhile there’s this matter of a blow. Now a blow is a thing I take from nobody. For a man there is my sword....”
“Your sword!” She abandoned herself to laughter. “And you don’t even own a penknife.”
“Oh, yes I do. I own a sword. It was a gift from my father to-day—a birthday gift. I am nineteen to-day, Nan.”
“How fast you grow! You’ll be a man soon. And so your father has given you a sword?” She leaned against the bole of a tree, and surveyed him archly. “That was very rash of your father. You’ll be cutting yourself, I know.”
He smiled, but with a little less of his earlier assurance. But he made a fair recovery.
“You are straying from the point.”
“The point of your sword, sweet sir?”
“The point of my discourse. It was concerning this matter of a blow. If you were a man I am afraid I should have to kill you. My honour would demand no less.”
“With your sword?” she asked him innocently.
“With my sword, of course.”
“Ugh. Jack the Giant-Killer in a cherry orchard! Youmust see you are out of place here. Get you gone, boy. I don’t think I ever liked you, Randal. Now I’m sure of it. You’re a bloody-minded fellow for all your tender years. What you’ll be when you’re a man ... I daren’t think.”
He swallowed the taunt.
“And what you’ll be when you’re a woman is the thing I delight in thinking. We’ll return to that. Meanwhile, this blow....”
“Oh, you’re tiresome.”
“You delay me. That is why. What I would do to a man who struck me I have told you.”
“But you can’t think I believe you.”
This time he was not to be turned aside.
“The real question is what to do to a woman.” He approached her. “When I look at you, one punishment only seems possible.”
He took her by the shoulders in a grip of a surprising firmness. There was sudden alarm in those eyes of hers that hitherto had been so mocking.
“Randal!” she cried out, guessing his purpose.
Undeterred he accomplished it. Having kissed her, he loosed his hold, and stood back for the explosion which from his knowledge of her he was led to expect. But no explosion came. She stood limply before him, all the raillery gone out of her, whilst slowly the colour faded from her cheeks. Then it came flowing back in an all-suffusing flood, and there was a pathetic quiver at the corners of her mouth, a suspicious brightness in her drooping eyes.
“Why, Nan!” he cried, alarmed by phenomena so unexpected and unusual.
“Oh, why did you do that?” she cried on a sob.
Here was meekness! Had she boxed his ears again, it would have surprised him not at all. Indeed, it is what he hadlooked for. But that she should be stricken so spiritless, that she should have no reproof for him beyond that plaintive question, left him agape with amazement. It occurred to him that perhaps he had found the way to tame her; and he regretted on every count that he should not have had recourse before to a method so entirely satisfactory to himself. Meanwhile her question craved an answer.
“I’ve been wanting to do it this twelvemonth,” said he simply. “And I shall want to do it again. Nan, dear, don’t you know how much I love you? Don’t you know without my telling you? Don’t you?”
The fervent question chased away her trouble and summoned surprise to fill its place. A moment she stared at him, and her glance hardened. She began to show signs of recovery.
“The declaration should have preceded the ... the ... affront.”
“Affront!” he cried, in protest.
“What else? Isn’t it an affront to kiss a maid without a by-your-leave? If you were a man, I shouldn’t forgive you. I couldn’t. But as you’re just a boy”—her tone soared to disdainful heights—“you shall be forgiven on a promise that the offence is not to be repeated.”
“But I love you, Nan! I’ve said so,” he expostulated.
“You’re too precocious, young Randal. It comes, I suppose, of being given a sword to play with. I shall have to speak to your father about it. You need manners more than a sword at present.”
The minx was skilled in the art of punishing. But the lad refused to be put out of countenance.
“Nan, dear, I am asking you to marry me.”
She jumped at that. Her eyes dilated. “Lord!” she said. “What condescension! But d’you think I want a child tied to my apron-strings?”
“Won’t you be serious, Nan?” he pleaded. “I am very serious.”
“You must be, to be thinking of marriage.”
“I am going away, Nan—to-morrow, very early. I came to say good-bye.”
Her eyelids flickered, and in that moment a discerning glance would have detected a gleam of alarm from her blue eyes. But there was no hint of it in her voice.
“I thought you said it was to marry me you came.”
“Why will you be teasing me? It means so much to me, Nan. I want you to say that you’ll wait for me; that you’ll marry me some day.”
He was very close to her. She looked up at him a little breathlessly. Her feminine intuitions warned her that he was about to take a liberty; feminine perversity prompted her to frustrate the intention, although it was one that in her heart she knew would gladden her.
“Some day?” she mocked him. “When you’re grown up, I suppose? Why, I’ll be an old maid by then; and I don’t think I want to be an old maid.”
“Answer me, Nan. Don’t rally me. Say that you’ll wait.”
He would have caught her by the shoulders again. But she eluded those eager hands of his.
“You haven’t told me yet where you are going.”
Gravely he flung the bombshell of his news, confident that it must lend him a new importance in her eyes, and thus, perhaps, bring her into something approaching subjection.
“I am going to London, to the army. My father has procured me a cornetcy of horse, and I am to serve under General Monk, who is his friend.”
It made an impression, though she did not give him the satisfaction of seeing how great that impression was. To do her justice, the army meant no more to her just at that moment than champing horses, blaring trumpets, andwaving banners. Of its grimmer side she took as yet no thought: else she might have given his news a graver greeting. As it was, the surprise of it left her silent, staring at him in a new wonder. He took advantage of it to approach her again. He committed the mistake of attempting to force the pace. He caught her to him, taking her unawares this time and seizing her suddenly, before she could elude him.
“Nan, my dear!”
She struggled in his arms. But he held her firmly. She struggled the harder, and, finding her struggles ineffective, her temper rose. Her hands against his breast she thrust him back.
“Release me at once! Release me, or I’ll scream!”
At that and the anger in her voice, he let her go, and stood sheepishly, abashed, whilst she retreated a few paces from him, breathing quickly, her eyes aflash.
“My faith! You’ll be a great success in London! They’ll like your oafish ways up yonder. I think you had better go.”
“Forgive me, Nan!” He was in a passion of penitence, fearing that this time he had gone too far and angered her in earnest. “Ah, don’t be cruel. It is our last day together for Heaven knows how long.”
