She smirked, clutching that second precious piece.“Indeed, your honour, they may sleep and welcome. Ye’ve paid for their lodgings.”
Holles considered her critically. “Goo’ woman. Ye’re a goo’ woman.” He considered her further. “Handsome woman! Lerrem sleep in peace. Gobbless you.”
She thought a kiss was coming. But he disappointed her. He loosed her arm, reeled away a little, swung round, and lurched out of the place and off down the street. Having gone some little way, he halted unsteadily and looked back. He was not observed. Having assured himself of this, he resumed his way, and it is noteworthy that he no longer staggered. His step was now brisk and certain. He flung something from him as he went, and there was a faint tinkle of shivering glass. It was the phial that had contained the powerful narcotic which he had added to his guests’ wine whilst they were grovelling for the money he had spilled.
“Animals!” he said contemptuously, and upon that dismissed them from his mind.
The hour of seven was striking from St. Clement’s Danes as he passed the back door of the playhouse and the untended chair that waited there for Miss Farquharson. Farther down the narrow street a couple of men were lounging who at a little distance might have been mistaken for the very chairmen he had left slumbering in the alehouse. Their plain liveries at least were very similar, and they were covered with broad round hats identical with those of Miss Farquharson’s bearers, worn at an angle that left their faces scarcely visible.
Sauntering casually, Colonel Holles came up with them. The street thereabouts was practically untenanted.
“Is all well?” he asked them.
“The people have quitted the theatre some ten minutes since,” one of them answered him in indifferent English.
“To your places, then. You know your tale if there are any questions.”
They nodded, and lounged along, eventually to lean against the theatre wall in the neighbourhood of the chair, obviously its bearers. The tale they were to tell at need was that Jake had been taken ill; it was feared that he was seized with the plague. Nat, who was remaining with him, had begged these two to take their places with the chair.
Holles took cover in a doorway, whence he could watch the scene of action, and there disposed himself to wait. The vigil proved a long one. As Jake had remarked to his companion, Miss Farquharson was likely to be late in leaving. On this the final evening at the Duke’s Theatre she would have packing to do, and there would perhaps be protracted farewells among the players. Of the latter several had already emerged from that little doorway and had departed on foot. Still Miss Farquharson did not come, and already the evening shadows began to deepen in the street.
If Colonel Holles was exercised by a certain impatience on the one hand, on the other he was comforted by the reflection that there was gain to his enterprise in delay. The thing he had to do would be better accomplished in the dusk; best, indeed, in the dark. So he waited, and Buckingham’s two French lackeys, disguised as chairmen, waited also. They had the advantage of knowing Miss Farquharson by sight, having twice seen her at close quarters, once on the occasion of her visit to Wallingford House and again on the day of her mock-rescue in Paul’s Yard.
At last, at a little after half-past eight, when already objects were become indistinctly visible at a little distance, she made her appearance in the doorway. She came accompanied by Mr. Betterton, and was followed by the theatre doorkeeper. She paused to deliver to the latter certain instructions in the matter of her packages, then Mr. Betterton escorted her gallantly to her chair. The chairmen were already at their places to which they had sprungimmediately upon her coming forth. One, standing behind the chair, by raising its hinged roof made of this a screen for himself. The other, by the foreshafts endeavoured to find cover beside the body of the chair itself.
Gathering her hooded cloak about her, she stepped into the sedan. Betterton bowed low over her hand in valediction. As he stood back, the chairman in front closed the apron, whilst the one behind lowered the roof. Then, taking their places between the shafts, they raised the chair and began to move away with it. From within Miss Farquharson waved a delicate hand to Mr. Betterton, who stood bowing, bareheaded.
The chair swung past the grotesque wooden structure of Temple Bar and along Fleet Street in the deepening dusk of that summer evening, and this being the normal way it should have taken there was so far nothing to alarm its occupant. But as its bearers were about to turn to the right, to plunge into the narrow alley leading down to Salisbury Court, a man suddenly emerged from that black gulf to check their progress. The man was Holles, who had gained the place ahead of them.
“Back!” he called to them, as he advanced. “You cannot pass. There is a riot down there about a plague-stricken house which has been broken open, and the pestilence is being scattered to the four winds. You cannot go this way.”
The bearers halted. “What way, then?” the foremost inquired.
“Whither would you go?” the man asked him.
“To Salisbury Court.”
“Why, that is my way. You must go round by the Fleet Ditch, as I must. Come, follow me.” And he went ahead briskly down Fleet Street.
The chair resumed its way in the altered direction. Miss Farquharson had leaned forward when it halted to hear what was said. She had observed no closed house in the alley upon coming that way some hours ago in daylight. But she saw no reason to doubt the warning on that account. Infected houses were, after all, growing common enough by now in London streets, and she was relieved that the closing of the theatre was to permit her own withdrawal into the country, away from that pestilential atmosphere.
She sat back again with a little sigh of weariness, and in silence suffered herself to be borne along.
But when they came to the Fleet Ditch, instead of turning to the right her bearers kept straight on, following ever in the wake of that tall cloaked man who had offered to conduct them. They were halfway over the bridge before Miss Farquharson became aware of what was happening. She leaned forward and called to them that they were mistaking the way. They took no more heed of her than if they had been stone-deaf, and trudged stolidly onward. She cried out to them more loudly and insistently. Still they took no notice. They were across the bridge, and swinging away now to the right towards the river. Miss Farquharson came to the conclusion that there must be some way back of which she was not aware, and that some good reason inspired their guide. So, for all that she still accounted it strange that the chairmen should have been so deaf to her commands, she allowed them now to proceed without further interference. But when far from finding any way to recross the ditch, the chair suddenly turned to the left in the direction of Baynard’s Castle, her bewilderment suddenly redoubled.
“Stop!” she called to them. “You are going the wrong way. Set down the chair at once. Set down, I say!”
They heeded her as little as before. Not only did they press steadily onward, but they even quickened their pace, stumbling over the rough cobbles of the street in the darkness that pervaded it. Alarm awoke in her.
