The main door slammed upon those precipitately departing men. Their running steps clattered over the cobbles of the street, and receded quickly out of earshot.
Colonel Holles and the woman he had sought so passionately long years ago, until despair had turned him from the quest, were alone together at last in that house, brought thither by that ironic destiny of his, in circumstances of horror piled on horror. The very act by which at last he had found her irrevocably lost her to him again. The very chance that had brought them together, after all these years, flung them at the same time farther apart than they had ever been; and this, without taking into account the fact that she was a woman now with the seal of death upon her. Was he not Fortune’s fool indeed?
The violent slamming of that door appeared to rouse him to a further degree of consciousness. Painfully he got to his knees, and with dazed eyes looked round the room. Again he brushed back the tangle of hair from his brow, and thereafter dully considered his hand which was wet and smeared with blood. The mists that enveloped his brain, obscuring and confusing his mental view of the events that had occurred before he was stricken down and since consciousness had begun to return to him, were now gradually dispersing. Understanding of where he was and how he had come there grew clear at last. He rose to his feet, and stood swaying a moment, looking round, dull-eyed as a drunkard.
He beheld Nancy, her shoulders turned to him, contemplating herself in an oblong Venetian mirror that adorned the wall beyond the table, and in the mirror itself he beheldthe reflection of her face. It was ashen, and there was a staring, ghastly horror in her eyes. It was then that he began to remember and piece together the incidents of the confused scene upon which his gaze had fallen when first his mind was dimly rousing itself. Again he saw Buckingham, crouching and shuddering as he backed away from Nancy, pointing to her the while with a palsied hand, and again he heard the Duke’s quavering voice, and the dread words it uttered.
He understood. Nancy was safe from Buckingham. She had been snatched from the Duke at the eleventh hour by a ravisher even more merciless and infinitely more foul.
This she was herself realizing as she contemplated her image in that little mirror and beheld the brand of the pestilence on her white breast. Although she had never before seen that betraying purple blotch, yet she had heard it described, and she could have had no doubt of its significance even without the terrified explanation that Buckingham had supplied. Whether it was from horror of what she beheld, or whether from the workings of the fell disease—which may also have been responsible for those moments of dizziness by which she had been earlier assailed, but which she had assigned to emotion—she found her image contracting and expanding now before her eyes; then she felt the room rocking about her, the ground heaving under her feet as if it had been the unstable deck of a ship. She reeled back, and knew, without power to help herself, that she was falling, when suddenly she felt herself caught, and supported.
She looked up, and beheld the ghastly, blood-smeared face of Randal Holles, who had sprung instinctively to her assistance. For a long moment she stared at him, dull-eyed, a little frown of effort drawing her brows together. Dully then she spoke:
“Do not touch me. Did you not hear? I have the plague.”
“Aye ... I heard,” he answered.
“You will take the infection,” she warned him.
“It is very likely,” said he, “but no great matter.”
On that he lifted her in his arms, as he had lifted her once before that night. Despite his shaken condition, the act cost him but little effort, for she was very slim and light. Unresisting—for she was too dazed and weak for any physical resistance now—she suffered him to bear her to the daybed. There he set her down at full length, carefully adjusting the wine-coloured cushions, so as to give ease to her head and limbs.
Then he passed round the couch to the shuttered windows, unbarred them, and set the casement wide to let a draught of the clean, cool night air into the stifling room. That done, he turned, and remained standing there beside the couch, looking down upon her with eyes that were as the eyes of some poor dumb beast in pain.
The cool air revived her a little, set her pulses beating more steadily, and cleared her mind of some of the numbness that had been settling upon it. For a spell she lay there, panting a little, remembering and realizing the situation and her own condition. Then she raised her eyes to look at the ghastly, haggard face above her, and to meet that anguished glance. For a little while she stared at him, her own countenance expressionless.
“Why do you stay?” she asked him at length in a dull voice. “Go ... go your ways, sir, and leave me to die. It is, I think, all that remains to do. And ... and I think that I shall die the easier without your company.”
He stepped back as if she had struck him. He made as if to answer her; then his parted lips came together again, his chin sank until it touched his breast. He turned, and with dragging feet walked slowly out of the room, softly closing the door.
She lay there invaded suddenly by a great fear. She strained her ears to catch the sounds of his footsteps in the passage, until finally the slamming of the door leading to the street announced to her that, taking her at her word, he was gone, indeed. She sat up in alarm, holding her breath, listening to his steps moving quickly now, almost at a run, up the street. At last she could hear them no longer. Her fears mounted. For all her brave talk, the thought of dying alone, abandoned, in this empty house filled her with terror; so that it seemed to her now that even the company of that dastard would have been better than this horror of loneliness in the hour of death.
She attempted to rise, to follow, to seek the companionship of human beings who might yet afford her some assistance and ease her sufferings. But her limbs refused their office. She got to her feet merely to collapse again, exhausted. And now she flung herself prone upon the daybed, and sobbed aloud until the searing pain in her breast conquered even her self-pity, and stretched her writhing in agony as if upon a rack. At last a merciful unconsciousness supervened.
And meanwhile Holles was moving mechanically and instinctively at speed up Sermon Lane in the direction of Paul’s. Why he should have chosen to go that way sooner than another he could not have told you. The streets were utterly deserted even at that early hour, for this was not a time in which folk chose to roam abroad at nights, and, moreover, the Lord Mayor’s enactments now compelled all taverns and houses of entertainment to close at nine o’clock.
Without hat or cloak, his empty scabbard dangling like a limp tail about his legs, he sped onward, a man half-distracted, with but a vague notion of his object and none of the direction in which its fulfilment would be likeliest. As he was approaching Carter Lane, a lantern came dancing likea will-o’-the-wisp round the corner to meet him, and presently the dark outline of the man who carried it grew visible. This man walked with the assistance of a staff which at closer quarters the lantern’s rays revealed to be red in colour. With a gasp of relief, Holles flung forward towards him.
“Keep your distance, sir! Keep your distance!” a voice warned him out of the gloom. “’Ware infection.”
But Holles went recklessly on until the long red wand was raised and pointed towards him to arrest his advance.
“Are you mad, sir?” the man cried sharply. Holles could make out now the pallid outline of his face, which the broad brim of his steeple-hat had hitherto kept almost entirely in shadow. “I am an examiner of infected houses.”
