“A month ago, do you say? But it is two months and more since I left the Paul’s Head!”
“What do you tell me? Ah, wait. My messenger shall speak for himself on this.” And he strode away to the bell-rope.
But Holles checked him.
“Nay, nay,” he cried with a wry smile. “There’s not the need. I think I understand. Mrs. Quinn has been riding her malice on a loose rein. Your messenger would, no doubt, announce whence he came, and Mrs. Quinn, fearing that the news might be to my advantage, acted so as to prevent his making further search for me. Evidently the plague has spared that plaguy woman.”
“What’s this?” The Duke’s heavy face empurpled. “Do you charge her with suppressing a communication from an office of state? By Heaven, if she’s still alive I’ll have her gaoled for it.”
“Let be,” said Holles, seizing him by the arm. “Devil take the woman! Tell me of the letter. Ye’ll never mean that you had found employment for me, after all?”
“You seem incredulous, Randal? Did you doubt my zeal for you?”
“Oh, not your zeal. But the possibility of your helping one who was in my case.”
“Aye, aye. But as to that, why, Buckingham improved it when he stood surety for your loyalty before the Justices. I heard of that. And when the chance came, the chance of this Bombay command that already I had earlier intended for you....”
“The Bombay command?” Holles began to wonder did he dream. “But I thought that it had been required by Buckingham for a friend of his own.”
“Sir Henry Stanhope, yes. So it had, and Stanhope sailed for the Indies with the commission. But it seems that when he did so he already carried the seeds of the plague within him. For he died of it on the voyage. It was a Providence that he did, poor devil; for he was no more fitted for the command than to be Archbishop of Canterbury. I wrote to you at once asking you to seek me here, and I waited a fortnight to hear from you. As you made no sign, I concluded that either you were stricken with the plague, or no longer desired the office, and I proceeded to appoint another gentleman of promise.”
Holles folded the pinions of his soaring hopes and let himself fall back into his despondency. He uttered a groan.
“But that’s not the end,” Albemarle checked him. “No sooner had I appointed this other than he, too, fell sick of the plague, and died a week ago. I have already found another suitable man—no easy matter in these days—and I had resolved to appoint him to-morrow to the vacant office. But, if ye’re not afraid that the plague is bound up with this commission, it’s at your disposal, and it shall be made out to you at once.”
Holles was gasping for breath. “You ... you mean that ... that I am to have the command, after all!” It was incredible. He dared not believe it.
“That is what I have said. The commission is ...” Albemarle broke off suddenly, and fell back before him. “What ails you man? You’re white as a ghost. Ye’re not ill?” And he lugged out a handkerchief that flung a reek of myrrh and ginger on the air, leaving Holles no single doubt of the thing his grace was fearing. Albemarle imagined that the plaguewhich, as he had said, seemed bound up with this commission, was already besetting the man upon whom he now proposed to bestow it. The humour of it took Holles sharply, and his laugh rang out further to startle the Duke.
“There’s no need for electuaries against me,” he assured his grace. “I am certified in health and carry no infection. I left Bunhill Fields this morning.”
“What?” Albemarle was astounded. “D’ye mean ye’ve had the plague?”
“That is the whole reason of my being here. I am a safe man now. And I came in answer to your proclamation asking for safe men.”
Albemarle continued to stare at him in deepening amazement.
“So that is what brought you?” he said at last, when full understanding came to him.
“But for that I certainly should never have come.”
“Gad!” said Albemarle, and he repeated the ejaculation with a laugh, for he found the situation curious enough to be amusing. “Gad! The ways of Chance!”
“Chance!” echoed Holles, suddenly very sober, realizing how this sudden, unexpected turn of Fortune’s wheel had changed the whole complexion of his life. “Almost it seems that Chance has stood my friend at last, though it has waited until I had touched the very bottom of misfortune. But for your proclamation, and but for Mrs. Quinn, too, I should have been Fortune’s fool again over the matter of this commission. It would have been here waiting for me, and I should never have known. The very malice by which Mrs. Quinn sought to do me disservice has turned to my benefit. For had she told your messenger the truth—that I had vanished and that she had no knowledge of my whereabouts—you would never have traced me just then, and you would never have waited that fortnight. Thus all might have beenchanged.” He paused, lost in a wonder that Albemarle did not share.
“Maybe, maybe,” said his grace briskly. “But what matters now is that you are here, and that the command is yours if you still wish it. There is not even the fear of the plague to deter you, since you are a safe man now. It is an important office, as I told you, and so that you discharge its duties, as I know you will, it may prove but a stepping-stone to greater things. What do you say?”
“Say?” cried Holles, his cheeks flushed, his grey eyes gleaming. “Why, I give you thanks with all my heart.”
“Then you accept it. Good! For I believe you to be the very man for the office.” Albemarle stepped to his writing-table, selected from among some documents a parchment bearing a heavy seal, sat down, took up a pen, and wrote briskly for a few seconds. He dusted the writing with pounce, and proffered the document. “Here, then, is your commission. How soon can you sail?”