“Nathaniel,” she called shrilly, leaning forward, and vainly seeking to grasp the shoulder just beyond her reach. “Nathaniel!”
Her alarm increased. Was this really Nathaniel or was it some one else? There was something sinisterly purposeful in the stolid manner in which the fellow plodded on unheeding. The tall man ahead who led them, little more than adark outline now, had slackened his step, so that the chair was rapidly overtaking him.
She attempted to rise, to force up the roof of the chair, to thrust open the apron in front of her. But neither yielded to her exertions. And in the end she realized that both had been fastened. That made an end of any doubt with which she may still have been deluding herself. She yielded to terror and her screams for help awoke the silent echoes of the street. The tall man halted, turned, rapped out an oath, and authoritatively commanded the men to set down. But even as he issued the order the flare of a link suddenly made its appearance at the corner of Paul’s Chains, and in the ring of yellow light it cast they could discern the black outlines of three or four moving figures. Light and figures paused a moment there, checked by the girl’s cries. Then abruptly they flung forward at clattering speed.
“On! On!” Holles bade the chairmen curtly, and himself went forward again, the chair now following with Miss Farquharson steadily shrieking for help and beating frenziedly upon roof and apron.
She, too, had seen those Heaven-sent rescuers rushing swiftly to meet them, and she may have caught in the torchlight the livid gleam of swords drawn for her deliverance.
They were a party of three gentlemen lighted by a link-boy, on their homeward way. They were young and adventurous, as it chanced, and very ready to bare their blades in defence of a lady in distress.
But it happened that this was a contingency for which Holles was fully prepared, one, indeed, which he could not have left out of his calculations.
The foremost of those hastening gallants was suddenly upon him, his point at the level of the Colonel’s breast, and bawling dramatically:
“Stand, villain!”
“Stand yourself, fool,” Holles answered him in tones of impatient scorn, making no shift to draw in self-defence. “Back—all of you—on your lives! We are conveying this poor lady home. She has the plague.”
That checked their swift advance. It even flung them back a little, treading on one another’s toes in their sudden intimidation. Brave enough against ordinary men and ordinary lethal weapons, they were stricken with instant panic before the horrible, impalpable foe whose presence was thus announced to them.
Miss Farquharson, who had overheard the Colonel’s warning and perceived its paralyzing effect upon those rescuers whom she had been regarding as Heaven-sent, leaned forward, in frenzied fear that the trap was about to close upon her.
“He lies! He lies!” she shrieked in her terror. “It is false! I have not the plague! I have not the plague! I swear it! Do not heed him, sirs! Do not heed him! Deliver me from these villains. Oh, of your charity, sirs ... in God’s name ... do not abandon me, or I am a lost woman else!”
They stood at gaze, moved by her piteous cries, yet hesitating what to believe. Holles addressed them, speaking sadly:
“She is distraught, poor soul. Demented. I am her husband, sirs, and she fancies me an enemy. I am told it is a common enough state in those upon whom this terrible disease has fastened.” It was a truth of which all London was aware by now that the onslaught of the plague was commonly attended by derangement of the mind and odd delusions. “And for your governance, sirs, I should tell you that I greatly fear I am, myself, already infected. I beg you, then, not to detain me, but to stand aside so that we may regain our home before my strength is spent.”
Behind him Miss Farquharson continued to scream herfurious denials and her piteous entreaties that they should deliver her.
If they still doubted, yet they dared not put their doubts to the test. Moreover, her very accents by now in their frenzy seemed to confirm this man’s assertion that she was mad. A moment yet those rescuers hung there, hesitating. Then suddenly one of them surrendered to his mounting fear and horror.
“Away! Away!” he cried, and, swinging round, dashed off down the street. His panic communicated itself instantly to his fellows, and they went clattering after him, the link-boy bringing up the rear, his streaming torch held high.
Aghast, spent by her effort, Miss Farquharson sank back with a moan, feeling herself exhausted and abandoned. But when one of the chairmen, in obedience to an order from the Colonel, pulled the apron open, she at once leapt up and out, and would have gone speeding thence but that the other bearer caught her about her slender body, and held her firmly whilst his fellow wound now about her head a long scarf which Holles had tossed him for the purpose. That done, they made fast her hands behind her with a handkerchief, thrust her back into the chair, and shut her in.
She sat now helpless, half-choked by the scarf, which not only served to muffle her cries, but also blindfolded her, so that she no longer knew whither she was being conveyed. All that she knew was that the chair was moving.
On it went, then away to the left, and up the steep gradient of Paul’s Chains, and lastly to the right into Knight Ryder Street. Before a substantial house on the north side of this, between Paul’s Chains and Sermon Lane, the chair came to a final standstill and was set down. The roof was raised and the apron pulled open, and hands seized upon her to draw her forth. She hung back, a dead weight, in a last futileattempt at resistance. Then she felt herself bodily lifted in strong arms, and swung to a man’s shoulder.
Thus Holles bore her into the house, wherein the chair, the poles having been removed, was also presently bestowed. The Colonel turned to the right of the roomy hall in which two silent figures stood at attention—Buckingham’s other two French lackeys—and entered a moderate-sized square chamber, sombrely furnished and sombrely wainscoted from bare floor to whitened ceiling. In the middle of the room a table with massive corkscrew legs was laid for supper, and on its polished surface gleamed crystal and silver in the light from the great candle-branch that occupied its middle. The long window overlooking the street was close-shuttered, the shutters barred. Under this stood a daybed of cane and carved oak, furnished with velvet cushions of a dull wine colour. To this daybed Holles conveyed his burden. Having set her down, he stooped to remove the handkerchief that bound her wrists.
It was a compassionate act, for he knew that the pinioning must be causing pain by now to her arms. Under the broad brim of his hat, his face, moist from his exertions, gleamed white, his lips were tightly compressed. Hitherto intent upon the accomplishment of the business as he had planned it, he had given little thought to its ugly nature. Now suddenly as he bent over this figure, at once so graceful, so delicate and frail, as a faint sweet perfume that she used assailed his nostrils conveying to his senses a suggestion of her daintiness and femininity, disgust of the thing he did overwhelmed him, like physical nausea.