“It is as I hoped,” panted Holles ... “that yours might be some such office. I need a doctor, man, quickly, for one who is taken with the plague.”
The examiner’s manner became brisk at once.
“Where?” he demanded.
“Close at hand here, in Knight Ryder Street.”
“Why, then, Dr. Beamish, there at the corner, is your man. Come.”
And thus it happened that, from the sleep which had succeeded the swoon that so mercifully whelmed her senses, Nancy was aroused by a sound of steps and voices. Where she lay she faced the door of the room. And, as through billows of mist that now rolled before her eyes, she saw the tall figure of Colonel Holles enter followed by two strangers. One of these was a little birdlike man of middle age; the other was young and of a broad frame and a full countenance. Both were dressed in black, and each carried the red wand which the law prescribed.
The younger man, who was the examiner met by Holles in Sermon Lane, came no farther than the threshold. He washolding close to his nostrils a cloth that gave out a pungent, vinegary smell, and his jaws worked vigorously the while, for he was chewing a stick of snake-root as a further measure of prevention. Meanwhile, his companion, who was that same Dr. Beamish he had recommended, approached the patient and made a swift, practised, and silent examination.
She suffered it in silence, too utterly trammelled by lethargy to give much thought or care to what might now betide her.
The physician held her wrist for a moment in his bony fingers, the middle one upon her pulse. Next he carefully examined the blotch upon her throat. Finally he raised first one of her arms and then the other, whilst Holles at his bidding held the candle-branch so as to cast the light into the armpit. A grunt escaped him upon the discovery of a swelling in the right one.
“This is unusually soon,” he said. “It is seldom before the third day that there is such a manifestation.”
With the forefinger he tested the consistency of that swelling, sending sharp, fiery streams of pain through all her body as it seemed to her.
He lowered the arm again, and straightened himself, considering her a moment with pursed lips and thoughtful eyes.
At his elbow Holles spoke in a toneless voice:
“Does it ... does it mean that her case is beyond hope?”
The physician looked at him.
“Dum vivimus, speremus,” said he. “Her case need not be hopeless any more than another’s. Much depends upon the energy with which the disease is fought.”
He saw the flash of Holles’s eyes at that, as through the Colonel’s mind sped the vow that if it was a matter of a fight he was there to wage it. He would fight the plague for her as fiercely as he had fought Buckingham. Beholding his sudden transfiguration, the physician, in charity—lest the manshould delude himself with false hopes—thought well to add:
“Much depends upon that. But more—indeed all—upon God, my friend.” He spoke to Holles as to a husband, for that, indeed, was the relationship in which he conceived him to stand to the afflicted lady. “If suppuration of that swelling can be induced, recovery is possible. More I cannot say. To induce that suppuration infinite pains and tireless labour may be necessary.”
“She may depend on that,” said Holles.
The physician nodded. “Nurses,” he added slowly, “are scarce and difficult to procure. I will do my best to find you one as soon as possible. Until then you will have to depend entirely upon yourself.”
“I am ready.”
“And in any case the law does not allow you to leave this house until you can receive a certificate of health—which cannot be until one month after her recovery or....” He broke off, leaving the alternative unnamed, and added hurriedly: “That is Sir John Lawrence’s wise provision for checking the spread of the infection.”
“I am aware of it and of my position,” said Holles.
“So much the better, then. And now, my friend, there is no time to lose. Speed in applying remedies is often all. She must be brought as quickly as may be into a free and full perspiration and for that she must be got to bed without delay. If her life is to be saved, you must get to work at once.”
“Tell me but what to do, sir.”
“Not only that; I come prepared to leave you all that you will require.”
He produced a bulky package from his pocket, and, beckoning Holles to the table, there opened it, and enumerated the lesser packages it contained and the purposes of each.
“Here is a stimulating ointment with which you will rubthe swelling in the armpit every two hours. Thereafter you will apply to it a poultice of mallows, linseed, and palm oil. Here is mithridate, of which you will administer a dose as an alexipharmic, and two hours later you will give her a posset drink of Canary and spirits of sulphur. The spirits of sulphur are here. Make a fire of sea-coal in her bedroom, and heap all available blankets upon her, that she may throw out as much as may be of the poison in perspiring.
“For to-night, if you do that, you will have done all that can be done. I shall return very early in the morning, and we will then consider further measures.”
He turned to the examiner: “You have heard, sir?”
The man nodded. “I’ve already bidden the constable send a watchman. He will be here by now and I’ll see the house closed when we go forth.”
“It but remains, then,” said the doctor, “to have the lady put to bed. Then I will take my leave of you until to-morrow.”
This, however, was a service the lady was still able to perform for herself. When Holles, disregarding the physician’s aid, had, single-handed, carried her to the room above, she recovered sufficiently to demand that she should be left to herself; and, despite her obvious weakness, Dr. Beamish concurred that to permit her to have her own way in the matter would be to make the more speed in the end.
The effort of undressing, however, so exhausted her and awoke such torturing pains that, when at last she got to bed, she lay there, panting, reduced to a state of utter prostration.
Thus Holles and the physician found her on their return. Dr. Beamish placed upon a table at the foot of the bed all the things that Holles would require, and, repeating his injunctions, took his leave at last. The Colonel went with him to the door of the house. This was standing open, and by the light of a lantern held by the watchman the examiner wascompleting the rudely wrought inscription,Lord have mercy upon us, under the ominous red cross which he had daubed above.
Bidding Holles a good-night and a stout courage, the physician and the examiner departed together. The watchman, who remained to hinder any unauthorized person from passing in or out, then closed the door. Holles heard the key being turned on the outside, and knew himself a prisoner in that infected house for weeks to come, unless death should chance to set him free meanwhile.
Quickly now, urged by the thought of his task, utterly disregarding the dull aching of his bruised head, he mounted the stairs again. A memory flashed through his mind of those three gallants whom her cries had attracted to her rescue, and who would have delivered her from his clutches, but that he had scared them away with the lie—as he supposed it then—that she was infected with the plague. Had their rescue succeeded, in what case would she be now? Would there be one at hand to fight such a fight as that for which he was braced and ready; to give his life at need, freely and without a pang, that he might save her own? Out of the anguish of his soul, out of the depths into which he was plunged, he thanked God for this fight that lay before him, for this disposition which made good come out of evil.
