Out of concern for her charge, Mrs. Dallows at once dispatched the watchman for Dr. Beamish, and, when the physician arrived some little while later, she acquainted him with the Colonel’s evasion and the consequent partially stunned condition in which Miss Sylvester appeared to move.
The good doctor, who had come to conceive some measure of affection for those two, rooted, perhaps, in a certain pity which their mysterious, but obviously unhappy, relations aroused in him, went at once in deepest distress to seek Miss Sylvester, who had meanwhile returned to her own room above-stairs. He found her affliction the more distressing to observe by virtue of her unnatural composure.
“This is terrible, my dear,” he said, as he took her hands. “What can have driven that unhappy man to so ... so unfortunate a course?”
“He must be sought. You will order search to be made for him?” she cried.
He sighed and sorrowfully shook his head: “There is no need for me to order that. My duty compels me to make his evasion known. Search for him will follow; but, should he be found, it may go very hard with him; there are rigorous penalties.”
Thus, unavoidably, Dr. Beamish but added a fresh burden to her already surcharged heart. It reduced her to a state of mind bordering upon distraction. She knew not what to desire. Unless he were sought and found, it followed that she would never see him again, whilst if he were found he would have to reckon with the severity of the law, and she could have no assurance that she would see him even then.
Out of his anxiety to help her, Dr. Beamish invited her confidence. He conceived here a case of stupid, headstrong, human pride against which two hearts were likely to be broken, and, because of that affection which they had come to inspire in him, he would have done all in his power to assist them could he but have obtained an indication of the way. But Miss Sylvester, greatly as it would have eased her sorrow to have confided in him, greatly as she desired to do so, found that no confidence was possible without divulging the thing that Holles had done, the hideous act by which she came to find herself in this house. A sudden sense of loyalty to him made it impossible for her to publish his infamy.
So, rejecting the chance to ease by confidence the burden that she carried, she continued to move, white-faced and listless, under the load of it during the two remaining days of her detention. Nor did the doctor come to her again until that third morning, when he was once more accompanied by the examiner, who presented her and her nurse-keeper each with a certificate of health that permitted their free departure. Holles, she was then informed, had not yet been found; but she knew not whether to rejoice or sorrow in that fact.
Bearers were procured for her, the watchman himself volunteering to act as one of them, and the chair in which she had been carried thither, which had been bestowed in the house itself, was brought forth again at her request, to carry her away.
“But whither are you going?” the doctor questioned her in solicitude.
They were standing in the doorway of the house, she with her light hooded mantle of blue taffetas drawn over her white gown, the chair standing in the sunlight, waiting to receive her.
“Why, home. Back to my own lodging,” she answered simply.
“Home?” he echoed, in amazement. “But ... but, then ... this house?”
She looked at him as if puzzled by his astonishment. Then she smiled wanly. “This house is not mine. I was here by ... by chance when I was taken ill.”
The belated revelation of that unsuspected circumstance filled him with a sudden dread on her behalf. Knowing the changes that had come upon that unfortunate City in the month that was overpast, knowing how many were the abandoned houses that stood open now to the winds of heaven, he feared with reason that hers might be one of these, or, at least, that the odds were all against her finding her home, as she imagined, in the condition in which she had left it.
“Where is your lodging?” he asked her.
She told him, adding that upon arrival there she would determine her future movements. She thought, she ended, that she would seek awhile the peace and quiet of the country. Perhaps she would return to London when this visitation was at an end; perhaps she would not. That was what she said. What she meant was really something very different.
The announcement served to increase his dismay on her behalf. It was easier now-a-days to project withdrawal into the country than to accomplish it unless one commanded unusual power and wealth—and all those who commanded these things had long since gone. The wholesale flight from London that had taken place since she was stricken down had been checked at last by two factors. There was no country town or village for many and many a mile that would receive fugitives from London, out of dread of the infection which these might carry. To repel them the inhabitants of rural districts had even had recourse to arms, until, partly because of this and to avoid disturbances andbloodshed, partly as an heroic measure against the spread of the plague throughout England, the Lord Mayor had been constrained to suspend the issue of certificates of health, without which no man could depart from London. Those who still remained in the infected area—where the plague was taking now a weekly toll of thousands of lives—must abandon all hope of quitting it until the pestilence should have subsided.