He turned away, to close the door, tossing aside his hat and cloak, and mopping his brow as he went, for the sweat was running down him like basting on a capon. Whilst he was crossing the room she struggled to her feet, and her hands being now at liberty she tugged and tore at the scarfuntil she loosed it so that it slipped down from her face and hung in folds about her neck and shoulders above the line of her low-cut, modish bodice.
Erect there, breathing hard, her eyes flaming, she flung her words angrily at the tall loose-limbed figure of her captor.
“Sir,” she said, “you will let me depart at once, or you shall pay dearly for this villainy.”
He closed the door and turned again, to face her. He attempted to smother in a smile the hangdog expression of his countenance.
“Unless you suffer me to depart at once, you shall....”
There she paused. Abruptly she broke off, to lean forward a little, staring at him, her parted lips and dilating eyes bearing witness to an amazement so overwhelming that it overrode both her anger and her fear. Hoarse and tense came her voice at last:
“Who are you? What ... what is your name?”
He stared in his turn, checking in the very act of mopping his brow, wondering what it was she saw in him to be moving her so oddly. Where she stood, her face was more than half in shadow, whilst the light of that cluster of candles on the table was beating fully upon his own. He was still considering how he should answer her, what name assume, when she startled him by sparing his invention further trouble in the matter.
“You are Randal Holles!” she cried on a wild, strained note.
He advanced a step in a sort of consternation, breathless, some sudden ghastly emotion tearing at his heart, eyeing her wildly, his jaw fallen, his whole face livid as a dead man’s.
“Randal Holles!” she repeated in that curiously tortured voice. “You! You of all men—and to do this thing!”
Where there had been only wild amazement in her eyes, he beheld now a growing horror, until mercifully she covered her face with her hands.
For a moment he copied her action. He, too, acting spasmodically, covered his face. The years rolled back; the room with its table laid for that infamous supper melted away to be replaced in his vision by a cherry orchard in bloom, and in that orchard a girl on a swing, teasing yet adorable, singing a song that brought him, young and clean and honourable, hastening to her side. He saw himself a lad of twenty going out into the world with a lady’s glove in his hat—a glove that to this day he cherished—bent upon knight-errantry for that sweet lady’s sake, to conquer the world, no less, that he might cast it in her lap. And he saw her—this Sylvia Farquharson of the Duke’s Theatre—as she had been in those long-dead days when her name was Nancy Sylvester.
The years had wrought in her appearance a change that utterly disguised her. Where in this resplendently beautiful woman could he discover the little child he had loved so desperately? How could he have dreamt of his little Nancy Sylvester transformed into the magnificent Sylvia Farquharson, whose name he had heard used as a byword for gallantry, lavishness, and prodigality, whose fame was as widespread and questionably lustrous as that of Moll Davies or Eleanor Gwynn?
He reeled back until his shoulders came to rest against the closed door, and stared and stared in dazed amazement, his soul revolted by the horror of the situation in which they found themselves.
“God!” he groaned aloud. “My Nan! My little Nan!”
At any other time and in any other place this meeting must have filled him with horror of a different kind. His soul might have been swept by pain and anger to find Nancy Sylvester, whom his imagination had placed high and inaccessible as the very stars, whose memory had acted as a beacon to him, casting a pure white light to guide him through the quagmire of many a vile temptation, reduced to this state of—as he judged it—evil splendour.
Just now, however, the consciousness of his own infamous position blotted out all other thought.
He staggered forward, and fell on his knees before her.
“Nan! Nan!” he cried in a strangled voice, “I did not know. I did not dream....”
It was enough to confirm the very worst of the fears that were assailing her, to afford her that explanation of his presence against which she had been desperately struggling in defiance of the overwhelming evidences.
She stood before him, a woman of little more than average height and of an almost sapling grace, yet invested with something proud and regal and aloof that did not desert her even now in this terrible situation at once of peril and of cruellest disillusion.
She was dressed, as it chanced, entirely in white, and all white she stood before him save where the folds of the blue scarf with which she had been muffled still hung about her neck and bosom. No whiter than her oval face was her gown of shimmering ivory satin. About her long-shaped eyes, that could by turns be provocative, mocking, and caressingin their glances, dark stains of suffering were growing manifest, whilst in their blue-green depths there was nothing but stark horror.
She put a delicate, tapering hand to her brow, brushing thence the modish tendrils of her chestnut hair, and twice she attempted to speak before words would come from her stiff lips.
“You did not know!” Pain rendered harsh and rasping the voice whose natural music had seduced whole multitudes, and the sound of it was a sword of sharpness to that kneeling, distracted man. “It is, then, as I thought. You have done this thing at the hiring of another. You are so fallen that you play the hired bully. And you are Randal Holles!”
A groan, a wild gesture of despair were the outward signs of his torment. On his knees he dragged himself nearer, to her very feet.
“Nan, Nan, don’t judge until you have heard, until....”
But she interrupted him. His very abjectness was in itself an eloquent admission of the worst.
“Heard? Have you not told me all? You did not know. You did not know that it was I whom you were carrying off. Do you think I cannot guess who is the master-villain that employs you for his jackal? And you did not know it was I—that it was one who loved you once, when you were clean and honest....”
“Nan! Nan! O God!”
“But I never loved you as I loathe you now for the foul thing you are become, you that were to conquer the world for me. You did not know that it was I whom you were paid to carry off! And you are so shameless, so lost to honour, that you dare to urge that ignorance as your excuse. Well, you know it now, and I hope you are punished in the knowledge. I hope that, if any lingering sense of shame abides in you, it will scorch your miserable soul to ashes. Getup, man,” she bade him, regally contemptuous, splendidly tragic. “Shall grovelling there mend any of your vileness?”
He came instantly to his feet. Yet it was not, as she supposed, in obedience to her command, so much as out of a sudden awakening to the need for instant action. All the agony that was threatening to burst his soul must be repressed, all that he had to say in expression and perhaps relieving of that agony, must wait.