“Well, that’s a mercy.”
“Ye don’t mean that, Nan? Ye can’t mean that ye care nothing about me. That you are glad I’m going.”
“You should mend your manners,” she reproved him by way of compromise.
“Why, so I will. It’s only that I want you so; that I’m going away—far away; that after to-day I won’t see you again maybe for years. If ye say that ye don’t care for me at all, why, then I don’t think that I’ll come back to Potheridge ever. But if ye care—be it never so little, Nan—if you’ll wait for me, it’ll send me away with a good heart, it’ll give me strength to become great. I’ll conquer theworld for you, my dear,” he ended grandiloquently, as is the way of youth in its unbounded confidence. “I’ll bring it back to toss it in your lap.”
Her eyes were shining. His devotion and enthusiasm touched her. But her mischievous perversity must be dissembling it. She laughed on a rising inflection that was faintly mocking.
“I shouldn’t know what to do with it,” said she.
That and her laughter angered him. He had opened his heart. He had been boastful in his enthusiasm, he had magnified himself and felt himself shrinking again under the acid of her derision. He put on a sudden frosty dignity.
“You may laugh, but there’ll come a day maybe when you won’t laugh. You may be sorry when I come back.”
“Bringing the world with you,” she mocked him.
He looked at her almost savagely, white-faced. Then in silence he swung on his heel and went off through the trees. Six paces he had taken when he came face to face with an elderly, grave-faced gentleman in the clerkly attire of a churchman, who was pacing slowly reading in a book. The parson raised his eyes. They were long-shaped blue eyes like Nancy’s, but kindlier in their glance.
“Why, Randal!” he hailed the boy who was almost hurtling into him, being half-blinded by his unshed tears.
The youth commanded himself.
“Give you good-morning, Mr. Sylvester. I ... I but came to say good-bye....”
“Why, yes, my boy. Your father told me....”
Through the trees came the girl’s teasing voice.
“You are detaining the gentleman, father, and he is in haste. He is off to conquer the world.”
Mr. Sylvester raised his heavy grey eyebrows a little; the shadow of a smile hovered about the corners of his kindly mouth, his eyes looked a question, humorously.
Randal shrugged. “Nancy is gay at my departure, sir.”
“Nay, nay.”
“It affords her amusement, as you perceive, sir. She is pleased to laugh.”
“Tush, tush!” The parson turned, took his arm affectionately, and moved along with him towards the house. “A mask on her concern,” he murmured. “Women are like that. It takes a deal of learning to understand a woman; and I doubt, in the end, if the time is well spent. But I’ll answer for it that she’ll have a warm welcome for you on your return, whether you’ve conquered the world or not. So shall we all, my boy. You go to serve in a great cause. God bring you safely home again.”
But Randal took no comfort, and parted from Mr. Sylvester vowing in his heart that he would return no more betide what might.
Yet before he quitted Potheridge he had proof that Mr. Sylvester was right. It was in vain that day that Nancy awaited his return. And that night there were tears on her pillow, some of vexation, but some of real grief at the going of Randal.
Very early next morning, before the village was astir, Randal rode forth upon the conquest of the world, fortified by a tolerably heavy purse, and that brand-new sword—the gifts which had accompanied his father’s blessing. As he rode along by the wall above which the cherry blossoms flaunted, towards the grey rectory that fronted immediately upon the road, a lattice was pushed open overhead, and the head and shoulders of Nancy were protruded.
“Randal!” she softly called him, as he came abreast.
He reined in his horse and looked up. His rancour melted instantly. He was conscious of the quickening of his pulses.
“Nan!” His whole soul was in his utterance of the name.
“I ... I am sorry I laughed, Randal, dear. I wasn’treally gay. I have cried since. I have stayed awake all night not to miss you now.” This was hardly true, but it is very likely she believed it. “I wanted to say good-bye and God keep you, Randal, dear, and ... and ... come back to me soon again.”
“Nan!” he cried again. It was all that he could say; but he said it with singular eloquence.
Something slapped softly down upon the withers of his horse. His hand shot out to clutch it ere it fell thence, and he found himself holding a little tasselled glove.
There was a little scream from above. “My glove!” she cried. “I’ve dropped it. Randal, please!” She was leaning far out, reaching down a beseeching hand. But she was still too far above him to render possible the glove’s return. Besides, this time she did not deceive him with her comedy. He took off his hat, and passed the glove through the band.
“I’ll wear it as a favour till I come to claim the hand it has covered,” he told her in a sort of exaltation. He kissed the glove, bowed low, covered himself with a flourish, and touched the horse with his spurs.
As he rode away her voice floated after him, faintly mocking, yet with a choking quaver that betrayed her secret tears.
“Don’t forget to bring the world back with you.”
And that was the last of her voice that he had ever heard.
Five years passed before the day when next he came to Potheridge. Again the cherry trees were in blossom; again he saw them, tossed by the breeze, above the grey wall of the rectory orchard, as he rode forward with high-beating heart, a lackey trotting at his heels.
The elder Holles, who had removed himself permanently to London shortly after his son’s going to Monk, had been dead these two years. If Randal had not accomplished his proud boast of conquering the world, at least he had wonhimself an important place in it, a fine position in the army, that should be a stepping-stone to greater things. He was the youngest colonel in the service, thanks to his own talents as well as to Monk’s favour—for Monk could never so have favoured him had he not been worthy and so proved himself—a man of mark, of whom a deal was expected by all who knew him. All this he now bore written plainly upon him: his air of authority; his rich dress; the handsome furniture of his splendid horse; the servant following; all advertised the man of consequence. And he was proud of it all for the sake of her who had been his inspiration. From his heart he thanked God for these things, since he might offer them to her.
What would she look like, he wondered, as he rode amain, his face alight and eager. It was three years since last he had heard from her; but that was natural enough, for the constant movements demanded by his soldier’s life made it impossible that letters should reach him often. To her he had written frequently. But one letter only had he received in all those years, and that was long ago, written to him after Dunbar in answer to his announcement that he had won himself a captaincy and so advanced a stage in his conquest of the world.