Considering now her case and weighing what she had told him, Dr. Beamish perceived that her need of him was far from being at an end. Practical and spiritual assistance might be as necessary to her presently as had lately been his physician’s ministrations.
“Come,” he said abruptly, “I will go with you to your lodging, and see you safely bestowed there—that is, if you permit it.”
“Permit it? Oh, my friend!” She held out her hand to him. “Shall I permit you to do me this last kindness? I shall be more grateful than ever I could hope to tell you.”
He smiled through his owlish spectacles, and in silence patted the little hand he held; then he made shift to lead her forward to her chair.
But a duty yet remained her. In the shadows of the hall behind lingered still the kindly Mrs. Dallows, almost tearful at this parting from the sweet charge for whom she had conceived so great a kindness. Miss Sylvester ran back to her.
“Keep this in memory of one who will never forget her debt to you and never cease to think of you fondly.” Into her hand she pressed a clasp of brilliants that she had taken from her bodice—a thing of price far beyond the gold that Holles had left behind in payment for the nurse’s services. Then, as Mrs. Dallows began at one and the same time to thank her and to protest against this excessive munificence,Nancy took the kindly woman in her arms and kissed her. Both were in tears when Nancy turned away and ran out to the waiting sedan.
The bearers—the watchman, and the fellow he had fetched to assist him—took up the chair and swung away towards Paul’s Chains. The little black figure of the doctor strutted beside it, swinging the long red wand that did him the office of a cane, whilst Mrs. Dallows, standing at the door of the house in Knight Ryder Street, watched it out of sight through a blur of tears.
And within the chair Miss Sylvester, too, was giving way at last to tears. They were the first she had shed since she had received the Colonel’s letter, which letter was the only thing she carried away with her from that ill-starred house. Lost thus to consciousness of her surroundings, she took no heed of the emptiness and silence of the streets, and of the general air of furtiveness and desolation that hung about the few wayfarers upon whom they chanced and that marked the very houses they were passing.
Thus at last they came to Salisbury Court and to the house that Nancy had indicated. And here at once Dr. Beamish saw that his worst fears were realized.
Its door hung wide, and the dust lay thick upon the window-panes, two of which were broken. Miss Sylvester, having alighted from her chair, stood looking up, arrested by the unusual aspect of the place, and chilled by a nameless dismay. In awe-stricken wonder, she looked round the court, utterly untenanted, and presenting everywhere the same forsaken aspect. From behind a dusty window of a house across the way, whose door was marked and locked and guarded, an aged yellow face revealed itself, and a pair of eyes that seemed malignant in their furtiveness were watching her. Beyond that ill-omened visage there was in all the court no single sign of life.
“What does it mean?” she asked the doctor.
Sadly he shook his head. “Can you not guess? Here as elsewhere the plague and the fear of the plague have been busy in your absence.” He sighed, and added abruptly: “Let us go in.”
They entered the gloomy vestibule, where dried leaves swept thither by the winds crackled under their feet, and thence they began the ascent of a narrow staircase on the baluster of which there was a mantle of dust. Miss Sylvester called out once or twice as they advanced. But there was no answer to those calls other than the hollow echoes they awoke in that untenanted house.
The three rooms that had composed her home were situated on the first floor, and as they ascended to the landing they saw the three doors standing open. Two of the chambers were shuttered, and, therefore, in darkness; but the drawing-room, which directly faced the stair-head, was all in sunlight, and even before they entered it they had a picture of the devastation wrought there. The furniture was not merely disarranged; it was rudely tumbled, some of it broken, and some was missing altogether. Drawers hung open, as they had been pulled by thieving hands, and that part of their contents which had not been considered worth removing now strewed the floor. A glass cabinet which had stood in one angle lay tumbled forward and shattered into fragments. Thesecrétairestood open, its lock broken, its contents rifled, a litter of papers tossed upon and about it. The curtains, torn from their poles—one of which hung broken across a window—had disappeared, as had an Eastern rug that had covered a portion of the floor.
Dr. Beamish and the lady stood in silence just within the doorway for a long moment, contemplating that dreadful havoc. Then Miss Sylvester moved swiftly forward to thesecrétaire, in an inner drawer of which she had left a considerable sum of money—representing most of her immediate resources. That inner drawer had been wrenched open; the money was gone.