He found her in a state of lethargy which, whilst leaving her a full consciousness of all that had occurred and was occurring about her, yet robbed her of all power of speech or movement. Lying there, her head supported by the pillows, which it had been the doctor’s last service to adjust, her wide, fevered eyes followed every movement of the Colonel’s as, stripped now of his doublet, he went briskly about the business of preparation. Anon under the pain which his ministrations caused her, she sank into unconsciousness, and thence into a raving delirium which for days thereafter was to alternate with periods of lethargic, exhausted slumber.
For five days, which to Randal Holles were as five years of mortal anguish, she lay suspended between this world and the next. The lightest straw of chance would suffice to tip against her the fearful balance of the scales, the slightest lack of care and watchfulness might result in the snapping of the slender thread by which life was still tethered to her exhausted, fever-wasting frame.
The doctor had succeeded beyond all his hopes in his quest of a nurse-keeper, and he brought her with him to the house in Knight Ryder Street, on the morrow of Nancy’s taking ill—a lean, capable, good-natured, henlike woman of forty. But for all her competency and willingness, had this Mrs. Dallows been alone in charge of the patient, it is long odds that Nancy would quickly have succumbed. For no hired attendant could ever have ministered to her with the self-sacrificing, remorseful devotion of the broken adventurer who loved her. No hired attendant could have brought to the task the strength of will and singleness of purpose that drove the weary, faltering flesh relentlessly along the path of this self-imposed duty.
Not for a moment did Holles suffer himself to relax his vigilance, to pause for a breathing in that grim fight with death. Of sleeping he never so much as thought, whilst the snatches of food and drink that constituted his meals, forced upon him by the nurse-keeper, were taken there at Nancy’s bedside.
Mrs. Dallows remonstrated with him, urging him to take some rest in the hours during which she was herself on duty. It was in vain. Equally vain were the same remonstranceswhen more authoritatively urged by Dr. Beamish. Holles left them unheeded as he did the physician’s recommendations that he should take some of the ordinary precautions to keep himself immune. The balsam of sulphur which the little doctor left with him to be used as a disinfectant was never touched; the wormwood, masterwort, and zedoary pressed upon him as prophylactics were equally neglected.
“My friend,” the doctor had said to him as early as the second day of her illness, “if you continue thus you will end by killing yourself.”
Holles had smiled as he replied: “If she lives, her life will have been cheaply purchased at the price. If she dies, it will not signify.”
The doctor, ignorant of her true identity, and persuaded ever that the twain were husband and wife, was touched by what he conceived to be an expression of exemplary conjugal devotion. That, however, did not turn him from his endeavours to reason Holles out of this obstinacy.
“But if she should survive and you should perish?” he asked him, whereupon Holles had amazed him by a sudden flash of anger.
“Plague me no more!”
After that Dr. Beamish had left him to follow his own inclinations, reflecting—in accordance with the popular belief, which the doctor fully shared—that after all the man carried in himself the most potent of all prophylactics in the fact that he was without fear of the infection.
But, although Holles neglected all the preventive measures which the doctor had so urgently prescribed for him, he nevertheless smoked a deal, sitting by the window of her chamber, which was kept open day and night to the suffocating heat of that terrible July. And the great fire constantly maintained by the doctor’s orders, this heat notwithstanding, did much to cleanse and purify the air. These thingsmay have helped to keep him safe despite himself, procuring for him a measure of disinfection.
It was entirely as a result of that tireless vigilance of his and of the constant poulticings which he applied, that on the fourth day the swelling in the patient’s armpit, having been brought to a head, began to vent the deadly poison with which her veins were laden.
Beamish was as amazed as he was delighted.
“Sir, sir,” he commended the Colonel on the evening of that fourth day, “your pains are being rewarded. They have wrought a miracle already.”
“You mean that she will live?” cried Holles in fearful hope.
The doctor paused, moderating his satisfaction, afraid of his own optimism.
“So much I cannot promise yet. But the worst is over. With proper care and God’s help I trust that we may save her.”
“Never doubt that the care will be forthcoming. Tell me but what is to do.”
The doctor told him, and the exhausted yet unyielding Holles listened greedily to his instructions, flung off his deadly lassitude, and applied himself diligently to the execution of all exactly as he was bidden.
And meanwhile, as if incubated by that terrific heat, the plague was spreading now through London at a rate that seemed to threaten the City with the utter extermination which the preachers of doom had presaged. It was from Beamish that Holles learnt of that sudden, upward, devastating leap of the pestilential conflagration, of the alarming bill of mortality, and of the fact that the number of victims within the walls amounted in that week alone to nearly a thousand. And, apart from what the doctor told him, there were abundant evidences of the havoc even within thenarrow survey possible to him from his prison. From that first-floor window, at which he spent long hours of day and night, he beheld Knight Ryder Street—that once busy thoroughfare—become daily less and less frequented, whilst daily, too, the hum of London’s activity, which might be likened to the very heart-beat of that great city, growing feebler and ever feebler, bore witness to its ebbing life.
There in Knight Ryder Street he could see the closed houses—and there were already three of them within the radius of his view on the opposite side of the street—each with its red cross and an armed watchman day and night before its padlocked door.
Victuals and what else was needed from outside reached them through the agency of their own watchman. Holles, who was still plentifully supplied with funds from what Buckingham had furnished him for this adventure, would lower the necessary money from the window in a basket. By the same means the watchman would send up the purchases he made on behalf of those within, absenting himself when necessary for the purpose, but always leaving the door locked and taking the key with him.
On the comparative and ever ominously increasing stillness of the air came intermittently, to increase the general melancholy, the tolling of bells, ringing out the knell of the departed, and nightly, just after dark and again before peep of day, there came now the clang of another bell infinitely more hideous because of the hideous ideas with which it had become associated, and the stillness of the street would be disturbed by a creak and rumble of wheels, a slow clatter of hooves, and a raucous voice uttering a dreadful summons:
“Bring out your dead!”
Peering down, as he ever did, he could make out the ghastly outline of the dead-cart loom into view as it came slowly rumbling by, attracted thither by those sealedhouses, like some carrion-bird in expectation of its prey. Invariably it paused before Holles’s own door, arrested by the sight of the watchman and the red cross dimly revealed by the light of his lantern; and that raucous voice would ring out again, more direct in its summons, sounding now like a demand, revoltingly insolent and cynical.