“What I have done, I can undo,” he said, and, commanding himself under the stress of that urgent necessity, he assumed a sudden firmness. “Shall we stand talking here instead of acting, when every moment of delay increases your danger? Come! As I carried you hither, in defiance of all, so will I carry you hence again at once while yet there is time.”
She recoiled before the hand that he flung out as if to seize her and compel her. There was a sudden fury of anger in her eyes, a fury of scorn on her lips.
“You will carry me hence! You! I am to trust myself to you!”
He never winced under the lash of her contempt, so intent was he upon that one urgent thing.
“Will you stay, then, and trust yourself to Buckingham?” he flung fiercely back at her. “Come, I say,” he commanded, oddly masterful in his overwhelming concern for her.
“With you? Oh, not that! Never with you! Never!”
He beat his hands together in his frenzy of impatience.
“Will you not realize that there is no time to lose? That if you stay here you are lost? Go alone, if you will. Return home at once. But since you must go afoot, and you may presently be pursued, suffer me at least to follow after you, to do what I can to make you safe. Trust me in this ... for your own sake trust me.... In God’s name!”
“Trust you?” she echoed, and almost she seemed to laugh. “You? After this?”
“Aye, after this. Because of this. I may be as vile as you are deeming me; not a doubt I am. But I never could have been vile to you. It may not excuse me to protest that I did not know it was against you that I was acting. But it should make you believe that I am ready to defend you now—now that I know. You must believe me! Can you doubt me in such a matter? Unless I meant honestly by you, why should I be urging you to depart? Come!”
This time he caught her by the wrist, and maintained his hold against her faint attempt to liberate herself. He attempted to draw her after him across the room. A moment she hung back, resisting still.
“For God’s sake!” he implored her madly. “At any moment Buckingham may arrive!”
This time she yielded to a spur that earlier her passion had made her disregard. Between such evils there could be no choice. She looked into his livid, gleaming face, distorted by his anguish and anxiety.
“I ... I can trust you in this? If I trust you ... you will bear me safely home? You swear it?”
“As God’s my witness!” he sobbed in his impatience.
There was an end to her resistance now. More: she displayed a sudden urgency that matched his own.
“Quick! Quick, then!” she panted.
“Ah!” He drew a deep breath of thankfulness, snatched up hat and cloak from the chair where he tossed them, and drew her across the room by the wrist, of which he still retained his grip.
And then, just as they reached the door, it was thrust open from without, and the tall, graceful figure of the Duke of Buckingham, his curled fair head almost touching the lintel, stood before them, a flush of fevered expectancy onhis handsome face. In his right hand he held his heavily feathered hat: his left rested on the pummel of the light dress rapier he was wearing.
The pair recoiled before him, and Holles loosed her wrist upon the swift, instinctive apprehension that here he was like to need his hands for other things.
His grace was all in glittering satin, black and white like a magpie, with jewels in the lace at his throat and a baldric of garter blue across his breast.
A moment he stood there at gaze, with narrowing eyes, puzzled by something odd in their attitudes, and looking from Miss Farquharson’s pale, startled loveliness to the stiff, grim figure of her companion. Then he came slowly forward, leaving the door wide behind him. He bowed low to the lady without speaking; as he came erect again it was to the Colonel that he addressed himself.
“All should be here, I think,” he said, waving a hand towards table and sideboard.
Holles half-turned to follow the gesture, and he stood a moment as if pondering the supper equipment, glad of that moment in which to weigh the situation. Out there, in the hall, somewhere just beyond that open door, would be waiting, he knew, Buckingham’s four French lackeys, who at their master’s bidding would think no more of slitting his throat than of slicing the glazed capon on the sideboard yonder. He had been in many a tighter corner than this in his adventurous life, but never before had there been a woman on his hands to hamper him and at the same time to agonize and numb his wits with anxiety. He thanked Heaven for the prudence which had silenced his impulse to bid Buckingham stand aside when he had first made his appearance. Had he acted upon that, there would very likely have been an end of him by now. And once there was an end of him, Nan would lie entirely at the Duke’s mercy.His life had come suddenly to matter very much. He must go very warily.
The Duke’s voice, sharp with impatience, roused him:
“Well, booby? Will you stand there all night considering?”
Holles turned.
“All is here, under your grace’s hand, I think,” he said quietly.
“Then you may take yourself off.”
Holles bowed submissively. He dared not look at Nan; but he caught the sudden gasp of her breath, and without looking beheld her start, and imagined the renewed horror and wide-eyed scorn in which she regarded this fresh display of cowardice and vileness.
He stalked to the door, the Duke’s eyes following him with odd suspicion, puzzled ever by that something here which he perceived, but whose significance eluded him. Holding the edge of the open door in his hand, Holles half-turned again. He was still playing for time in which to decide upon his course of action.
“Your grace, I take it, will not require me further to-night?”
His grace considered. Beyond the Duke Holles had a glimpse of Nan, standing wide-eyed, livid as death, leaning against the table, her right hand pressed upon her heaving breast as if to control its tumult.
“No,” said his grace slowly, at last, “Yet you had best remain at hand with François and the others.”
“Very well,” said Holles, and turned to go. The key was, he observed, on the outside of the door. He stooped and withdrew it from the lock. “Your grace would perhaps prefer the key on the inside,” he said, with an odious smirk, and, whilst his grace impatiently shrugged his indifference, Holles made the transference.
Having made it, he closed the door swiftly, and he had quietly turned the key in the lock, withdrawn and pocketed it before his grace recovered from his surprise at the eccentricity of his behaviour.
“What’s this?” he demanded sharply, taking a step towards the Colonel, and from Nan there came a faint cry—a sob scarcely more than to announce the reaction caused by sudden understanding and the revival of her hopes from the despair into which she had fallen.
Holles, his shoulders to the door, showed a face that was now grim and set. He cast from him again the hat and cloak which he had been holding.
“It is, your grace, that I desire a word in private with you, safe from the inconvenient intrusion of your lackeys.”
The Duke drew himself up, very stiff and stern, not a little intrigued as you conceive by all this; but quite master of himself. Fear, as I think I have said, was an emotion utterly unknown to him. Had he but been capable of the same self-mastery in other directions he might have been the greatest man in England. He made now no outcry, put no idle questions that must derogate from the dignity with which he felt it incumbent to invest himself.