“In a month,” said Holles promptly.
“A month!” Albemarle was taken aback. He frowned. “Why, man, you should be ready in a week.”
“Myself, I could be ready in a day. But I mean to take this new-found tide of fortune at the flood, and....”
But Albemarle interrupted him impatiently.
“Don’t you realize, man, the time that has been already lost? For four months now this office has stood vacant.”
“Which means that there’s a very competent lieutenant in charge. Let him continue yet awhile. Once I am there, I’ll speedily make up for lost time. That I can promise you. You see, it may be that I shall have a companion, who cannot possibly be ready in less than a month.”
With an odd, reckless trust in the continuance of Fortune’s favour now, he boldly added: “You have said that I am the very man for the office. The government can wait a month,or you can appoint some one less likely to serve it as efficiently.”
Albemarle smiled at him grimly across the table. “Ye’re very full of surprises to-day, Master Randal. And this one baffles me.”
“Shall I explain it?”
“It would be a condescension.”
Holles poured out his tale, and Albemarle gave him a sympathetic hearing. When he had done, the Duke sighed and turned aside before replying, to examine the pages of a notebook at his elbow.
“Well, well,” he said at length, having consulted an entry. “TheEnglish Lassis fitting at Portsmouth for the voyage, and should be ready, I am informed, in two weeks from now. But there are ever delays at present, and it is odds that in no case would she be ready in less than three weeks. I’ll see to it that she is not ready under a month.”
Impetuously the Colonel held out both hands to the Duke.
“What a friend you are!” he cried.
Albemarle wrung them hard. “You’re damnably like your father, God rest him!” said he. Then, almost brusquely: “Away with you now, and good-luck to you. I’ll not ask you to stay to see her grace at present, since you’re pressed. You shall kiss her hands before you sail. Be off!”
Holles took his leave. At the door he suddenly checked, and, turning, displayed a rueful countenance.
“Although I have the King’s commission in my pocket and hold an important office in his service, I haven’t a shilling in the world,” he said. “Not a shilling.”
Albemarle responded instantly by producing a purse from which he counted twenty pounds. There was no sign of parsimonious reluctance about his offer now.
“As a loan, of course,” said Holles, gathering up the yellow coins.
“No, no,” Albemarle corrected him. “An advance. Take no further thought for it. The Treasury shall refund me the money at once.”
Away from Whitehall, where the ground was green with thriving grass, went Colonel Holles at speed. He set his face towards Islington once more, and swung along with great strides, carrying in his breast a heart more blithe than he had known for many a year. Blind and deaf to all about him, his mind sped ahead of his limbs to the goal for which he made.
Thus, until a sudden awful dread assailed him. Fortune had fooled and cheated him so often that it was impossible he should long continue in this new-born trust in her favour. It was, after all, four weeks since he had seen Nancy, and those in that house of rest where he had spent the period of his sequestration could tell him nothing of her since they held no direct intercourse with those who had their being in the pest-houses. In a month much may betide. Evil might have befallen her, or she might have departed thence. To soothe the latter dread came the recollection that any such departure would have been impossible until she, too, had undergone the prescribed period of disinfection. But the former dread was not so easily to be allayed. It would be so entirely of a piece with all his history that, now that apparently he held the earnest of Fortune in his hands, he should make the discovery that this had reached him too late; that, even as she bestowed with the one hand, so with the other did Fortune rob him.
You conceive, then, the dread anxiety in which he came, breathless, hot, and weary from the speed he had made, to the open fields and at last to the stout, spiked gates of that pleasant homestead that had been put to the uses of a lazaret. Here a stern and surly guardian denied him passage.
“You cannot enter, sir. What do you seek?”
“Happiness, my friend,” said the Colonel, completing the other’s conviction that he was mad. But mad or sane there was a masterful air about him now. He bristled with the old amiable arrogance that of late had been overlaid by despondency and lassitude of soul. And his demand that the gate should be unbarred for him held an authority that was not lightly to be denied.
“You understand, sir,” the gatekeeper asked him, “that, once you enter here, you may not go back whence you come for twenty-eight days, at least?”
“I understand,” said Holles, “and I come prepared to pay the price. So, in God’s name, open, friend.”
The gatekeeper shrugged. “Ye’re warned,” he said, and raised the bar, thus removing, as he thought, all obstacles that kept a fool from his folly.
Colonel Holles entered. The gates clashed behind him, and he took his way briskly, almost at a run, down the long avenue in the dappled shade of the beech trees and elms that bordered it, making straight for the nearest of the red-brick outhouses, which was the one which he himself had occupied during his sickness.
A broadly built, elderly woman perceived his approach from the doorway, and, after staring at him a moment in surprise and consternation, started forward to meet him, calling to him to stand. But he came on heedless and breathless until they were face to face.
“How came you in, you foolish man?” she cried.