“Bring out your dead!”
Then, at a word from the watchman, the horrible vehicle would toil slowly on, and Holles with a shudder would fling a glance over his shoulder at the sufferer where she lay fevered and tossing, wondering fearfully whether duty and pitiless necessity would compel him to answer that summons when next it came, and surrender that lovely body to join the abominable load in that hideous cart.
Thus, until the morning of the sixth day, when from daybreak until past eight o’clock he waited in a sudden frenzy of impatience for the coming of Beamish. When at last he arrived, Holles met him at the stair-head.
The Colonel’s face was ghastly, his eyes fevered, and he was trembling with fearful excitement.
“She sleeps—quietly and peacefully,” he informed the doctor, in a whisper, a finger to his lips.
Very softly they entered the chamber now and tiptoed to the bedside, Holles in an agony of hope taking up his position at the foot between the carved bedposts. A glance confirmed the news with which Holles had met the physician. Not only was she in an easy, tranquil slumber, such as she had not known since taking to this bed, but the fever had entirely left her. This the doctor’s practised eye judged at once, even before he moved to take her pulse.
At that touch of his hand upon her wrist, she stirred, sighed, and opened her eyes, sanely and calmly awake at last. She looked up into the wizened, kindly little spectacledface of the doctor, blankly at first, then with a little frown of bewilderment. But he was speaking at the moment, and the words he used helped her groping wits to piece together the puzzle of her surroundings and condition.
“The danger is overpast,” he was saying. “She will recover now, thanks be to God and to your own tireless care of her. It is yourself gives me more concern than she does. Leave her now to the care of Mrs. Dallows, and do you go rest yourself, or I tell you I will not answer for your life.” He had been looking at Holles whilst he spoke. Now he turned to consider her again, and found her conscious glance upon him. “See! She is awake,” he cried.
“The danger is overpast?” Holles echoed, his voice thick and unnatural. “You say the danger is overpast? I am awake, good doctor? I have not by chance fallen asleep at my post and come to dream this thing?”
“You are awake, man, and I repeat the danger is at an end. Now go and rest.”
Wondering to whom it was the doctor spoke, whose was that raucous, weary voice that questioned him, she slowly turned her head, and beheld a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghost of a man, whose pallid, sunken cheeks were overgrown with a course stubble of unshaven beard, standing between the bedposts, clutching at one of them as if for support. Meeting her gaze, he recoiled a step and loosed his hold. Then he swung half-round, a hand to his brow.
“Naught ails me, doctor,” he mumbled, and now she knew who he was and remembered. “I would sooner....”
His voice abruptly ceased in mid-period; he reeled, steadied himself for an instant, and then toppled slowly forward and crashed at full length upon the floor. Instantly Mrs. Dallows, with a little outcry of alarm, was on her knees beside him; she turned him over, raised his head, by an effort, and pillowed it in her lap as Dr. Beamish camehastening up. The same thought was in the mind of both nurse and physician.
Nancy sought painfully—for she was very weak—to raise herself, that she might see what was taking place there on the floor, beyond the foot of the bed.
Swiftly the doctor tore open the breast of the Colonel’s doublet; but not even so much was necessary. At once he perceived what had happened. It was as if the assurance that she was out of danger, and so no longer in need of his ministrations, had snapped the reins of will by which Holles had held his lassitude in subjection. Instantly Nature had claimed from him the dues which he had so long withheld.
“He is asleep,” said Dr. Beamish; and he almost chuckled. “That is all. Help me to lift him to that couch, Mrs. Dallows. No need to carry him farther or to do more for him at present. Never fear, you’ll not rouse him—not until the clock has gone round once, at least.”
They laid him there, a pillow under his head, and Beamish returned to his patient’s side. She had sunk back again, but her eyes, looking enormous now in her wasted cheeks, were still upon the figure of Holles where he lay inert as stone, just within the orbit of her vision.
“Sleep?” she questioned the doctor, wonderingly. “Is that sleep?”
Never had she—nor, indeed, have many—seen slumber fell a man as if he had been shot.
“Nothing worse, ma’am. The Colonel has never so much as closed his eyes for a whole week. Nature compassionately has closed them for him. No need to afflict yourself on his behalf. Sleep is all he now requires. So give yourself peace, and beware of making demands upon the little strength that’s left you.”
She looked at him intently. “I have the plague, have I not?”
“Say rather that you had it, ma’am. You have it no longer. It has been cast out of you. It has left you feeble; but that is all that ails you at present. And you are a safe woman now. When you shall have recovered your strength, you may go whither you will without further fear of the infection. The plague will not touch you again. For the great mercy thus vouchsafed you, you may render thanks to God, and, next to God, to your husband.”
She frowned, perplexed.
“My husband?”
“Your husband, ma’am. And a husband in a thousand—nay, in ten thousand. I have seen many a husband lately, and I speak with knowledge—alas! The terror of the pestilence can blot out every other feeling. I have seen it happen time and again. But Colonel Holles is not of those. His is a devotion that makes a hero of him; and, because he has been fearless, he has been spared. Fortune favours the brave, ma’am.”
“But ... but he is not my husband.”
“Not your husband?” said the doctor, confounded. And he repeated, “Not your husband!” Then, with an affectation of cynicism very alien in reality to the genial, kindly little man, “Gadso!” he ejaculated, “perhaps that explains it. But what is he, then, who has all but given his life for you?”
She hesitated, at a loss how to define their relationship. At last:
“Once he was my friend,” she answered.
“Once?” The physician raised his bushy brows. “And when, pray, did he cease to be your friend—this man who stayed with you in this infected house when he might have fled; this man who has denied himself sleep or rest of any kind in all these days, that he might be ever at hand against your need of him; this man who has wrestled with deathfor you, and rescued you at the risk of taking the pestilence a thousand times for your sake?”
“Did he do all this?” she asked.
Dr. Beamish entertained her with the details of the heroism and self-sacrifice that Holles had displayed.
When the tale was done, and she lay silent and very thoughtful, the doctor permitted himself a slyly humorous smile.
“He may once have been your friend, as you say,” he concluded, smiling. “But I cannot think that he was ever more your friend than now. God send me such a friend in my own need!”