“Proceed, sir,” he said coldly. “Let us have the explanation of this insolence, that so we may make an end of it.”
“That is soon afforded.” Holles, too, spoke quietly. “This lady, your grace, is a friend of mine, an ... an old friend. I did not know it until ... until I had conveyed her hither. Upon discovering it, I would have escorted her hence again, and I was about to do so when your grace arrived. I have now to ask you to pledge me your word of honour that you will do nothing to prevent our peaceful departure—that you will offer no hindrance either in your own person or in that of your servants.”
For a long moment, Buckingham stood considering himwithout moving from the spot where he stood, midway between Holles and the girl, his shoulder to the latter. Beyond a heightening of the colour about his eyes and cheekbones, he gave no sign of emotion. He even smiled, though not quite pleasantly.
“But how simple,” he said, with a little laugh. “Nothing, indeed, could be of a more engaging simplicity. And how touching is the situation, how romantic. An old friend of yours, you say. And, of course, because of that, the world is to stand still.” Then his voice hardened. “And should I refuse to pledge my word, what does Colonel Holles propose?”
“It will be very bad for your grace,” said Holles.
“Almost, I think, you threaten me!” Buckingham betrayed a faint amazement.
“You may call it that.”
The Duke’s whole manner changed. He plucked off his mask of arrogant languor.
“By God!” he ejaculated, and his voice was rasping as a file. “That is enough of this insolence, my man. You’ll unlock that door at once, and go your ways, or I’ll call my men to beat you to a jelly.”
“It was lest your grace should be tempted to such ungentle measures that I took the precaution to lock the door.” Holles was smooth as velvet. “I will ask your grace to observe that it is a very stout door and that the lock is a very sound one. You may summon your lackeys. But before they can reach you, it is very probable that your grace will be in hell.”
Buckingham laughed, and, even as he laughed he whipped the light rapier from its scabbard, and flung forward in a lunge across the distance which he had measured with his very practised swordsman’s eye.
It was an action swift as lightning and of a deadlyprecision, shrewdly calculated to take the other by surprise and transfix him before he could make a move to guard himself. But swift as it was, and practised as was the Duke’s skill, he was opposed to one as swift and practised, one who had too often kept his life with his hands not to be schooled in every trick of rough-and-tumble. Holles had seen that calculating look in the Duke’s eyes as they measured the distance between them, and, because he had more than once before seen just such a calculating look in the eyes of other men and knew what followed, he had guessed the Duke’s purpose, and he had been prepared. Even as the Duke drew and lunged in one movement, so, in one movement, too, Holles drew and fell on guard to deflect that treacherous lightning-stroke.
Nan’s sudden scream of fear and the clash of the two blades rang out at the same moment. The Colonel’s parry followed on into the enveloping movement of aripostethat whirled his point straight at the Duke’s face on the low level to which this had been brought by the lunge. To avoid it, Buckingham was forced to make a recovery, a retreat as precipitate as the advance had been swift. Erect once more, his grace fell back, his breathing quickened a little, and for a moment the two men stood in silence, their points lowered, measuring each other with their eyes. Then Holles spoke.
“Your grace, this is a game in which the dice are heavily cogged against you,” he said gravely. “Better take the course I first proposed.”
Buckingham uttered a sneering laugh. He had entirely mistaken the other’s meaning.
“Why, you roaring captain, you pitiful Bobadil, do you think to affright me with swords and antics? It is against yourself the dice are loaded. Unlock that door, and get you hence or I’ll carve you into ribbons.”
“Oho! And who’s the roaring captain now? Who theBobadil? Who the very butcher of a silk button?” cried Holles, stung to anger. He would have added more, perhaps, but the Duke stemmed him.
“Enough talk!” he snapped. “The key, you rogue, or I’ll skewer you where you stand.”
Holles grinned at him. “I little thought when I saved your life that night at Worcester that I should be faced with the need to take it thus.”
“You think to move me with that reminder, do you?” said the Duke, and drove at him.
“Hardly. I’ll move you in another way, you lovelorn ninnyhammer,” Holles snarled back.
And then the blades ground together again, and they were engaged in deadly earnest.
I do not suppose that any two men ever engaged with greater confidence than those. Doubt of the issue was in the mind of neither. Each regarded the other half contemptuously, as a fool rushing upon his doom.
Holles was a man of his hands, trained in the hardest school of all, and although for some months now sword-practice had been a thing neglected by him, yet it never occurred to him that he should find serious opposition in a creature whose proper environment was the Court rather than the camp. The Duke of Buckingham, whilst making no parade of the fact, was possibly the best blade of his day in England. He, too, after all, had known his years of adversity and adventurous vagrancy, years in which he had devoted a deal of study to the sword, for which he was gifted with a natural aptitude. Of great coolness in danger, vigorous and agile of frame, he had a length of reach which would still give him an advantage on those rare occasions where all else was equal. He regarded the present affair merely as a tiresome interruption to be brushed aside as speedily as possible.
Therefore he attacked with vigour, and his very contempt of his opponent made him careless. It was well for him in the first few seconds of that combat that Holles had reflected that to kill the Duke would be much too serious a matter in its ultimate consequences and possibly in its immediate ones. For Buckingham’s lackey’s were at hand, and, after disposing of their master, he must still run the gauntlet of those fellows before he could win to freedom with Nancy. His aim, therefore, must be to disarm or disable the Duke, and then,holding him at his mercy, compel from him the pledge to suffer their unmolested departure which the Duke at present refused. Thus it happened that in the first moments of the engagement he neglected the openings which the Duke’s recklessness afforded him, intent instead upon reaching and crippling the Duke’s sword-arm.
Two such attempts, however, each made over the Duke’s guard on ariposte, disclosed to Buckingham not only the intention, but also something of the quality of the swordsman to whom he was opposed, whilst the ease with which the Duke foiled those attempts caused Holles also to correct the assumption upon which he had engaged. The next few seconds fully revealed to each of them the rashness of underrating an antagonist, and as their mutual respect increased they settled down now to fight more closely and cautiously.