She turned and looked at Dr. Beamish, her face piteous in its white dismay. She tried to speak, but her lip trembled, and her eyes filled again with tears. To have endured so much, and to come home to this!
The doctor started forward in answer to the pitiful appeal of that glance. He advanced a chair that happened to be whole, and urged her to sit down and rest, as if the rest she needed were merely physical. She obeyed him, and with hands folded in her lap she sat there looking helplessly around upon the wreckage of her home.
“What am I to do? Where am I to turn?” she asked, and almost at once supplied the answer: “I had better go from this accursed place at once. I have an old aunt living in Charmouth. I will return to her.”
She had also, she added, certain moneys in the hands of a banker near Charing Cross. Once she should have withdrawn these there would be nothing to keep her in London. She rose on the announcement as if there and then to act upon it. But the doctor gently restrained her, gently revealed to her the full helplessness of her position which was more overwhelming even than she supposed.
It must be almost certain that the banker she named would temporarily have suspended business and withdrawn himself from a place in which panic and confusion had made an end of commerce for the present. But even if he should still be at his counting-house and able at once to supply her demands, such a journey into the country as she contemplated was almost utterly impossible. True, the accident of her having had the plague had supplied her with a certificate of health, and in view of this no one couldhinder her departure. But, considering whence she came, it would be with difficulty that out of London she would find any one to give her shelter; most likely, indeed, that she would be driven back by sheer necessity if not by force before she had gone farther than a day’s journey.
The realization of this unsuspected thing, that she was doomed to imprisonment in this dreadful city which seemed abandoned alike by God and man, inhabited only by the unfortunate and the unclean, a city of dead and dying, drove her almost to the uttermost limits of despair.
For a while she was half stunned and silent. Then speech came from her wild and frantic.
“What then? What then remains? What am I to do? How live? O God, if only I had perished of the plague! I see now ... I see that the worst wrong Randal Holles ever did me was when he saved my miserable life.”
“Hush, hush! What are you saying, child?” The doctor set a comforting arm about her shoulders. “You are not utterly alone,” he assured her gently. “I am still here, to serve you, my dear, and I am your friend.”
“Forgive me,” she begged him.
He patted her shoulder. “I understand. I understand. It is very hard for you, I know. But you must have courage. While we have health and strength, no ill of life is beyond repair. I am old, my dear; and I know. Let us consider now your case.”
“My friend, it is beyond considerations. Who can help me now?”
“I can, for one; that is my intention.”
“But in what way?”
“Why, in several ways at need. But first I can show you how you may help yourself.”
“Help myself?” She looked up at him, frowning a little in her mystification.
“It is in helping others that we best help ourselves,” he explained. “Who labours but for himself achieves a barren life, is like the unfaithful steward with his talents. Happiness lies in labouring for your neighbour. It is a twofold happiness. For it brings its own reward in the satisfaction of achievement, in the joy of accomplishment; and it brings another in that, bending our thoughts to the needs and afflictions of our fellows, it removes them from the contemplation of the afflictions that are our own.”
“Yes, yes. But how does it lie in my power now to do this?”
“In several ways, my dear. I will tell you of one. By God’s mercy and the loving heroism of a fellow-creature you have been cured of the plague, and by that cure you have been rendered what is commonly known as a ‘safe woman’—a person immune from infection who may move without fear among those who suffer from the pestilence. Nurse-keepers are very difficult to find, and daily their diminishing numbers grow less equal to the ever-increasing work that this sad visitation provides. Many of them are noble, self-sacrificing women who, without even such guarantees of immunity as you now possess, go heroically among the sufferers, and some of these—alas!—are constantly succumbing.” He paused, peering at her shortsightedly through his spectacles.
She looked up at him in round-eyed amusement.
“And you are suggesting that I....” She broke off, a little appalled by the prospect opened out to her.
“You might do it because you conceive it to be a debt you owe to God and your fellow-creatures for your own preservation. Or you might do it so that, in seeking to heal the afflictions of others, you may succeed in healing your own. But, however you did it, it would be a noble act, and would surely not go unrewarded.”
She rose slowly, her brows bent in thought. Then she uttered a little laugh of self-pity. “And unless I do that, what else, indeed, am I to do?” she asked.
“Nay, nay,” he made haste to reassure her. “I do not wish to force you into any course against your will. If the task is repugnant to you—and I can well understand that it might be—do not imagine that I shall on that account forsake you. I will not leave you helpless and alone. Be sure of that.”