She made no response, but continued very still and thoughtful for a while, staring up at the carved canopy of this great strange bed, her face a blank mask in which the little doctor sought in vain for a clue to the riddle of the relations of those two. Had he yielded to his inquisitiveness, he would have questioned her. But, other considerations apart, he was restrained by thought for her condition. Nourishment and rest were to be prescribed, and it was not for him, by probing questions, to prove himself perhaps a disturber of the latter.
That evening Dr. Beamish returned, bringing with him, as on the occasion of his first visit, a public examiner. This official came to assure himself formally of the doctor’s assertion that a cure had been effected, so that he might make his report thereupon, to the end that after the lapse of twenty-eight days—provided that in the meanwhile there were no fresh outbreak of pestilence in either of the other inmates—the reopening of the house should be permitted.
Holles, awakening from eleven hours of uninterrupted lethargic sleep, but still heavy with lassitude, stood dully at hand whilst the examiner held his formal inquisition into the conditions of the patient, of Mrs. Dallows, and of Holles himself. As the Colonel stood there, gaunt, pale, unshaven, and dishevelled, Nancy’s eyes considered him very gravely, whilst he himself dared to turn never so much as a single glance in her direction.
When the examiner and the doctor passed at last from the room, Holles dragged himself wearily after them. He followed them below-stairs, and remained there alone after they had taken their departure.
For twenty-eight days he was doomed to imprisonment in this house, and he made his dispositions. That night he slept in a back bedroom on the ground floor. In the morning, having prepared himself breakfast in the kitchen, a matter in which Mrs. Dallows came to his assistance, he went to straighten out the dining-room so that it might serve him for a lodging during the period of incarceration that lay ahead.
He found the room in utter darkness. It had not been entered since the night of Nancy’s coming thither. He groped his way across to the shutters, which he remembered to have closed by request of the examiner after carrying Nancy from the room on that terrible night a week ago. He pulled them open and let in a flood of daylight upon a scene each detail of which reminded him poignantly of the happenings of that night. There lay the chair overturned by Nancy as she retreated before Buckingham. He imagined the circumstances in which it had fallen. There on the polished blocks of the floor, under the table—where it had escaped the eyes of Dr. Beamish—gleamed the blade of his own broken sword, and yonder in a corner, whither it had rolled, the hilt which his nerveless fingers had relinquished when he was struck down. On the floor by the table there was a dull brown patch which he knew to have been made by his own blood, and there were similar stains on the daybed and on the napery of the table, which he guessed to have been made by the blood of Buckingham.
Fallen between the daybed and the window, he found the slender dress rapier which Buckingham had used. The Duke had dropped it there when he rose at the end of their grim struggle, and he had not paused to recover it in his precipitate flight.
For the rest, guttered candles, withered flowers, and rotting fruits encumbered the table, and the lustre of glass and silver was dulled by a film of dust. On the sideboard stood the array of dainty dishes that had been prepared for that infamous intimate supper which had never been consumed, rotting there, and loading the atmosphere of the room with the evil odour of decay, which to Holles was like an exhalation of the ugly memories they held for him.
He flung the windows wide, and spent some time in setting the room to rights, and ridding it of all that refuse.
Thereafter he lay on the daybed smoking and thinking, and very listless. And it was thus, in the days that followed, that most of his hours were spent. If he did not regard himself as actually dead already, at least he regarded himself as one whose life was ended, one to whom death would bring a welcome relieving rest. Vaguely he hoped—he would have prayed, but that he had long since lost the habit of prayer—that the infection which he supposed present in this house might claim him for her victim. Morning and evening, and ever and anon throughout the day, he would open his doublet to finger his breast and explore his armpits in expectancy, eager to discover upon himself the tokens of the plague.
But the irony that had ever pursued him thwarted now his desire of death as it had thwarted his every desire concerned with life. Living and moving in that house of pestilence, breathing its mephitic atmosphere, he yet remained as immune as if he had been a “safe man.”
For the first three days his existence was one of completest, listless idleness. There were books in the house; but he had no desire to read. He was content to lie there smoking and moping. Each morning Mrs. Dallows reported to him the condition of the patient, which was one of steady improvement, and this was confirmed by the doctor, who paid two visits in the course of those three days. On the second of those occasions he remained some time in talk with Holles, giving him news of the dreadful state of things outside.
Whitehall was empty now of all its courtly tenants with the single exception of the Duke of Albemarle. Honest George Monk had elected to remain undaunted at his post as the representative of his King, to perform in the King’s name—and whilst His Majesty was busy at Salisbury with the amorous pursuit of Miss Frances Stewart—allthat which a king himself should be at hand to perform in time of national stress, to mitigate the tribulations of his subjects.
Hopefully Holles inquired of Beamish if he knew aught of Buckingham. Hopefully, that is, because he was expecting to hear that the Duke was laid low by the infection.
“Gone with the rest,” the doctor informed him. “He left Town for the North a week ago, aroused to a sudden sense of his duty as Lord Lieutenant of York by the fact that a French lackey in his household was stricken with the plague. He’ll be safe enough in York, no doubt.”
“A French lackey, eh? Only a lackey!” The Colonel’s face was overspread with disappointment. “The devil watches over his own,” he grumbled. “A wretched lackey pays for the sins of his master. Well, well, I suppose there is a God—somewhere.”
“Have you no cause to know it, sir, and to give thanks?” Beamish reproved him. And Holles turned away without answering, beyond a sigh and a shrug, which but served to increase the doctor’s perplexity over the behaviour of the members of this odd household. That all was very far from well there was abundantly clear.
Acting upon a sudden impulse, Dr. Beamish left the room, and mounted the stairs again—for all that his time was short and his patients many. Dismissing Mrs. Dallows upon some trivial errand to the kitchen, he remained closeted for five minutes with Miss Sylvester. That was the name by which he knew her, the name by which she had chosen to make herself known to both doctor and nurse.
Whether it was as a result of what he said to her in those five minutes, or whether other influences were at work, within an hour of the doctor’s departure, Holles was sought by Mrs. Dallows with a message that Miss Sylvester was risen, and desired to speak with him.
The eyes of that kindly nurse, sharpened by solicitude, saw him turn pale and tremble at the summons. His first impulse was to disregard it. But, before making any reply, he took a turn in that wainscoted sombre room. Then, with a sigh of resignation, he announced that he would go. Mrs. Dallows opened the door, and held it for him to pass out, tactfully refraining from following him.