In the background in a tall armchair to which she had sunk and in which she now reclined bereft of strength, white with terror, her pulses drumming, her breathing so shortened that she felt as if she must suffocate, sat Nancy Sylvester, the only agonized witness of that encounter of which she was herself the subject. At first the Duke’s back was towards her, whilst, beyond him, Holles faced her, so that she had a full view of his countenance. It was very calm and set, and there was a fixed, unblinking intentness about the grey eyes that never seemed to waver in their steady regard of his opponent’s. She observed the elastic, half-crouching poise of his body, and, in the ease with which his sword was whirled this way and that, she realized the trained skill and vigorous suppleness of his wrist. She began to take courage. She gathered as she watched him some sense of the calm confidence in which he fought, a confidence which gradually communicated itself to her and came to soothe the terror that had been numbing her wits.
Suddenly there was a change of tactics. Buckinghammoved swiftly aside, away to his left; it was almost a leap; and as he moved he lunged in the new line he now confronted, a lunge calculated to take Holles in the flank. But Holles shifted his feet with the easy speed of a dancer, and veered to face his opponent in this new line, ready to meet the hard-driven point when it was delivered.
As a result of that breaking of ground, she now had them both in profile, and it was only now, when too late, that she perceived what an opportunity she had missed to strike a blow in her own defence. The thing might have been done, should have been done whilst the Duke was squarely offering her his undefended back. Had she been anything, she told herself, but the numbed, dazed, witless creature that she was, she would have snatched a knife from the table to plant it between his shoulder-blades.
It may have been the sense of some such peril, the fighter’s instinctive dread of an unguarded back, that had driven the Duke to break ground as he had done. He repeated the action again, and yet again, compelling Holles each time to circle so that he might meet the ever-altered line of attack, until in the end the Duke had the door behind him and both Holles and the girl in front.
Meanwhile, the sounds of combat in that locked room—the stamp of shifting feet and the ringing of blades—had drawn the attention of the men in the hall outside. There came a vigorous knocking on the door accompanied by voices. The sound was an enheartening relief to Buckingham, who was finding his opponent much more difficult to dispatch than he had expected. Not only this, but, fearless though he might be, he was growing conscious that the engagement was not without danger to himself. This rascal Holles was of an unusual strength. He raised his voice suddenly:
“À moi! François, Antoine! À moi!”
“Monseigneur!” wailed the voice of François, laden with alarm, from beyond the oak.
“Enfoncez la porte!” Buckingham shouted back.
Came heavy blows upon the door in answer to that command; then silence and a shifting of feet, as the grooms set their straining shoulders to the oak. But the stout timbers withstood such easy methods. The men’s footsteps retreated, and there followed a spell of silence, whose meaning was quite obvious to both combatants. The grooms were gone for implements to break down the door.
That made an end of the Colonel’s hopes of rendering the Duke defenceless, a task whose difficulty he began to perceive that he must find almost insuperable. He settled down, therefore, to fight with grimmer purpose. There was no choice for him now but to kill Buckingham before the grooms won through that door, or all would be lost, indeed. The act would no doubt be followed by his own destruction at the hands either of Buckingham’s followers or of the law; but Nancy, at least, would be delivered from her persecutor. Full now of that purpose, he changed his tactics, and from a defensive which had aimed at wearing down the Duke’s vigour, he suddenly passed to the offensive. Disengage now followed disengage with lightning swiftness, and for some seconds the Duke found the other’s point to be everywhere at once. Hard-pressed, his grace was compelled to give ground. But as he fell back he side-stepped upon reaching the door, not daring now to set his shoulders to it lest, by thus cutting off his own retreat, he should find himself pinned there by the irresistible blade of his opponent. It was the first wavering of his confidence, this instinctive craving for space behind him in which to retreat.
So far Holles had fought on almost academic lines, no more, indeed, being necessary for the purpose he had been setting himself. But now that this purpose was changed,and finding that mere speed and vigour could not drive his point beyond the Duke’s iron guard, he had recourse to more liberal methods. There was a trick—a deadly, never-failing trick—that he had learned years ago from an Italian master, a soldier of fortune who, like himself, had drifted into mercenary service with the Dutch. He would essay it now.
He side-stepped to the left, and lunged on a high line of tierce, his point aimed at the throat of his opponent. The object of this was no more than to make the Duke swing round to parry. The lunge was not intended to go home. It was no more than a feint. Without meeting the opposing blade as it shifted to the threatened line, Holles dropped his point and his body at the same time, until he was supported, at fullest stretch, by his left hand upon the ground. Upward under the Duke’s guard he whirled his point, and the Duke, who had been carried—as Holles had calculated that he would be—a little too far round in the speed required, thus unduly exposing his left flank, found that point coming straight for his heart. He was no more than in time to beat it aside with his left hand, and even so it ripped through the sleeve of his doublet and tore his flesh just above the elbow.
But for that wound there might well have been an end of Holles. For this trick of his was such that it must succeed or else leave him that essays it momentarily at the mercy of his antagonist. That moment presented itself now; but it was gone again before the Duke had mastered the twitch occasioned him by the tearing of his arm. His recovery and downward-drivenripostewere swift, but too late by half a heart-beat. Holles was no longer there to be impaled.
They smiled grimly at each other as erect they stood, pausing a second after that mutually near escape of death. Then, as a succession of resounding blows fell upon the door, Holles drove at him again with redoubled fury. From thesound of the blows it would seem that the grooms had got an axe to work, and were bent upon hacking out the lock.
Holles realized that there was no time to lose; Buckingham, that his safety lay in playing for time, and allowing the other’s furious attacks to spend themselves against his defence. Twice again, despite his wound, he used his left hand, from which the blood was dripping freely, to dash aside the other’s blade. Once he did it with impunity. But when he repeated the action, Holles took advantage of it to fling himself suddenly forward inside the Duke’s guard, until they were breast to breast, and with his own left he seized the Duke’s sword-wrist in a grip that paralyzed it. Before, however, he could carry out his intention of shortening his sword, his own wrist was captive in the Duke’s blood-smeared left hand. He sought to force himself free of that grip. But the Duke maintained it with the tenacity born of the desperate knowledge that his life depended on it, that if he loosed his hold there would be an instant end of him.