She looked at him, and smiled a little.
“It is repugnant, of course,” she confessed frankly. “How should it be otherwise? I have lived soft and self-indulgently from childhood. Therefore, if I do this thing, perhaps it will on that account be more acceptable in the eyes of Heaven. As you say, it is a debt I owe.” She put out a hand and took his arm. “I am ready, my friend, to set about discharging it.”
Had you asked Colonel Holles in after-life how he had spent the week that followed immediately upon his escape from the house in Knight Ryder Street, he could have supplied you with only the vaguest and most incomplete of accounts. His memories were a confused jumble, from which only certain facts detached themselves with any degree of sharpness. The ugly truth, which must be told, is that in all that week he was hardly ever entirely sober. The thing began on the very night—or, rather, morning—of his evasion.
Without definite destination, or even aim beyond that of putting as great a distance as possible between himself and Knight Ryder Street, Holles came by way of Carter Lane into Paul’s Yard. There he hung a moment hesitating—for a man may well hesitate when all directions are as one to him; then he struck eastward, down Watling Street, finally plunging into the labyrinth of narrow alleys to the north of it. Here he might have wandered until broad daylight, but that, lost in the heart of that dædal, he was drawn by sounds of revelry to a narrow door, from under which a blade of light was stretched across the cobbles of the street.
It was the oddness of those sounds, as incongruous in this plague-stricken London as if they had issued from the bowels of a sepulchre, that gave him pause. On that mean threshold he stood hesitating, peering up at the sign, which he could just discern to be in the shape of a flagon, whence he must have concluded, had other evidences been lacking, that the place was a tavern. Further he concluded, fromhis knowledge of the enactment by which all such resorts were to close to custom at nine o’clock, that here a breach of the law was being flagrantly committed.
Attracted, on the one hand, by the thought of the oblivion that might be purchased within, repelled, on the other, by the obviously disreputable character of the place and by a curious sense of the increased scorn he must evoke in Nancy’s mind could she witness his weak surrender to so foul a temptation, he ended by deciding to pass on. But, even as he turned to do so, the door was suddenly pulled open, and across the street was flung a great shaft of yellow light in which he stood revealed. Two drunken roisterers, lurching forth, paused a moment, surprised, at the sight of him, arrested there. Then, with drunken inconsequence, they fell upon him, took him each by an arm, and dragged him, weakly resisting, over the threshold of that unclean den, amid shouts of insensate, hilarious welcome from its inhabitants.
Holles stood there in the glare and stench of a half-dozen fish-oil lamps suspended from the beams of the low, grimy ceiling, blinking like an owl, whilst the taverner, vehemently cursing the fools who had left his door agape, made haste to close it again, shutting out as far as possible sight and sound of this transgression of the recent rigorous laws.
When presently the Colonel’s eyes had grown accustomed to the light, he took stock of his surroundings. He found himself in a motley gathering of evil-looking, raffish men, and no less evil-looking women. In all there may have been some thirty of them huddled there together in that comparatively restricted space. The men were rufflers and foists and worse; the women were trulls of various degrees, with raddled cheeks and glittering eyes. Some were maudlin, some hilarious, and some lay helpless and inert as logs. All of them had been drinking to excess, save, perhaps, somefour or five who were gathered about a table apart, snarling over a pack of greasy cards. They were men and women of the underworld, whom circumstances, and the fact that no further certificates of health were being issued, confined to the plague-ridden city; and, in an excess of the habits of debauch that were usual to them, they took this means of cheating for a brief while the terror in which normally they lived and moved in that stronghold of death. It was a gathering typical of many that Asmodeus might have discovered had he troubled on any of those August nights to lift the roofs of London’s houses.
Holles surveyed them with cold disgust, whilst they stared questioningly back at him. They had fallen silent now, all save one who, maudlin, in a corner, persisted in continuing an obscene song with which he had been regaling the company when the Colonel entered.
“Gads my life!” said Holles, at length. “But that I am told the Court has gone to Salisbury, I might suppose myself in Whitehall.”
The double-edged gibe shook them into an explosion of laughter. They acclaimed him for a wit, and proceeded to pronounce him free of their disreputable company, whilst the two topers who had lugged him in from the open dragged him now to one of the tables where room was readily made for him. He yielded to the inevitable. He had a few pieces in his pocket, and he spent one of these on burnt sack before that wild company broke up, and its members crept to their homes, like rats to their burrows, in the pale light of dawn.