He was washed and shaven, tolerably dressed, and his long, well-combed, golden-brown hair hung in long, smooth ringlets to the snowy collar which Mrs. Dallows had found time to wash and iron for him. Thus he no longer presented the wild, unkempt appearance that had been his when last Miss Sylvester had seen him. But there was a haggard dejection about the lines of his mouth, a haunting sadness about his eyes that nothing could relieve.
He found Miss Sylvester seated by the open window, where he himself had sat throughout the greater part of those five days and six nights when he had so unceasingly watched over her to beat back hungry death from her pillow. She occupied a great chair set for her there by Mrs. Dallows, a rug about her knees. She was very pale and weak, yet her loveliness seemed to draw added charms from her condition. She wore that gown of ivory white in which she had been carried to this evil house, and her chestnut hair had been dressed with care and was intertwined with a thread of pearls. Her long eyes seemed of a darker, deeper blue than usual, perhaps because of the hollows her illness had left about them. And there were other changes in her that in their sum appeared almost to spiritualize her, so that to Holles she seemed to have recovered something of her lost childhood, of her early youth, and looked less like Sylvia Farquharson, the idolized player, and more like the Nancy Sylvester whom he had known and loved so dearly.
Wistfully she looked up at him as he entered, then awaythrough the open window into the hot sunlight that scorched the almost empty street.
He closed the door, advanced a pace or two, and halted.
“You sent for me,” he said, “else I should not have ventured to intrude.” And he stood now like a groom awaiting orders.
A tinge of colour crept into her cheeks. One of her slender, tapering hands, that in these days had grown almost transparent, plucked nervously at the rug about her knees. Ill at ease as she was, her speech assumed, despite her, a stilted, formal shape.
“I sent for you, sir, that I might acknowledge the great debt in which you have placed me; to thank you for your care of me, for your disregard of your own peril in tending me; in short, sir, for my life, which had been lost without you.”
She looked at him suddenly as she ceased, whereupon he shifted his glance to the sunlight in the open so as to avoid the unbearable gaze of her eyes that were gleaming like wet sapphires.
“You owe me no thanks—no thanks at all,” he said, and his voice was almost gruff. “I but sought to undo the evil I had done.”
“That ... that was before the plague came to my rescue. In what you did then, you sought at the risk of your life to make me the only possible amend, and to deliver me from the evil man into whose power you had brought me. But the plague, now. It was no fault of yours that I took that. It was already upon me when you brought me hither.”
“No matter for that,” said he. “Reparation was due. I owed it to myself.”
“You did not owe it to yourself to risk your life for me.”
“My life, madam, is no great matter. A life misused,misspent, has no great value. It was the least that I could offer.”
“Perhaps,” she answered gently. “But also it was the most, and, as I have said, far more than you owed.”
“I do not think so. But the matter is not worth contending.”
He did not help her. Persuaded of the scorn that must underline her utterances, however smooth—because conscious that scorn was his only desert—he accepted her words as expressions of a pitying gratitude that offended. He stood before her, overwhelmed by the consciousness of his unworthiness, in a mood of the most abject humility. But unconsciously, without suspecting it, he had empanoplied this humility in pride. His desire, above all, was to withdraw from an interview that could be nothing but a source of pain.
But she detained him, persisting in what he accounted her cruel charity.
“At least the reparation you have made is a very full one.”
“It would comfort me to hear you say it, could I believe you,” he answered grimly, and would have taken his leave of her on that but that she stayed him by her interjection.
“Why should you not believe me? Why should I be other than sincere in my desire to thank you?”
He looked at her at last, and in his eyes she saw some reflection of the pain he was suffering.
“Oh, I believe you sincere in that. You wish to thank me. It is natural, I suppose. You thank me; but you despise me. Your gratitude cannot temper your contempt. It is not possible.”
“Are you so sure?” she asked him gently, and her eyes were very piteous.
“Sure? What else can I be? What else is possible? Do Inot loathe and despise myself? Am I so unconscious of my own infamy that I should befool myself into the thought that any part of it can escape you?”
“Don’t!” she said. “Ah, don’t!” But in the sorrow in her face he read no more than the confirmation of the very thing she was feebly attempting to deny.
“Is it worth while to close our eyes to a truth so self-evident?” he cried. “For years I sought you, Nan, a man without a stain upon his name, to find you at last in an hour in which I was so besmirched that I could not bear your eyes upon me. The very act that by a cruel irony of chance brought us together here at last was an act by which I touched the very bottom of the pit of infamy. Then—that dreadful night—you regarded me rightly with loathing. Now you regard me with pity because I am loathsome. Out of that pity, out of your charity, you fling me thanks that are not due, since what I have done was done in mitigation of my offence. What more is there to say? If this house were not locked, and I a prisoner here, I should have gone by now. I should have departed in that blessed moment that Beamish announced your danger at an end, taking care that our paths should never cross again, that I might never again offend you with the sight of my loathsomeness or the necessity to render thanks for benefits received from unclean hands, that you properly despise.”
“You think that sums all up?” she asked him, sadly incredulous. “It does not. It leaves still something to be said—indeed, a deal.”
“Spare it me,” he begged her passionately. “Out of that same charity that bids you thank me, spare me.” Then, more briskly, with a certain finality, he added: “If you have commands for me, madam, I shall be below until this house is reopened, and we can go our separate ways again.”
He bowed formally, and turned away.
“Randal!” she called to him as he reached the door. He paused, his firm resolve beaten down by that pleading utterance of his name. “Randal, won’t you tell me how ... how you came into ... into the position in which I found you here? Won’t you tell me that? Won’t you let me know all—all—so that I may judge for myself?”
A moment he stood there, white to the lips and trembling, fighting his pride—that pride which was masquerading in the garment of humility, and so deceived him that he suffered it to prevail.
“Judge me, madam, upon the evidence you possess. It is sufficient to enable you to do me justice. Nothing that went before, no vicissitudes of my vagrant life, can extenuate the thing you know of me. I am a scoundrel, a loathsomeness, an offence, and you know me to be this—you in whose eyes I would ever have appeared as a man of shining honour. Oh, God pity me! Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”
Her eyes were suddenly aswim in tears.
“I see that perhaps you judge yourself too hardly. Let me judge for myself, Randal. Don’t you see that I am aching to forgive? Is my forgiveness nothing to you?”