How would she greet him now? How would she look at him? What would be her first word? He thought that it would be his name. He hoped it might be; for in her utterance of it he would read all he sought to know.
They came to a clattering halt at the rectory door. He flung down from the saddle without waiting for his groom’s assistance, and creaked and clanked across the cobbles to rattle on the oak with the butt of his riding-whip.
The door swung inwards. Before him, startled of glance, stood a lean old crone who in nothing resembled the corpulent Mathilda who had kept the rector’s house of old. Hestared at her, some of the glad eagerness perishing in his face.
“The ... the rector?” quoth he, faltering. “Is he at home?”
“Aye, he be in,” she mumbled, mistrustfully eyeing his imposing figure. “Do ee bide a moment, whiles I calls him.” She vanished into the gloom of the hall, whence her voice reached him, calling: “Master! Master! Here be stranger!”
A stranger! O God! Here all was not as it should be.
Came a quick, youthful step, and a moment later a young man advanced from the gloom. He was tall, comely, and golden-haired; he wore clerkly black and the Geneva bands of a cleric.
“You desired to see me, sir?” he inquired.
Randal Holles stood looking at him, speechless for a long moment, dumbfounded. He moistened his lips at last, and spoke.
“It was Mr. Sylvester whom I desired to see, sir,” he answered. “Tell me”—and in his eagerness he was so unmannerly as to clutch the unknown parson’s arm—“where is he? Is he no longer here?”
“No,” was the gentle answer. “I have succeeded him.” The young cleric paused. “Mr. Sylvester has been with God these three years.”
Holles commanded himself. “This is bad news to me, sir. He was an old friend. And his daughter ... Miss Nancy? Where is she?”
“I cannot tell you, sir. She had departed from Potheridge before I came.”
“But whither did she go? Whither?” In a sudden frenzy he shook the other’s arm.
The cleric suffered it in silence, realizing the man’s sudden distraction.
“That, sir, I do not know. I never heard. You see, sir, I had not the acquaintance of Miss Sylvester. Perhaps the squire....”
“Aye, aye! The squire!”
To the squire’s he went, and burst in upon him at table in the hall. Squire Haynes, corpulent and elderly, heaved himself up at the intrusion of this splendid stranger.
“God in Heaven!” he cried in amazement. “It’s young Randal Holles! Alive!”
It transpired that the report had run through Potheridge that Randal had been killed at Worcester. That would be at about the time Mr. Sylvester died, and his daughter had left the village shortly thereafter. At another season and in other circumstances Holles might have smiled at the vanity which had led him to suppose his name famous throughout the land. Here to his native Potheridge no echo of that fame had penetrated. He had been reported dead and no subsequent deed of his had come to deny that rumour in this village that was the one spot in all England where men should take an interest in his doings.
Later, indeed, he may have pondered it, and derived from it a salutary lesson in the bridling of conceit. But at the moment his only thought was of Nancy. Was it known whither she had gone?
The squire had heard tell at the time; but he had since forgotten; a parson’s daughter was no great matter. In vain he made an effort of memory for Randal’s sake and upon Randal’s urging. Then he bethought him that perhaps his housekeeper could say. Women retained these trivial matters in their memories. Summoned, the woman was found to remember perfectly. Nancy had gone to Charmouth to the care of a married aunt, a sister of her father’s, her only remaining relative. The aunt’s name was Tenfil, an odd name.
To his dying day Randal would remember that instant ride to Charmouth, his mental anxiety numbing all sense of fatigue, followed by a lackey who at intervals dozed in his saddle, then woke to grumble and complain.
In the end half dead with weariness, yet quickened ever by suspense, they came to Charmouth, and they found the house of Tenfil, and the aunt; but they found no Nancy.
Mrs. Tenfil, an elderly, hard-faced, hard-hearted woman, all piety and no charity, one of those creatures who make of religion a vice for their own assured damnation, unbent a little from her natural sourness before the handsome, elegant young stranger. She was still a woman under the ashes of her years and of her bigotry. But at the mention of her niece’s name the sourness and the hardness came back to her face with interest.
“A creature without godliness. My brother was ever a weak man, and he ruined her with kindness. It was a mercy he died before he came to know the impiety of his offspring—a wilful, headstrong, worldly minx.”
“Madam, it is not her character I seek of you; but her whereabouts,” said the exasperated Randal.
She considered him in a new light. In the elegance and good looks, which had at first commended him, she now beheld the devil’s seal of worldliness. Such a man would seek her niece for no good purpose; yet he was just such a man as her niece, to her undoing, would make welcome. Her lips tightened with saintly, uncharitable purpose. She would make of herself a buckler between this malignant one and her niece. By great good fortune—by a heavenly Providence, in her eyes—her niece was absent at the time. And so in the cause of holiness she lied to him—although of this the poor fellow had no suspicion.
“In that case, young sir, you seek something I cannot give you.”
She would have left it vaguely there, between truth and untruth. But he demanded more.
“You mean, you do not know ... that ... that she has left you?”
She braced herself to the righteous falsehood.
“That is what I mean.”
Still he would not rest content. Haggard-faced he drove her into the last ditch of untruth.
“When did she leave you? Tell me that, at least.”
“Two years ago. After she had been with me a year.”
“And whither did she go? You must know that!”
“I do not. All that I know is that she went. Belike she is in London. That, at least, I know is where she would wish to be, being all worldliness and ungodliness.”
He stared at her, a physical sickness oppressing him. His little Nan in London, alone and friendless, without means. What might not have happened to her in two years?
“Madam,” he said in a voice that passion and sorrow made unsteady, “if you drove her hence, as your manner seems to tell me, be sure that God will punish you.”
And he reeled out without waiting for her answer.
Inquiries in the village might have altered the whole course of his life. But, as if the unutterable gods of Mrs. Tenfil’s devotions removed all chances of the frustration of her ends, Randal rode out of Charmouth without having spoken to another soul. To what end should he have done so, considering her tale? What reason could he have to disbelieve?