Thereafter he hired a bed from the vintner, and slept until close upon noon. Having broken his fast upon a dish of salt herrings, he wandered forth again, errant and aimless. He won through a succession of narrow, unclean alleys into the eastern end of Cheapside, and stood there, aghast to survey the change that the month had wrought. In thatthoroughfare, usually the busiest in London, he found emptiness and silence. Where all had been life and bustle, a continual stream of coaches and chairs of wayfarers on foot and on horseback, of merchants and prentices at the shop doors with their incessant cries of “What d’ye lack?” and clamorous invitations to view the wares and bargains that they offered, the street from end to end was now empty of all but some half-dozen stragglers like himself, and one who with averted head was pushing a wheelbarrow whose grim load was covered by a cloak.
Not a coach, not a chair, not a horse in sight, and not a merchant’s voice to be heard; not even a beggar’s whine. Here and there a shop stood open, but where there were no buyers there was no eagerness to sell. Some few houses he beheld close-shuttered and padlocked, each marked with the red cross and guarded by its armed watchman; one or two others he observed to stand open and derelict. Last of all, but perhaps most awe-inspiring, as being the most eloquent witness to the general desolation, he saw that blades of grass were sprouting between the kidney stones with which the street was paved, so that, but for those lines of houses standing so grim and silent on either side, he could never have supposed himself to be standing in a city thoroughfare.
He turned up towards St. Paul’s, his steps echoing in the noontide through the empty street as echo at midnight the steps of some belated reveller.
It were unprofitable further to follow him in those aimless wanderings, in which he spent that day and the days that followed. Once he made an excursion as far as Whitehall, to assure himself that His Grace of Buckingham was, indeed, gone from Town, as Dr. Beamish had informed him. He went spurred by the desire to vent a sense of wrong that came to the surface of his sodden wits like oil to the surface of water. But he found the gates of Wallingford Houseclosed and its windows tight-shuttered, as were by then practically all the windows that overlooked that forsaken courtly thoroughfare.
Albemarle, he learnt from a stray sailor with whom he talked, was still at the Cockpit. True to his character, Honest George Monk remained grimly at his post unmoved by danger; indeed, going freely abroad in utter contempt of it, engrossed in the charitable task of doing whatever a man in his position could do to mitigate the general suffering.
Holles was tempted to seek him. But the temptation was not very strong upon him, and he withstood it. Such a visit would but waste the time of a man who had no time to waste; therefore, Albemarle was hardly likely to give him a welcome.
His nights were invariably spent at the sign of the Flagon in that dismal alley off Watling Street into which merest chance had led him in the first instance. What attraction the place could have held for him he would afterwards have found it difficult to define. There is little doubt that it was just his loneliness that impelled thither his desire for the only society that he knew to be available, a company of human beings in similar case to himself, who sought in the nepenthes of the wine-cup and in riotous debauch a temporary oblivion of their misery and desolation. Low though he might previously have come, neither was this the resort nor were the thieves and harlots by whom it was frequented the associates that he would ordinarily have chosen. Fortune, whose sport he had ever been, had flung him among these human derelicts; and there he continued, since the place afforded him the only thing he craved until death should—as he hoped—bring him final peace.
The end came abruptly. One night—the seventh that he spent in that lewd haunt of recklessness—he drank more deeply even than his deep habit. As a consequence, when,at the host’s bidding, he lurched out into the dark alley, the last of all those roisterers to depart, his wits were drugged to the point of insensibility. He moved like an automaton, on legs that mechanically performed their function. Staggering under him, they bore his swaying body in long lurches down the lane, until he must have looked like some flimsy simulacrum of a man with which the wind made sport.
Without apprehension or care of the direction in which he was moving, he came into Watling Street, crossed it, plunged into a narrow alley on the southern side, and reeled blindly onward until his feet struck an obstacle in their unconscious path. He pitched over it, and fell forward heavily upon his face. Lacking the will and the strength to rise again, he lay where he had fallen, and sank there into a lethargic sleep.