Thus now in this fiercecorps-à-corpsthey writhed and swayed hither and thither, snarling and panting and tugging, whilst the sound of the blows upon the door announced the splintering of a panel, and Nancy, half-swooning in her chair, followed the nightmare struggles of the two men in wide-eyed but only half-seeing terror.
They crashed across the room to the daybed under the window, and the Duke went down upon it backwards in a sitting posture. But still he retained his grip of the Colonel’s sword-wrist. Holles thrust his knee into the Duke’s stomach to gain greater leverage.
Now at last, with the increased strain that Holles brought to bear, Buckingham’s fingers were beginning to slip. And then under a final blow the door all splintered about, the lock flew open and the grooms flowed into the room to their master’s rescue.
Holles tore his wrist free at the same moment by a last wrench. But it was too late. Casting the Duke’s sword hand from him, he sprang away and round with a tearing sob to face the lackeys. For a second his glittering point held them at bay. Then the blow of a club shivered the blade, and they rushed in upon him. He felled one of them with a blow of the hilt which he still retained, before a club took him across the skull. Under that blow he reeled back against the table, his limbs sagged, and he sank down in a heap, unconscious.
As he lay there one of the grooms, standing over him, swung his club again with the clear intention of beating out his brains. But the Duke arrested the descending blow.
“It is not necessary,” he said. He was white and breathing hard from his exertions and there was a fevered glitter in his eyes. But these signs apart he was master of himself.
“Your arm, monseigneur!” cried François, pointing to the blood that filled his sleeve.
“Bah! A scratch! Presently.” Then he pointed to the prone limp figure of Holles, from whose head the blood was slowly trickling. “Get a rope, François, and truss him up.” François departed on his errand. “You others, carry Antoine out. Then return for Bobadil. I may have a use for him yet.”
They moved to obey him, and picked up their fellow whom Holles had felled before he, himself, went down.
The Duke was not pleased with them at all. A little more and they might have been too late. But to reproach them with it entailed an admission which this proud, vain man was reluctant to make.
They trooped out obediently, and Buckingham, still very pale, but breathing now more composedly, turned to Nancy with a queer little smile on lips that looked less red than usual.
She had reached that point of endurance at which sensibility becomes mercifully dulled. She sat there, her head resting against the tall back of the chair, her eyes closed, a sense of physical nausea pervading her.
Yet, at the sound of the Duke’s voice gently addressing her, she opened her long blue eyes, set now in deep stains of suffering, and looked at this handsome satyr who stood before her in an attitude of deference that was in itself a mockery.
“Dear Sylvia,” he was saying, “I am beyond measure pained that you should have been subjected to this ... this unseemly spectacle; I need not protest that it was no part of my intention.”
She answered him almost mechanically, yet the ironical answer she delivered was true to her proud nature and the histrionic art which would not be denied expression even in the extremity to which she was reduced.
“That, sir, I can well believe.”
He considered her, wondering a little at that flash of spirit, from one in her condition. If anything it but served to increase his admiration. He sighed.
“Ah, my Sylvia, you shall forgive me the shifts to which my love has driven me, and this last shift of all with that roaring fool’s heroics and what they have led to. Endeavour not to think too harshly of me, child. Don’t blame me altogether. Blame thatcos amoris, that very whetstone of love—your own incomparable loveliness and grace.”
She sat now stiffly upright, dissembling her fear behind a mask of indignant scorn that was sincere enough.
“Love!” she answered him in a sudden gust of that same scorn. “You call this violence love?”
He answered her with a throbbing vehemence of sincerity, a man pleading his own defence.
“Not the violence, but that which has moved me to it, that which would move me to tear down a world if it stood between you and me. I want you, Sylvia, more than I have ever wanted anything in life. It is because of the very fervency and sincerity of my passion that I have gone so clumsily to work, that in every attempt to lay my homage and devotion at your feet, I have but provoked your resentment. Yet, child, I swear to you that, if it lay in my power, if I were free to make you my Duchess, that is the place I should be offering to you now. I swear it by everything I hold sacred.”
She looked at him. There had been a humility in his bearing which, together with that vibrant sincerity in his voice, must surely have moved her at any other time. It moved her now, but only to a still greater scorn.
“Is anything sacred to such a man as you?” She rose by an effort, and stood before him, swaying, slightly conscious of dizziness and of shivers, and marvelling a little that she should be unable better to command herself. But she commanded herself at least sufficiently to give him his answer. “Sir, your persecution of me has rendered you loathly and abhorrent in my sight, and nothing that you may now do can alter that. I tell you this in the hope that some spirit of manliness, some sense of dignity, will cry a halt to you; so that you may disabuse your mind of any notion that you can prevail by continuing to pursue and plague me with your hateful attentions. And now, sir, I beg you to bid your creatures fetch the chair in which I was brought hither and carry me hence again. Detain me further, and I promise you, sir, that you shall be called to give a strict account of this night’s work.”
The whiplash of her contempt, which she was at pains to render manifest in every word she uttered, the loathing that scorched him from her lovely eyes, served but to stir a dull resentment and to arouse the beast in him. The change was instantly apparent in the sneer that flickered over his white face, in the ugly little soft laugh with which he greeted her demand.
“Let you depart so soon? How can you think it, Sylvia? To have been at such infinite pains to cage you, you lovely bird, merely to let you fly away again!”
“Either you let me depart at once, sir,” she told him almost fiercely, her weakness conquered now in her own indignation, “or the Town shall ring with your infamy. You have practised abduction, sir, and you know the penalty. I shall know how to make you pay it. I swear that you shall hang, though you be Duke of twenty Buckinghams. You do not want for enemies, who will be glad enough to help me, and I am not entirely without friends, your grace.”
He shrugged. “Enemies!” he sneered, “Friends!” He waved a disdainful hand toward the unconscious Holles. “There lies one of your friends, if what the rascal said was true. The others will not be more difficult to dispose of.”