For six months after that he sought Nancy in all places likely and unlikely. And all that while in Charmouth Nancy patiently and trustfully awaited his coming, which should deliver her from the dreadful thraldom of Aunt Tenfil’s godliness. Some day, she was persuaded, must happen that which she did not know had already happened; that he mustseek her in Potheridge, learn whither she was gone, and follow. For she did not share Potheridge’s belief that he was dead, though for a time she had mourned him grievously when first the rumour ran through her native village. Subsequently, however, soon after her migration to Charmouth, a letter from him had reached her there, written some months after Worcester fight, in which he announced himself not only safe and sound, but thriving, conquering the world apace, and counting upon returning laden with it soon, to claim her.
And meanwhile despair was settling upon young Randal. To have lived and striven with but one inspiration and one aim, and to find in the hour of triumph that the aim has been rendered unattainable, is to know one’s self for Fortune’s fool. To a loyal soul such as his the blow was crushing. It made life purposeless, robbed him of ambition and warped his whole nature. His steadfastness was transmuted into recklessness and restlessness. He required distraction from his brooding; the career of arms at home, in time of peace, could offer him none of this. He quitted the service of the Parliament, and went abroad—to Holland, that happy hunting-ground of all homeless adventurers. He entered Dutch service, and for a season prospered in it. But there was a difference, deplorable and grim. He was no longer concerned to build himself a position in the State. Such a thing was impossible in a foreign land, where he was a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, a man who made of arms a trade soulless and uninspired. With the mantle of the mercenary he put on a mercenary’s habits. His easily earned gold he spent riotously, prodigally, as was ever the mercenary’s way. He gamed and drank and squandered it on worthless women.
He grew notorious; a man of reckless courage, holding his life cheap, an able leader of men, but a dissolute, hard-drinking, quarrelsome Englander whom it was not safe to trust too far.
The reaction set in at last; but not until five years of this life had corroded his soul. It came to him one day when he realized that he was over thirty, that he had dissipated his youth, and that the path he trod must lead him ultimately to a contemptible old age. Some of the good that slumbered in the depths of his soul welled up to cry a halt. He would go back. Physically and morally he would retrace his steps. He would seize this life that was slipping from him, and remould it to the original intention. For that he would return to England.
He wrote to Monk, who then was the powerfullest man in the realm. But—Fortune’s fool again—he wrote just too late. The restoration was accomplished. It was a few weeks old, no more. For one who had been a prominent Parliament man in the old days, and the son of a Parliament man still more prominent, there was no place by then in English service. Had he but made the application some months sooner, whilst the restoration was still in the balance, and had he then taken sides with Monk in bringing it about, he might by that very act have redeemed the past in Stuart eyes, setting up a credit to cancel the old debt.
The rest you guess. He sank thereafter deeper into his old habits, rendering himself ever more unfit for any great position, and so continued for five horrid years that seemed to him in retrospect an age. Then came the war, and England’s unspoken summons to every son of hers who trailed a sword abroad. Dutch service could no longer hold him. This was his opportunity. At last he would shake off the filth of a mercenary’s life, and go boldly home to find worthy employment for his sword.
Yet, but for the scheming credit accorded him by a tavern-keeper and the interest of a vulgar old woman who had cause to hold him in kindly memory, he might by now have been sent back, to tread once more the path to hell.
Colonel Holles took the air in Paul’s Yard, drawn forth partly by the voice of a preacher on the steps of Paul’s, who was attracting a crowd about him, partly by his own restlessness. It was now three days since his visit to the Cockpit, and although he could not reasonably have expected news from Albemarle within so short a time, yet the lack of it was fretting him.
He was moving along the skirts of the crowd that had collected before the preacher, with no intention of pausing, when suddenly a phrase arrested him.
“Repent, I say, while it is time! For behold the wrath of the Lord is upon you. The scourge of pestilence is raised to smite you down.”
Holles looked over the heads of the assembled citizens, and beheld a black crow of a man, cadaverous of face, with sunken eyes that glowed uncannily from the depths of their sockets.
“Repent!” the voice croaked. “Awaken! Behold your peril, and by prayer and reparation set yourselves to avert it whiles yet it may be time. Within the Parish of St. Giles this week lie thirty dead of this dread pestilence, ten in St. Clement’s, and as many in St. Andrew’s, Holborn. These are but warnings. Slowly but surely the plague is creeping upon the city. As Sodom of old was destroyed, so shall this modern Sodom perish, unless you rouse yourselves, and cast out the evil that is amongst you.”
The crowd was in the main irreverently disposed. There was some laughter, and one shrill, persistent voice that derided him. The preacher paused. He seemed to lengthen before them, as he raised his arms to Heaven.
“They laugh! Deriders, scoffers, will you not be warned? Oh, the great, the dreadful God! His vengeance is upon you, and you laugh. Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic. Therefore I will bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, and I will burn thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.”
Holles moved on. He had heard odd allusions to this pestilence which was said to be making victims in the outskirts and which it was alleged by some fools was a weapon of warfare wielded by the Dutch—at least, that it was the Dutch who had let it loose in England. But he had paid little heed to the matter, knowing that scaremongers are never lacking. Apparently the citizens of London were of his own way of thinking, if he might judge by the indifferent success attending the hoarse rantings of that preacher of doom.
As he moved on, a man of handsome presence and soldierly bearing, with the dress and air of a gentleman, considered him intently with eyes of startled wonder. As Holles came abreast of him, he suddenly stepped forward, detaching from the crowd, and caught the Colonel by the arm. Holles checked, and turned to find himself gravely regarded by this stranger.
“Either you are Randal Holles, or else the devil in his shape.”
Then Holles knew him—a ghost out of his past, as he was, himself, a ghost out of the past of this other; an old friend, a brother-in-arms of the days of Worcester and Dunbar.
“Tucker!” he cried, “Ned Tucker!” And impulsively, his face alight, he held out his hand.
The other gripped it firmly.
“I must have known you anywhere, Randal, despite the change that time has wrought.”
“It has wrought changes in yourself as well. But youwould seem to have prospered!” The Colonel’s face was rejuvenated by a look of almost boyish pleasure.
“Oh, I am well enough,” said Tucker. “And you?”
“As you see.”
The other’s grave dark eyes considered him. There fell a silence, an awkward pause between those two, each of whom desired to ask a hundred questions. At last:
“I last heard of you in Holland,” said Tucker.
“I am but newly home.”
The other’s eyebrows went up, a manifestation of surprise.