A half-hour passed. It was the half-hour immediately before the dawn. Came a bell tinkling in the distance. Slowly it drew nearer, and a cry repeated at intervals might have been audible and intelligible to Holles had he been conscious. Soon to these were added other sounds: the melancholy creak of an axle that required greasing, and the slow clank and thud of hooves upon the cobbles. Nearer rang the cry upon the silent night:
“Bring out your dead!”
The vehicle halted at the mouth of the alley in which the Colonel lay, and a man advanced, holding a flaming link above his head so as to cast its ruddy glare hither and thither to search the dark corners of that by-way.
This man beheld two bodies stretched upon the ground: the Colonel’s and the one over which the Colonel had stumbled. He shouted something over his shoulder and advanced again. He was followed a moment later by the cart, conducted by his fellow, who walked at the horse’s head, pulling at a short pipe.
Whilst he who held the torch stood there to light the other in his work, his companion stooped and rolled over the first body, then stepped forward, and did the same by Colonel Holles. The Colonel’s countenance was as livid as that of the corpse that had tripped him up, and he scarcely seemed to breathe. They bestowed no more than a glance upon him with the terrible callous indifference that constant habit will bring to almost any task, and then returned to the other.
The man with the link thrust this into a holder attached to the front of the dead-cart. Then the two of them on their knees made an examination of the body, or rather of such garments as were upon it.
“Not much to trouble over here, Larry,” said one.
“Aye,” growled Larry. “They’re sorry enough duds. Come on, Nick. Let’s heave her aboard.”
They rose, took down their hooks, and seizing the body by them they swung it up into the vehicle.
“Fetch the prancer nearer,” said Nick, as he turned and stepped towards Holles. The horse was led forward some few paces, so that the light from the cart now fell more fully upon the Colonel’s long supine figure.
Nick went down on one knee beside him, and uttered a grunt of satisfaction. “This is better.”
His fellow came to peer over his shoulder.
“A gentry-cove, damme!” he swore with horrible satisfaction. Their practised ghoulish fingers went swiftly over Holles, and they chuckled obscenely at sight of the half-dozen gold pieces displayed in Larry’s filthy paw.
“Not much else,” grumbled one after a further inspection.
“There’s his sword—a rich hilt; look, Larry.”
“And there’s a fine pair o’ stampers,” said Larry, who was already busy about the Colonel’s feet. “Lend a hand, Nick.”
They pulled the boots off and made a bundle of them,together with the Colonel’s hat and cloak. This bundle Larry dropped into a basket that hung behind the cart, whilst Nick remained to strip Holles of his doublet. Suddenly he paused.
“He’s still warm, Larry,” he said querulously.
Larry approached, pulling at his pipe. He growled a lewd oath, expressive of contempt and indifference.
“What odds?” he added cynically. “He’ll be cold enough or ever we comes to Aldgate.” And he laughed as he took the doublet Nick flung to him.
The next moment their filthy hooks were in the garments they had left upon Holles, and they had added him to the terrible load that already half-filled their cart.
They backed the vehicle out of the alley, and then trundled on, going eastward, their destination being the pit at Aldgate. Ever and anon in their slow progress they would halt either at the summons of a watchman or at what they found for themselves. At every halt they made an addition to their load which they bore away for peremptory burial in that Aldgate plague-pit, above which on these hot nights the corpse-candles flickered almost constantly to increase the tale of portents and to scare the credulous into the belief that the place was haunted by the souls of those unfortunates whose bodies lay irreverently tumbled there under the loosely shovelled clay.
They were already approaching their destination, and the first light of dawn, pallid, cold, and colourless as a moonstone, was beginning to dispel the darkness, when, be it from the jolting of the cart, or from the flow of blood where one of those foul hooks had scraped his thigh, or yet from preserving Nature, quickening his wits that he might save himself from suffocation, the Colonel was aroused from his drunken trance.
He awakened, thrusting fiercely for air, and seeking todislodge a heavy mass that lay across his face. The efforts that at first he made were but feeble, as was to be expected from one in his condition; so that he gained no more than brief respites, in each of which, like a drowning man struggling repeatedly to the surface, he gasped a breath of that foul contamination about him. But finding each effort succeeded by a suffocation that became ever more painful, a sort of terror seized upon him, and pulled his senses out of their drunken torpor. He braced himself and heaved more strenuously, until at length he won clear, so far, at least, as his head was concerned.