“You don’t know me, Mrs. Barlow?” he asked her.
Startled anew by that pleasant, familiar address, she stared at him again. And then, under the finery and vigour investing him and rendering him almost unrecognizable to eyes that remembered only the haggard, meanly clad fellow of a month ago, she discovered him.
“Save us! It’s Colonel Holles!” And almost without pause she went on in a voice of distress: “But you were to have left the house of rest to-day. Whatever can have brought you back here to undo all again.”
“Nay, not to undo. To do, Mrs. Barlow, by God’s help. But ye’ve a singular good memory, to remember that I should be leaving to-day!”
She shook her head, and smiled with a touch of sadness. “’Twasn’t me that remembered, sir. It was Miss Sylvester.” And again she shook her head.
“She’s here, then! Ha! She is well?”
“Well enough, poor dear. But oh, so mortal sad. She’s yonder, resting, under the cedars—a place she’s haunted this past month.”
He swung aside, and, without more than a hurriedly flung word of thanks or excuse, he was gone swiftly across the lawn, towards that cluster of cedars, amid whose gnarled old trunks he could discern the flutter of a grey gown.
She had haunted the spot this month past, Mrs. Barlow had said. And it was the spot where they had spoken their farewells. Ah, surely Fortune would not trick him this time! Not again, surely, would she dash away the cup from his very lips, as so often she had done!
As he drew nearer over the soft, yielding turf that deadened all sound of his steps, he saw her sitting on that stone seat where a month ago he had left her in the conviction that he was never to behold her again with the eyes of the flesh. Her shoulders were turned towards him, but even so he perceived in her attitude something of the listlessness by which she was possessed. He paused, his pulses throbbing, paused instinctively, fearing now to startle her, as startle her he must, however he approached.
He stood arrested there, breathless, at a loss. And then as if she sensed his presence, she slowly turned and lookedbehind her. A long while she stared, startled, white-faced.
“Randal!” She was on her feet, confronting him.
He plunged forward.
“Oh, Randal, why have you come here? You should have gone to-day....”
“I went, and I have returned, Nan,” he told her, standing there beside her now.
“You have returned!” She looked him over more attentively now, and observed the brave suit of dark blue camlet that so well became his tall, spare frame, and the fine Spanish boots that were now overlaid with dust. “You have returned!” she said again.
“Nan,” he said, “a miracle has happened.” And from his breast he pulled that parchment with its great seal. “A month ago I was a beggar. To-day I am Colonel Holles in something more than name, commanding something more than a mere regiment. I have come back, Nan, because at last I can offer you something in exchange for all that you will sacrifice in taking me.”
She sank down slowly, weakly, to the seat, he standing over her, until they were in the same attitude of a month ago. But how different now was all else! She leaned her elbows on her knees a moment, pressing her hands to her throbbing temples.
“It is real, this? It ... it is true? True?” she asked aloud, though clearly not of him. And then she sat back again, and looked up into his face.
“It is not very much, perhaps, when all is said, though it seems much to me to-day, and with you beside me I shall know how to make it more. Still, such as it is, I offer it.” And he tossed the parchment down into her lap.
She looked at the white cylinder without touching it, and then at him again, and a little smile crept about the corners of her sweet mouth, and trembled there. Into her mindthere leapt the memory of the big boast of conquest for her sake with which he had set out in the long ago.
“Is this the world you promised me, Randal?” she asked him. And his heart bounded at the old rallying note, which laid his last doubt to rest.
“As much of it as I can contrive to get,” said he.
“Then it will be enough for me,” she answered. And there was no raillery in her voice now, only an infinite tenderness. She rose, and, standing there close before him, held out the parchment still unfolded.
“But you haven’t looked,” he protested.
“What need to look? It is your kingdom, you have told me. And I’ll share your kingdom whatever it may be.”
“It is situate in the Indies ... in Bombay,” said he, with a certain diffidence.
She considered.
“I always had a thirst for travel,” she said deliberately.
He felt that it was due to her that he should explain the nature of this appointment and how he came by it. To that explanation he proceeded. Before he had reached the end she was in tears.
“Why? Why? What now?” he cried in dismay. “Does your heart misgive you?”
“Misgive me? Oh, Randal! How can you think that? I weep for thankfulness. I have spent a month of such hopeless anguish, and now....”
He put an arm about her shoulder, and drew her head down on to his breast. “My dear,” he murmured. He sighed, and held her thus in a silence that was like a prayer, until, at length, she raised her face.
“Do you know, Randal, that it is more years than I care to think of since last you kissed me, and then you vexed me by stealing what is now yours to take.”
He was a little awed. But, after all, with all his faults, he was never one to yield to fear.
They were married on the morrow, and their honeymoon was spent in that sequestration that the law exacted. Certified clear of infection at last, they were permitted to go forth to garner the honours that Fortune had stored up for Randal Holles to make amends for all that he had earlier suffered at her hands.
THE END