“It would be all,” he answered her. “But I could never believe in it. Never. You are aching to forgive, you say. Oh, blessed, healing words! But why is this? Because you are grateful to me for the life I have helped to save. That is the true source of your pity for my soul’s deformity, which is urging you to utter this forgiveness. But behind that gratitude and that forgiveness there must ever remain the contempt, the loathing of this deformity of mine. It must be so. I know it, or I know nothing. Because of that....” He broke off, leaving the sentence there, completing it with a wry smile and a despairing shrug. But she saw neither. She had averted her eyes again, and she was looking straight before her into the sunlight, across to the black-timbered,yellow houses opposite which were blurred in her sight by tears.
Softly he went out, and closed the door. She heard him go, and suffered him to do so, making no further attempt to stay him, knowing not what to say to combat his desperate convictions.
Heavy-footed he went down the stairs, back to that room where he had his being. And as he went his thoughts confirmed him. They had met at last, those two, only that they might part again. Their ways could never lie together. Overshadowing their joint lives there must ever be the loathly memory of that irrevocable thing he had done. Even if he were not the broken vagrant that he was, even if he had anything to offer in life to the woman of his dreams, his action when he played the jackal for Buckingham must render impossible between them any tenderness that should be sincere and unalloyed.
He was in a mood from which there was no escape. Pride hemmed his soul about with walls of humility and shame, and there was no issue thence save by the door that the plague might open. Yet even the plague refused to stand his friend.
The weeks crept on, and August was approaching. Soon now the period of quarantine would be at an end, and the house in Knight Ryder Street reopened to liberate its inmates. Yet the passing of time wrought no change in the mood of Holles. Not once again did he seek to approach Nancy, and not again did she bid him to her presence.
He informed himself constantly of her progress, and learnt with satisfaction that she was fast recovering her strength. But Mrs. Dallows who brought him this daily information was also at pains to let him know at the same time that there was no recovery in spirits to be observed in her charge.
“She is very sad and lonely, poor, sweet lady. It would melt your heart to see her, sir.”
“Aye, aye,” Holles would gloomily make answer to that oft-reiterated report. And that was all.
Mrs. Dallows was not a little afflicted. And affliction in Mrs. Dallows had the effect of heightening her resemblance to a hen. She perceived, of course, that a mystery enshrouded the relations of these two, saw that some obstacle stood between them, holding them apart—to their mutual torment, since obviously they were designed to be lovers; and more than once she sought to force the confidence now of one, now of the other. Her motives, no doubt, were entirely charitable. She was eager to help them, if it were possible, to a better understanding. But her efforts to probe their secret remained unavailing, and she could but sorrow in their sorrow. It was the more grievous and vexatious to her because the deep concern of each for the other was manifest in the questions each set her daily.
Holles kept to his quarters below-stairs, smoking continuously and drinking deeply, too, until he had consumed the little store of wine the house contained. Then not even the nepenthe of the cup remained to assuage his grim despondency, his repeated assertions to himself that his life was lived, that he was a dead man without further business above-ground.
Thus August found them, and from the watchman he heard incredible stories of London’s deepening plight, whilst from the window he nightly beheld the comet in the heavens, that latest portent of menace, the flaming sword of wrath—as the watchman termed it—that was hung above the accursed city, stretching, as it seemed, from Whitehall to the Tower.
They were within three days of the reopening of the house when at last one evening Mrs. Dallows came to him trembling with excitement, and a little out of breath.
“Miss Sylvester, sir, bids me say that she will be obliged if you will step upstairs to see her.”
The message startled him.
“No, no!” he cried out like a man in panic. Then, controlling himself, he took refuge in postponement that would give him time to think: “Say ... say that if Miss Sylvester will excuse me ... not this evening. I am tired ... the heat....” he vaguely explained.
The nurse cocked her head on one side and her bright little birdlike eyes considered him wistfully. “If not this evening, when? To-morrow morning?”
“Yes, yes,” he answered eagerly, thinking only of averting the immediate menace. “In the morning. Tell her that I ... I shall wait upon her then.”
Mrs. Dallows withdrew, leaving him oddly shaken and afraid. It was himself he feared, himself he mistrusted. Where once the boy had worshipped, the man now lovedwith a love that heaped up and fed the fires of shame in his soul until they threatened to consume him. At his single interview with Nancy he had exposed his mind. He had been strong; but he might not be strong again. The gentleness of purpose of which she had allowed him a glimpse, a gentleness born of her cursed gratitude, might lead him yet to play the coward, to give her the full confidence that she invited, and so move her pity and through pity her full forgiveness. And then if—as might well betide—he should prove so weak as to fling himself at her feet, and pour out the tale of his longings and his love, out of her sense of debt, out of her pity and her gratitude she might take him, this broken derelict of humanity, and so doom herself to be dragged down with him into the kennels where his future lay.
There stood a peril of a wrong far worse than that which already he had done her, and for which in some measure he had perhaps atoned. And because he could not trust himself to come again into her presence preserving the silence that his honour demanded, he suffered tortures now at the thought that to-morrow, willy-nilly, he must see her, since it was her wish, and she was strong enough herself to seek him should he still refuse to go.
He sat, and smoked, and thought, resolved that at all costs that interview must not take place. One way there was to avoid it and definitely to set a term to the menace of it. That was to break out of the sealed house at once without awaiting the expiry of the legal term. It was a desperate way, and it might be attended by gravest consequences to himself. But no other course presented itself, and the consequences mattered nothing, after all.
The thought became a resolve and, having reached it, he gave his mind peace. This, indeed—and not the pains and risks he had taken to save her from the plague—wasreparation. Anon, when she came to consider and weigh his action, she would perceive its true significance and purpose, and the perception might at last blot out the contempt of him which perforce must be abiding in her soul however she might seek to overlay it with charity.
A thought seized him, and, growing to purpose, exalted him. He sought pen, ink, and paper, drew a chair to the table, and sat down to act upon his inspiration.
“You have asked,” he wrote, opening abruptly thus, “to know by what steps I descended to the hell of infamy in which you discovered me. And I refrained from answering you lest I should arouse in you a further measure of your blessed, self-deceiving compassion. But now that I am on the point of passing out of your life, now that there is no chance that we should ever meet again, I am moved to tell you all, that thus I may bear away with me the fortifying hope that hereafter you will hold my memory in a pity that shall be free of execration.