He saw the paling stars above and was able at last to breathe freely and without effort. But the burden which he had succeeded in thrusting from his head, now lay across his breast, and the weight of it was troublesome and painful. He put forth a hand, and realizing by the sense of touch that what he grasped was a human arm, he shook it vigorously. Eliciting no response, he began to grow angry.
“Afoot there, ye drunken lob,” he growled in a thick voice. “Get up, I say. Get up! O’s my life! D’ye take me for a bed that you put yourself to sleep across me? Gerrup!” he roared, his anger increasing before that continued lack of response. “Gerrup, or I’ll....”
He ceased abruptly, blinking in the glare of light that suddenly struck across his eyes from the flaming head of the torch which had been thrust upwards. The cart had come to a standstill, and above the tall sides of it, rising into his field of vision, came the two horrible figures of the carters, whom the sound of his voice had brought to mount the wheels of the vehicle.
There was something so foul and infernal in those faces, as seen there in the ruddy glare of the torch, that the sight of them brought the Colonel a stage nearer to sobriety. He struggled up into a sitting position, and looked about him,bewildered, uneasy, furiously endeavoring to conjecture where he might be.
In plaintive impatience came the nasal voice of one of those ghouls.
“I told ye the gentry-cove was warm, Larry.”
“Aye! Well? And what now?” quoth the other querulously.
“Why, fling him out, o’ course.”
“Bah! Let him ride. If he’s not stiff yet, he soon will be. What’s the odds?”
“And what o’ the plague examiner, you fool? Won’t he see that it’s just a drunken cove who was sleeping off his booze? And what’ll he say to us? Here! Lend a hand! Let’s get him out.”
But Holles was no longer in need of their assistance. Their words and what he saw of that grim load of which he was a part had made him realize at last his ghastly situation. The sheer horror of it not only sobered him completely; it lent him a more than ordinary strength. He heaved himself clear, and struggled, gasping, to his knees. Thence he gripped the side of the cart, pulled himself to his feet, flung a leg over and leapt down, stumbling as he did so, and sprawling full length upon the ground.
By the time he had gathered himself up, the cart was already trundling on again, and the peals of hoarse, obscene laughter from the carters were ringing hideously through the silent street.
Holles fled from the sound, back by the way that he had been carried, and it was not until he had gone some distance, not until the foul hilarity of the carters and the clatter of the accursed cart itself had faded out of earshot, that he began to grow conscious of his condition. He was without cloak or hat or doublet or boots. The fact that his sword was gone, as well as the little money that still remained him, seemed tohim just then to matter rather less. What chiefly troubled him was that he was cold and dizzy. He shivered every now and then as with an ague; his head was a globe of pain and his senses reeled. Yet he was sober, he assured himself. He could think coherently, and he was able to piece together, not only the thing that had happened to him, but the very manner of its happening.
Mechanically he trudged on and on, aimlessly now, a man walking in a nightmare. The light grew. The moonstone light of early dawn took on colour and began to glow as with the fires of the opal; the sky was invaded and suffused by the saffron heralds of the sun.
At last he paused, without knowledge or care of where he was; utterly bereft of strength, he sank presently into the shelter of the doorway of a deserted house, and there fell asleep.
When next he awakened, he was lying in the full glare of a sun that was already high in the heavens. He looked about him, and found himself in surroundings that were utterly strange to him, so that he could form no notion of whither he had strayed.
In mid-street stood a man in a steeple hat dressed in black, leaning upon a red wand and regarding him attentively.
“What ails you?” the man asked him, seeing him awake and conscious.
Disgruntled, Holles glared at him. “The sight of you,” he snapped, and struggled stiffly up. “Naught else.”
Yet, even as he gained his feet, a giddiness assailed him. He steadied himself a moment against the door-post: then reeled and sank down again upon the step that had been his couch. For some few seconds he sat there bemused, marvelling at his condition. Then, acting on a sudden thought, he tore open the breast of his shirt.
“I lied!” he shouted wildly. When next he looked up, he was laughing, a ringing, exultant laugh. “I lied! There is something else. Look!” And he pulled his shirt wider apart, so that the man might see what he had found. And that was the last thing that he remembered.
On his breast the flower of the plague had blossomed while he slept.