“Whatever can have brought you?”
“The war, and the desire to find employment in which I may serve my country.”
“And you’ve found it?” The smile on the dark face suggested a scornful doubt which almost made an answer unnecessary.
“Not yet.”
“It would have moved my wonder if you had. It was a rashness to have returned at all.” He lowered his voice, lest he should be overheard. “The climate of England isn’t healthy at all to old soldiers of the Parliament.”
“Yet you are here, Ned.”
“I?” Again that slow, half-scornful smile lighted the grave, handsome face. He shrugged. He leaned towards Holles, and dropped his voice still further. “My father was not a regicide,” he said quietly. “Therefore, I am comparatively obscure.”
Holles looked at him, the eager pleasure which the meeting had brought him withering in his face. Would men ever keep green the memory of this thing and of the silly tie with which they had garnished it? Must it ever prove an insuperable obstacle to him in Stuart England?
“Nay, nay, never look so glum, man,” Tucker laughed,and he took the Colonel by the arm. “Let us go somewhere where we can talk. We should have a deal to tell each other.”
Holles swung him round.
“Come to the Paul’s Head,” he bade him. “I am lodged there.”
But the other hung back, hesitating a moment. “My own lodging is near at hand in Cheapside,” he said, and they turned about again.
In silence they moved off together. At the corner of Paul’s Yard, Tucker paused, and turned to look across at the doorway of Paul’s and the fanatical preacher who stood there shrilling. His voice floated across to them.
“Oh, the great and the dreadful God!”
Tucker’s face set into grimly sardonic lines. “An eloquent fellow, that,” he said. “He should rouse these silly sheep from their apathy.”
The Colonel stared at him, puzzled. There seemed to be an ulterior meaning to his words. But Tucker, without adding anything further, drew him away and on.
In a handsome room on the first floor of one of the most imposing houses in Cheapside, Tucker waved his guest to the best chair.
“An old friend, just met by chance,” he explained to his housekeeper, who came to wait upon him. “So it will be a bottle of sack ... of the best!”
When, having brought the wine, the woman had taken herself off and the two sat within closed doors, the Colonel gave his friend the account of himself which the latter craved.
Gravely Tucker heard him through, and grave his face remained when the tale was done. He sighed, and considered the Colonel a moment in silence with sombre eyes.
“So George Monk’s your only hope?” he said, slowly, at last. Then he uttered a short, sharp laugh of infinite scorn.“In your case I think I’d hang myself and have done. It’s less tormenting.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think that Monk will really help you? That he intends to help?”
“Assuredly. He has promised it, and he was my friend—and my father’s friend.”
“Friend!” said the other bitterly. “I never knew a trimmer to be any man’s friend but his own. And if ever a trimmer lived, his name is George Monk—the very prince of trimmers, as his whole life shows. First a King’s man; then something betwixt and between King and Parliament; then a Parliament man, selling his friends of the King’s side. And lastly a King’s man again, in opposition to his late trusting friends of the Parliament. Always choosing the side that is uppermost or that can outbid the other for his services. And look where he stands; Baron of this, Earl of that, Duke of Albemarle, Commander-in-Chief, Master of the Horse, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and God knows what else. Oh, he has grown fat on trimming.”
“You do him wrong, Ned.” Holles was mildly indignant.
“That is impossible.”
“But you do. You forget that a man may change sides from conviction.”
“Especially when it is to his own profit,” sneered Tucker.
“That is ungenerous, and it is untrue, of course.” The Colonel showed signs of loyal heat. “You are wrong also in your other assumption. He would have given me all the help I needed, but that....”
“But that he counted the slight risk—nay; what am I saying?—the slight inconvenience to himself should any questions afterwards be asked. He could have averted in such a case all awkwardness by pleading ignorance to your past....”
“He is too honest to do that.”
“Honest! Aye—‘honest George Monk’! Usually misfortune schools a man in worldly wisdom. But you....” Tucker smiled between contempt and sadness, leaving the phrase unfinished.
“I have told you that he will help me; that he has promised.”
“And you build upon his promises? Promises! They cost nothing. They are the bribes with which a trimmer puts off the importunate. Monk saw your need, as I see it. You carry the marks of it plainly upon you, in every seam of your threadbare coat. Forgive the allusion, Randal!” He set a conciliatory hand upon his friend’s arm, for the Colonel had reddened resentfully at the words. “I make it to justify myself of what I say.” And he resumed: “Monk’s revenues amount to thirty thousand pounds a year—such are the vails of trimmers. He was your friend, you say; he was your father’s friend, and owed much to your father, as all know. Did he offer you his purse to tide you over present stress, until opportunity permits him to fulfil his promise? Did he?”
“I could not have taken advantage of it if he had.”
“That is not what I ask you. Did he offer it? Of course he did not. Not he. Yet would not a friend have helped you at once and where he could?”
“He did not think of it.”
“A friend would have thought of it. But Monk is no man’s friend.”
“I say again, you are unjust to him. You forget that, after all, he was under no necessity to promise anything.”
“Oh, yes, he was. There was his Duchess, as you’ve told me. Dirty Bess can be importunate, and she commands him. He goes notoriously in terror of her. Yielding to her importunities he promised that which he will avoid fulfilling.I know George Monk, and all his leprous kind, of which this England is full to-day, battening upon her carcase with the foul greed of vultures. I....”
He grew conscious that Colonel Holles was staring at him, amazed by his sudden vehemence. He checked abruptly, and laughed.
“I grow hot for nothing at all. Nay, not for nothing—for you, old friend, and against those who put this deception upon you. You should not have come back to England, Randal. But since you’re here, at least do not woo disappointment by nourishing your hopes on empty promises.” He raised his glass to the light, and looked at the Colonel solemnly across the top of it. “I drink to your better fortune, Randal.”
Mechanically, without answering a word, the Colonel drank with him. His heart was turned to lead. The portrait Tucker had so swiftly painted of Monk’s soul was painted obviously with a hostile, bitter brush. Yet the facts of Monk’s life made it plausible. The likeness was undeniable, if distorted. And Holles—rendered pessimistic and despondent by his very condition—saw the likeness and not the distortion.