“Your grooms will not suffice to save you from the others.”
That stung him. The blood leapt to his face at that covert taunt that it was only the intervention of his men had saved him now.
But he made answer with a deadly smoothness. “So much even will not be needed. Come, child, be sensible. See precisely where you stand.”
“I see it clearly enough,” she answered.
“I will take leave to doubt it. You do as little justice to my wits, it seems, as ever you have done to my poor person. Who is to charge me, and with what? You will charge me.You will accuse me of bringing you here by force, against your will, and here retaining you. Abduction, in short, you say; and you remind me that it is a grave offence at law.”
“A hanging matter, even for dukes,” said she.
“Maybe; maybe. But first the charge must be made good. Where are your witnesses? Until you produce them, it will be your word against mine. And the word of an actress, however exalted, is ... in such matters ... the word of an actress.” He smiled upon her. “Then this house. It is not mine. It is tenanted by a ruffian named Holles; it was taken by him a few days ago in his own name. It was he who brought you here by force. Well, well, if there must be a scapegoat, perhaps he will do as well as another. And, anyhow, he is overdue for the gallows on quite other crimes. He brought you here by force. So far we shall not contradict each other. What follows? How came I here into that man’s house? Why, to rescue you, of course, and I stayed to comfort you in your natural distress. The facts will prove my story. My grooms will swear to it. It will then be seen that in charging me you are a scheming adventuress, returning evil for good, seeking to profit by my unwary generosity. You smile? You think the reputation bestowed upon me by a scandalmongering populace will suffice to give that tale the lie. I am not of your opinion; and, anyway, I am prepared to take the risk. Oh, I would take greater risks for you, my dear.”
She made a little gesture of contempt. “You may be a very master of the art of lying, as of all other evil arts. But lies shall not avail you if you dare to detain me now.”
“If I dare to detain you?” He leaned nearer to her, devouring her with his smouldering eyes. “If I dare, child? Dare?”
She shrank before him in sheer terror. Then, conqueringherself, stiffening in every limb, she drew herself erect. Majestically, a very queen of tragedy, she flung out an arm in a gesture of command.
“Stand back, sir! Stand back, and let me pass, let me go.”
He fell back, indeed, a pace or two, but only that he might the better contemplate her. He found her magnificent, in the poise of her graceful body, the ivory pallor of her face, the eyes that glowed and burned and looked the larger for the deep, dark shadows in which they were now set. Suddenly, with an almost inarticulate cry, he sprang forward to seize her. He would make an end of this maddening resistance, he would melt this icy disdain until it should run like water.
She slipped aside and away in panic before his furious onslaught, oversetting the high-backed chair in which she had lately been sitting.
The crash of its fall seemed to penetrate to the slumbering mind of Holles, and disturb his unconsciousness. For he stirred a little, uttering a faint moan.
Beyond that, however, her flight accomplished nothing. Two yards away the wainscot faced her. She would have run round the table, but, before she could turn to do so, the Duke had seized her. She faced him, savagely at bay, raising her hands to protect herself. But his arms went round her arms, forcing her hands down to her sides, and crushing her hurtfully against him, heedless, himself, in his frenzy of the hot pain in his own lacerated shoulder in which the bleeding was redoubled by this effort.
Helpless in his arms she lay.
“You coward, you beast, you vileness!” she gasped. And then he stopped her mouth with kisses.
“Call me what you will, I hold you, I have you, and not all the power of England shall tear you from me now.Realize it, child,”—he fell to pleading. “Realize and accept, and you will find that I have but mastered you only so that I may become your slave.”
She answered him nothing; again that dizziness, that physical sickness was assailing her. She moaned a little, lying helpless there in that grip of his that to her was as loathly and deadly as the coiling embrace of some great snake of which it brought the image to her mind. Again he was kissing her, her eyes, her mouth, her throat, about which still hung the folds of the blue scarf that had served to muffle her. Because this offended him and was in some sense an obstacle, a barrier, he seized one end of it, and, tearing it roughly away, laid bare the lovely throat and breast it had so inconveniently veiled.
Over that white throat he now bent his head like some evil vampire. But his fevered lips never reached it. In the very act of bending, he paused, and stiffened.
Behind him he could hear the footsteps of his grooms reentering the chamber. But it was not their coming that imposed this restraint upon him, that dilated and bulged his eyes with horror, that fetched the ashen pallor to his cheeks, and set him suddenly trembling and shuddering from head to foot.
For a moment he was as a man paralyzed. His limbs refused their office; they seemed turned to lead. Slowly, where he would have had them swift, his arms relaxed their grip of that sweet body. Slowly they uncoiled themselves, and slowly he fell back before her, crouching forward the while, staring ever, his jaw fallen, his face the face of a man in the last extremity of terror.
Suddenly he raised his right hand to point with a shaking finger at her throat. Hoarsely, in a cracked voice, he spoke.
“The tokens! The tokens!”
The three grooms, entering at that moment, checked andstood there just within the threshold as if suddenly turned to stone.
The awakening Holles, on the ground, raising himself a little, and thrusting back the tumbled hair which was being matted to his brow by blood from his cracked head, looked dazedly round and up to see the Duke’s shaking, pointing hand, to hear the Duke’s quavering voice, this time, saying yet again:
“The tokens!”
His grace fell back step by step, gasping with dread, until suddenly he swung about to face his men.
“Back,” he bade them, his voice shrill. “Back! Away! Out of this! She is infected! My God! She has the plague! The tokens are upon her!”
A moment still they stood at gaze in this horror which they fully shared with him. They craned forward, to look at Miss Farquharson, leaning faint and limp against the wainscot, her white neck and shoulders thrown into dazzling relief against the dark brown of the background, and from where they stood they could make out quite plainly stamped upon the white loveliness of that throat the purple blotch that was the brand and token of the pestilence.
As the Duke reached them, they turned, in sudden dread of him. Might he not, himself, already carry upon him the terrible infection? With wild cries of terror they fled before him out of the room, and out of the house, never heeding the commands which, as he precipitately followed, he flung after them.