“The tale of the ill-fortune that has pursued me begins on a May morning, many years ago, when I rode full of hope and eagerness into Charmouth, a youth of some substance and more pride, whose feet were firmly planted upon an honourable road of life. I went to claim you for my own, to lay my little achievement and the assured promise of my greater ones at your dear feet.”
He wrote on into the fading daylight. He lighted candles, and wrote on with that swift fluency of the man who has a clear tale to tell and the eloquence that comes naturally from a bursting heart.
The candles, faintly stirred by the night breeze that came through the open window, burnt down, and great stalactites of wax were hanging from the sconces; still he wrote without pause. He heard, but did not heed, the changing of the watchman at the door below. Later he heard, but did notheed, the passing of the dead-cart with its accompaniment of clanging bell and raucous summons.
Once only he paused, to procure and light fresh candles, and then wrote on. Not until long after midnight, not until the approach of dawn, did he cease, his task accomplished.
He sat back then in his tall chair, and stared straight before him, a man bemused, considering. Thus awhile. Then from an inner pocket of his doublet he drew a tasselled yellow glove that was slim and long and sorely rubbed and stained with age. He considered it as it lay there across his palm, and bethought him of that dawn many years ago when it had dropped to him from his lady’s casement, and he had set it in his hat, to be worn as a favour. He sighed, and a tear, wrung by the anguish of this renunciation from his hardened, adventurer’s heart, fell on his hand.
Abruptly then he sat forward, and, snatching up the quill again, he scrawled at fierce speed on the foot of the last of the written sheets:
“Here is a glove that you bestowed on me in the long ago. I wore it, as your knight wearing his lady’s favour in the lists of life, proudly by the right of your gift and my unsullied honour. For years it was an amulet to maintain that honour still unsullied against all trials and temptations. Now that it has failed of this purpose through my own cowardice and unworthiness, you may not wish me to retain it longer.”
That manuscript—for it is hardly to be termed a letter—still survives. Its faded characters cover some thirty pages of paper that the centuries have tinted yellow. It has been—as you will surmise—in my possession. It has supplied me with more than the mere elements of this history, which without it could never have been written.
He did not read it through when it was done. There was no time for that. As he had poured it from his heart, so he left it. He folded the sheets together, enclosing the glovewithin them, wrapped a thread of silk about the package, and on the knot of this he made a disc of wax which he sealed with his thumb. He superscribed the package, quite simply, “To Miss Nancy Sylvester,” and stood it there on the table against the stem of the candle-branch within view of the first person who should enter that room.
Next he drew forth his still well-filled purse, and emptied its contents on to the table. One half he replaced; of the other he made two packets, addressing one to Dr. Beamish and the other to Mrs. Dallows.
Softly then he pushed back his chair, and rose. He tiptoed to the window, and peered down into the shadows where the watchman kept his post, propped in a corner of the padlocked doorway. A sound of snoring came to inform Holles that, as he had reckoned, the fellow slept. Why should he have troubled to weary himself with a strict and wakeful vigilance? Who could be so mad as to wish to incur all the penalties of evasion from a house that was to be opened now in three days’ time?
Holles went back. He took up his hat and cloak. Then, acting upon a sudden thought, he sought his baldric, and to the empty scabbard that was attached to it he fitted the slender dress-rapier that Buckingham had left behind him. The blade was rather loose in that sheath, but he contrived to jam the hilt.
Having passed the baldric over his head and settled it on his shoulder, he blew out the candles, and a moment later he was at the window again.
He scarcely made a sound as he straddled the window-sill; then very gently he let himself down, until he hung at full length, his toes not more than three feet above the kidney stones of the dark, empty, silent street. A moment he hung there, steadying himself, then loosed his hold. He dropped very lightly, and, as he was wearing no spurs, he madepractically no noise at all. At once he set off in the direction of Sermon Lane.
The watchman, momentarily disturbed by the movements so near at hand, caught a sound of footsteps retreating quickly up the street, but never dreamed of connecting them with any one from the house he guarded. He settled himself more comfortably in his restful angle, and sank back peacefully into his slumbers.
Nevertheless, the evasion of Holles had not gone as entirely unperceived as he imagined. Slight as had been the noise he made, yet it had reached the window of the room immediately above, and by that window—which was the window of Nancy’s room—sat Nancy driven to that vigil by thoughts that rendered sleep impossible.
Her attention aroused by those furtive sounds below, she had leaned far out from the casement and peered down into the darkness. She had heard the soft thud of feet as Holles dropped to the street, and immediately thereafter the patter of his retreating footsteps. Very faintly she thought she made out at the same time the receding figure of a man, a deeper shadow amid shadows. But however little she may have seen with the eyes of the flesh, she saw all with the eyes of her imagination. She was on the point of crying out, but suddenly checked herself, fearful of rousing the watchman and setting afoot a pursuit which, if successful, might be attended by direst consequences for Holles. And it was only that same dread that lent her strength to repress the instinctive impulse to call him back and arrest that flight of his.
Then she steadied herself. After all, it was possible that she was at fault, that she was the victim of her own imaginings, that her overwrought senses had played a trick upon her. But the doubt was unbearable. She must make sure at once. With trembling, fumbling fingers she kindled a light. Then with a rug wrapped about her over her night-rail, shemade her way below. Thus she descended the stairs for the first time, and as she went she blamed herself bitterly—in her conviction that she would find things as she feared—for not having earlier taken this step and gone to seek him who remained so obdurately absent.
When on the following morning an anxious Mrs. Dallows entered the dining-room in fearful quest of her charge, she found her there, at once to her infinite relief and infinite distress. In her night-rail, the rug fallen from her bare shoulders, Nancy sat on the daybed under the open window. She was pale and dry-eyed, but with such pain and misery stamped upon her face that the sight of tears would have been comforting by contrast. Beside her was a candlestick in which the single candle had been burnt to the socket, about her the floor was strewn with the sheets of Holles’s letter, which had slipped from her nerveless fingers.
That letter had accomplished all that Holles could have hoped from it. It had quenched completely and finally any lingering embers of her scorn. It had aroused compassion, and the old love, and finally despair. For by his own act he was deliberately lost to her again. He was gone, irrevocably, as he announced, and by the very manner of his going had made himself an outlaw.