“If you are right,” he said slowly, his eyes upon the table, “I may as well take your advice, and hang myself.”
“Almost the only thing left for a self-respecting man in England,” said Tucker.
“Or anywhere else, for that matter. But why so bitter about England in particular?”
Tucker shrugged. “You know my sentiments, what they always were. I am no trimmer. I sail a steady course.”
Holles regarded him searchingly. He could not misunderstand the man’s words, still less his tone.
“Is that not.... Is it not a dangerous course?” he asked.
Tucker looked at him with wistful amusement.
“There are considerations an honest man should set above danger.”
“Oh, agreed.”
“There is no honesty save in steadfastness, Randal, and I am, I hope, an honest man.”
“By which you mean that I am not,” said Holles slowly.
Tucker did not contradict him by more than a shrug and a deprecatory smile that was of mere politeness. The Colonel rose, stirred to vehemence by his friend’s manifest opinion of him.
“I am a beggar, Ned; and beggars may not choose. Besides, for ten years now I have been a mercenary, neither more nor less. My sword is for hire. That is the trade by which I live. I do not make governments; I do not plague myself with questions of their worth; I serve them, for gold.”
But Tucker, smiling sadly, slowly shook his head.
“If that were true, you would not be in England now. You came, as you have said, because of the war. Your sword may be for hire; but you still have a country, and the first offer goes to her. Should she refuse it, the next will not go to an enemy of England’s. So why belittle yourself thus? You still have a country, and you love it. There are many here who are ready to love you, though they may not be among those who govern England. You have come back to serve her. Serve her, then. But first ask yourself how best she may be served.”
“What’s that?”
“Sit down, man. Sit, and listen.”
And now, having first sworn the Colonel to secrecy in the name of their old friendship—to which and to the Colonel’s desperate condition, the other trusted in opening his heart—Tucker delivered himself of what was no less than treason.
He began by inviting the Colonel to consider the state to which misgovernment by a spendthrift, lecherous,vindictive, dishonest king had reduced the country. Beginning with the Bill of Indemnity and its dishonourable evasion, he reviewed act by act the growing tyranny of the last five years since the restoration of King Charles, presenting each in the focus of his own vision, which, if bitterly hostile, was yet accurate enough. He came in the end to deal with the war to which the country was committed; he showed how it had been provoked by recklessness, and how it had been rendered possible by the gross, the criminal neglect of the affairs of that navy which Cromwell had left so formidable. And he dwelt upon the appalling license of the Court with all the fury of the Puritan he was at heart.
“We touch the end at last,” he concluded with fierce conviction. “Whitehall shall be swept clean of this Charles Stuart and his trulls and pimps and minions. They shall be flung on the foul dunghill where they belong, and a commonwealth shall be restored to rule this England in a sane and cleanly fashion, so that honest men may be proud to serve her once again.”
“My God, Ned, you’re surely mad!” Holles was aghast as much at the confidence itself as at the manner of it.
“To risk myself, you mean?” Tucker smiled grimly. “These vampires have torn the bowels out of better men in the same cause, and if we fail, they may have mine and welcome. But we do not fail. Our plans are shrewdly laid and already well advanced. There is one in Holland who directs them—a name I dare not mention to you yet, but a name that is dear to all honest men. Almost it is the hour. Our agents are everywhere abroad, moulding the people’s mind, directing it into a sane channel. Heaven itself has come to our help by sending us this pestilence to strike terror into men’s hearts and make them ask themselves how much the vices by which the rulers defile this land may not have provoked this visitation. That preacher you heard upon thesteps of Paul’s is one of our agents, doing the good work, casting the seed in fertile places. And very soon now will come the harvest—such a harvest!”
He paused, and considered his stricken friend with an eye in which glowed something of the light of fanaticism.
“Your sword is idle and you seek employment for it, Randal. Here is a service you may take with honour. It is the service of the old Commonwealth to which in the old days you were stanch, a service aiming at these enemies who would still deny such men as you a place in England. You strike not only for yourself, but for some thousands in like case. And your country will not forget. We need such swords as yours. I offer you at once a cause and a career. Albemarle puts you off with promises of appointments in which the preference over worth is daily granted to the pimpish friends of the loathly creatures about Charles Stuart’s leprous Court. I have opened my heart to you freely and frankly, even at some risk. What have you to say to me?”
Holles rose, his decision taken, his face set. “What I said at first. I am a mercenary. I do not make governments. I serve them. There is no human cause in all the world to-day could move me to enthusiasm.”
“Yet you came home that you might serve England in her need.”
“Because I did not know where else to go.”
“Very well. I accept you at your own valuation, Randal—not that I believe you; but not to confuse the argument. Being here, you find the doors by which you counted upon entering all closed against you, and locked. What are you going to do? You say you are a mercenary; that your concern is but to give a soulless service to the hand that hires you. I present you to a liberal taskmaster; one who will richly reward your service. Since to you all service is alike, let the mercenary answer me.”
He, too, had risen, and held out a hand in appeal. The Colonel looked at him seriously awhile; then he smiled.
“What an advocate was lost in you, Ned!” said he. “You keep to the point—aye; but also you conveniently miss it. A mercenary serves governmentsin esse; the service of governmentsin posseis for enthusiasts; and I have had no enthusiasms these ten years and more. Establish your government, and my sword is for your hire, and gladly. But do not ask me to set my head upon the board in this gamble to establish it; for my head is my only remaining possession.”
“If you will not strike a blow for love, will you not strike one for hate: against the Stuart, whose vindictiveness will not allow you to earn your bread?”
“You overstate the case. Though much that you have said of him may be true, I will not yet despair of the help of Albemarle.”
“Why, you blind madman, I tell you—I swear to you—that in a very little while Albemarle will be beyond helping any man, beyond helping even himself.”
Holles was about to speak, when Tucker threw up a hand to arrest him.
“Do not answer me now. Let what I have said sink home into your wits. Give it thought. We are not pressed for a few days. Ponder my words, and if as the days pass and no further news comes to you from Whitehall—no fulfilment of this airy promise—perhaps you will regard things differently, and come to see where your interest really lies. Remember, then, that we need skilled soldiers as leaders for our movement, and that an assured welcome awaits you. Remember, too—this for the mercenary you represent yourself—that the leaders now will be the leaders still when the task is accomplished, and that theirs will be the abiding rewards. Meanwhile, Randal, the bottle’s not half done. So sit you down again, and let us talk of other matters.”
Going home towards dusk, the thing that most intrigued the Colonel was the dangerous frankness that Tucker had used with him, trusting a man in his desperate case with a secret so weighty upon no more than his pledged word and what Tucker remembered of him in the creditable state from which he had long since fallen. Reflection, however, diminished his wonder. Tucker had divulged no facts whose betrayal could seriously impair the plotters. He had mentioned no names; he had no more than vaguely alluded to a directing mind in Holland, which the Colonel guessed to be Algernon Sidney’s, who was beyond the reach of the Stuart arm. For the rest, what had he told him? That there was a serious movement afoot to overthrow the Stuart dynasty, and restore the Commonwealth. Let Holles carry that tale to the authorities, and what would happen? He could impeach by name no man but Tucker; and all he could say of Tucker was that Tucker had told him these things. Tucker’s word would be as good as Holles’s before a justice. On the score of credit, Holles’s antecedents would be the subject of inquiry, and the revelation of them would result in danger to himself alone.
Tucker had not been as ingenuous and confiding as he had at first supposed. He laughed a little to himself at his own simplicity. Then laughed again as he reviewed the proposal Tucker had made him. He might be desperate, but not desperate enough for that—not yet. He caressed his neck affectionately. He had no mind to feel a rope tightening about it. Nor would he yet despair because of what Tucker, largely for the purposes of his own advocacy, had said of Albemarle. The more he considered it, away from Tucker now, the more persuaded was he of Albemarle’s sincerity and good intentions.
On his return to the Paul’s Head from that treasonable talk with Tucker, the Colonel found a considerable excitement presiding over that usually peaceful and well-conducted hostelry. The common room was thronged, which was not in itself odd, considering the time of day; what was odd was the noisy, vehement babble of the normally quiet, soberly spoken merchants who for the main part composed its custom. Mrs. Quinn was there listening to the unusually shrill voice of her bookseller-suitor Coleman, and her round red face, which the Colonel had never seen other than creased and puckered in smiles of false joviality, was solemn for once and had lost some of its normally high colour. Near at hand hovered the drawer, scraping imaginary crumbs from the table with his wooden knife, as a pretext for remaining to listen. And so engrossed was his mistress that she left his eavesdropping unreproved.
Yet, for all her agitation, she had a coy glance for the Colonel as he stalked through, with that lofty detachment and arrogant unconcern of his surroundings which she found so entirely admirable in him. It was not long before she followed him into the little parlour at the back, where she found him stretched at his ease on his favourite seat under the window, having cast aside sword and hat. He was in the act of loading a pipe from a leaden tobacco-jar.
“Lord, Colonel! Here be dreadful news,” she told him.
He looked up, cocking an eyebrow.
“You’ll have heard?” she added. “It is the talk of the Town.”
He shook his head. “Nay, I heard nothing dreadful. Imet a friend, an old friend, over there by the Flower of Luce, and I’ve been with him these three hours. I talked to no one else. What is this news?”
But she was frowning as she looked at him scrutinizingly with her round blue eyes. Her mind was shifted by his light words to her own more immediate concerns. He had met a friend—an old friend. Not much in that to arouse anxiety, perhaps. But Mrs. Quinn moved now in constant dread of influences that might set the Colonel on a sound worldly footing likely to emancipate him from his dependence upon herself. She had skilfully drawn from him enough of the details of his interview with Albemarle to realize that the help upon which he counted from that quarter had not been forthcoming. He had been put off with vague promises, and Mrs. Quinn knew enough of her world not to be greatly perturbed by that. None the less she would have set all doubts at rest by leading the Colonel into the relationship in which she desired to hold him, but that as yet the Colonel manifested no clear disposition to be led. And she was too crafty a huntress to scare her quarry by premature and too direct an onslaught. The only anxiety, yielding to which she might have committed that imprudence, was on the score of the unexpected. She knew that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and this mention of a friend—an old friend, with whom he had spent some hours in intimate talk—was disquieting. She would have liked to question him on the subject of that friend, and might have done so but for his insistent repetition of the question:
“What is this news?”
Recalled to it thus, the gravity of the news itself thrust out the other matter from her mind.
“That the plague has broken out in the City itself—in a house in Bearbinder Lane. It was brought by a Frenchman from Long Acre, where he lived, and which he left uponfinding the pestilence to be growing in his neighbourhood. Yet it seems he was already taken with the disease, which now the wretch has brought to our threshold, as it were, without benefit to himself.”
The Colonel thought of Tucker and his scaremongering emissaries.
“Perhaps it is not true,” said he.
“Aye, but it is. Beyond a doubt. It was put about by a preacher rogue from the steps of Paul’s to-day. At first folk did not believe him. But they went to Bearbinder Lane, and there found the house shut up, and guarded by command of my Lord Mayor. And they do say that Sir John Lawrence is gone to Whitehall to take order about this, to concert measures for staying the spread of the pestilence; they are to close playhouses and all other places where people come together, which will likely mean that they will be closing taverns and eating-houses. And what should I do in that case?”
“Nay, nay,” Holles comforted her. “It will hardly come to that. Men must eat and drink or they starve, and that’s as bad as the pestilence.”
“To be sure it is. But they’ll never think of that in their zeal and their sudden godliness—for they’ll be in a muck-sweat o’ godliness now that they see what a visitation has been brought upon us by the vices of the Court. And this to happen at such a time, with the Dutch fleet, as they say, about to attack the coast!”
She railed on. Disturbed out of her self-centred existence into a consideration of the world’s ills now that she found herself menaced by them, she displayed a prodigious volubility upon topics that hitherto she had completely ignored.
And the substance of her news was true enough. The Lord Mayor was at that very moment at Whitehall urging immediate and drastic measures for combating the spread of the pestilence, and one of these measures was the instant closingof the playhouses. But since he did not at the same time urge the closing of the churches, in which the congregating of people was at least as dangerous as in the theatres, it was assumed at Court that Sir John was the cat’s-paw of the Puritans who sought to make capital out of the pestilence. Besides, the visitation was one that confined itself to the poorer quarters and the lower orders. Heaven would never be so undiscriminating as to permit this horrible disease to beset persons of quality. And then, too, Whitehall’s mind at the moment was over-full of other matters: there were these rumours that the Dutch fleet was out, and that was quite sufficient to engage such time and attention as could be spared from pleasure by the nation’s elect, following in the footsteps of their pleasure-loving King. Also a good many of the nation’s elect were exercised at the time by personal grievances in connection with the fleet and the war. Of these perhaps the most disgruntled—as he was certainly the most eminent—was His Grace of Buckingham, who found the nation sadly negligent of the fact that he had come all the way from York, and his lord-lieutenancy there, to offer her his valuable services in her hour of need.
He had requested the command of a ship, a position to which his rank and his talents fully entitled him, in his own view. That such a request would be refused had never entered his calculations. But refused it was. There were two factors working against him. The first was that the Duke of York cordially disliked him and neglected no chance of mortifying him; the second was that the Duke of York, being Lord Admiral of the Fleet, desired to take no risks. There were many good positions from which capable naval men could be excluded to make way for sprigs of the nobility. But the command of a man-of-war was not one of these. Buckingham was offered a gun-brig. Considering that the offer came from the King’s brother, he could not resent it inthe terms his hot blood prompted. But what he could do to mark his scorn, he did. He refused the gun-brig, and enlisted as a volunteer aboard a flag-ship. But here at once a fresh complication arose. As a Privy Councillor he claimed the right of seat and voice in all councils of war, in which capacity it is probable he might have done even more damage than in command of one of the great ships. Again the Duke of York’s opposition foiled him, whereupon in a rage he posted from Portsmouth to Whitehall to lay his plaint before his crony the King. The Merry Monarch may have wavered; it may have vexed him not to be able to satisfy the handsome rake who understood so well the arts of loosening laughter; but between his own brother and Buckingham there can have been no choice. And so Charles could not help him.
Buckingham had remained, therefore, at Court, to nurse his chagrin, and to find his way circuitously into the strange history of Colonel Randal Holles. His grace possessed, as you know, a mercurial temperament which had not yet—although he was now approaching forty—lost any of its liveliness. Such natures are readily consoled, because they readily find distractions. It was not long before he had forgotten, in new and less creditable pursuits, not only the humbling of his dignity, but even the circumstance that his country was at war. Dryden has summed him up in a single line: He “was everything by starts, and nothing long.” The phrase applies as much to Buckingham’s moods as to his talents; it epitomizes the man’s whole character.
His friend George Etheredge, that other gifted rake who had leapt into sudden fame a year ago with his comedy “The Comic Revenge,” had been deafening his ears with praises of the beauty and talent of that widely admired and comparatively newly discovered actress Sylvia Farquharson. At first Buckingham had scoffed at his friend’s enthusiasm.
“Such heat of rhetoric to describe a playhouse baggage!” he had yawned. “For a man of your parts, George, I protest you’re nauseatingly callow.”
“You flatter me in seeking to reprove,” Etheredge laughed. “To be callow despite the years is to bear the mark of greatness. Whom the gods love are callow always; for whom the gods love die young, whatever be their age.”
“You aim at paradox, I suppose. God help me!”
“No paradox at all. Whom the gods love never grow old,” Etheredge explained himself. “They never come to suffer as do you from jaded appetites.”
“You may be right,” his grace admitted gloomily. “Prescribe me a tonic.”
“That is what I was doing: Sylvia Farquharson, at the Duke’s House.”
“Bah! A play actress! A painted doll on wires! Twenty years ago your prescription might have served.”
“You admit that you grow old. Superfluous admission! But this, let me perish, is no painted doll. This is an incarnation of beauty and talent.”
“So I’ve heard of others that had neither.”
“And let me add that she is virtuous.”
Buckingham stared at him, opening his lazy eyes. “What may that be?” he asked.
“The chief drug in my prescription.”
“But does it exist, or is your callowness deeper than I thought?” quoth Buckingham.
“Come and see,” Mr. Etheredge invited him.
“Virtue,” Buckingham objected, “is not visible.”
“Like beauty, it dwells in the beholder’s eye. That’s why you’ve never seen it, Bucks.”
To the Duke’s playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields his disgruntled grace suffered himself, in the end, to be conducted. He went to scoff. He remained to worship. You alreadyknow—having overheard the garrulous Mr. Pepys—how from his box, addressing his companion in particular and the whole house in general, the ducal author loudly announced that he would give his muse no rest until he should have produced a play with a part worthy of the superb talents of Miss Farquharson.
His words were reported to her. They bore with them a certain flattery to which it was impossible that she should be impervious. She had not yet settled herself completely into this robe of fame that had been thrust upon her. She continued unspoiled, and she did not yet condescendingly accept such utterances from the great as no more than the proper tribute to her gifts. Such praise from one so exalted, himself a distinguished author and a boon companion of the King’s, set a climax upon the triumphs that lately she had been garnering.
It prepared her for the ducal visit to the green room, which followed presently. She was presented by Mr. Etheredge with whom she was already acquainted, and she stood shyly before the tall, supremely elegant duke, under the gaze of his bold eyes.
In his golden periwig he looked at this date not a year more than thirty, despite the hard life he had lived from boyhood. As yet he had come to none of that grossness to be observed in the portrait which Sir Peter Lely painted some years later. He was still the handsomest man at Charles’s Court, with his long-shaped, dark blue eyes under very level brows, his fine nose and chin, and his humorous, sensitive, sensual mouth. In shape and carriage he was of an extraordinary grace that drew all eyes upon him. Yet at sight, instinctively, Miss Farquharson disliked him. She apprehended under all that beauty of person something sinister. She shrank inwardly and coloured a little under the appraising glance of those bold, handsome eyes, which seemed to penetrate toofar. Reason and ambition argued her out of that instinctive shrinking. Here was one whose approval carried weight and would set the seal upon her fame, one whose good graces could maintain her firmly on the eminence to which she had so laboriously climbed. He was a man whom, in spite of all instinctive warnings, she must use with consideration and a reasonable submission.