There ensued for Colonel Holles on some plane other than that of mundane life a period of fevered activity, of dread encounters and terrible combats, of continual strife with a relentless opponent dressed in black and white satin who wore the countenance of His Grace of Buckingham and who was ever on the point of slaying him, yet, being unmerciful, never slayed. These combats usually took place in a sombre panelled room by the light of a cluster of candles in a silver branch, and they had for witness a white-clad, white-faced woman with long blue-green eyes and heavy chestnut hair, who laughed in glee and clapped her hands at each fresh turn of the encounter. Sometimes, however, the battle-ground was a cherry orchard, sometimes the humble interior of a yeoman’s cottage in the neighbourhood of Worcester. But the actors were ever the same three.
The fact is that Holles lived in a world of delirium, whence at last he awakened one day to sanity—awakened to die, as he thought, when he had taken stock of his surroundings and realized them by the aid of the memories he assembled of his last waking conscious hours.
He found himself lying on a pallet, near a window, through which he had a glimpse of foliage and of a strip of indigo sky. Directly overhead were the bare rafters of a roof that knew no ceiling. He turned his head on his pillow and looked away to his left, down a long barnlike room in which stood a half-dozen such pallets as his own, and upon each a sufferer like himself. One or two of them lay inert, as if in death; the others tossed and moaned, whilst one, still more violent, was struggling fiercely with his keepers.
It was not a pleasant sight for a man in his condition, so he rolled his head back to its first position, and thus returned to the contemplation of that strip of sky. A great calm settled upon the soul that clung to his fever-wasted body. He understood his situation perfectly. He was stricken with the plague, and he was vouchsafed this interval of consciousness—the consciousness, perhaps, that is the herald of dissolution—in order that he might return thanks to God that at last the sands of his miserable life were run and peace awaited him. The very contemplation of this sufficed to blot out at last the shame that could never in life have left him, the haunting spectre of the loathing he must have inspired in her against whom he had so grossly sinned. He remembered that full confession he had left for her. And it was sweet to reflect, before passing out into the cold shadows, that its perusal, revealing all that had gone to make an utter villain of him, showing how Fate had placed him between the hammer and the anvil, might mitigate the contempt in which inevitably she must have held him.
Tears gathered in his eyes, and rolled down his wasted cheeks. They were tears at once of physical weakness and of thanksgiving, rather than of self-pity.
Steps were softly approaching his bedside. Some one was leaning over him. He turned his head once more and looked up. And then a great fear took possession of him, so that for a moment his heart seemed to contract. Aloud, he explained to himself that apparition.
“I am at my dreams again!” he complained in a whisper.
At his bedside stood a woman, young and comely in the grey homespun, with the white bands and bib and coif that made up the garb of Puritans. Her face was small and pale and oval, her eyes were long, of a colour between blue and green, very wistful now in their expression, and from under the wings of her coif escaped one or two heavy chestnutcurls, to lie upon her white neck. A fine cool hand sought his own where it lay upon the coverlet, a voice that was full of soft, sad music answered him.
“Nay, Randal. You are awake at last—thank God!”
And now he saw that those long wistful eyes were aswim in tears.
“Where am I, then?” he asked, in his first real bewilderment since awakening. Almost he began to imagine that he must have dreamt all those things which he had deemed actual memories of a time that had preceded his delirium.
“In the pest-house in Bunhill Fields,” she told him, which only served to increase the confusion in his mind.
“That is ... I can understand that. I have the plague, I know. I remember being stricken with it. But you? How come you here ... in a pest-house?”
“There was nowhere else for me to go, after ... after I left that house in Knight Ryder Street.” And very briefly she explained the circumstances. “So Dr. Beamish brought me here. And here I have been by the blessing of Providence,” she ended, “tending the poor victims of the plague.”
“And you tended me? You?” Incredulous amazement lent strength to his enfeebled voice.
“Did not you tend me?” she answered him.
He made a gesture of repudiation with one of his hands, grown so pale and thin. Then he sighed and smiled contentedly.
“God is very good to me a sinner. As I lay here now all that I craved was that you, knowing the full truth of my villainy, of the temptation by which I fell, should speak a little word of pity and forgiveness to me to ... to make my dying easier.”
“Your dying? Why do you talk of death?”
“Because it comes, by the mercy of God. To die of the plague is what I most deserve. I sought it and it fled beforeme. Yet in the end I stumbled upon it by chance. All my life is it thus that things have come to me. That which I desire and pursue eludes me. When I cease the pursuit, it turns and takes me unawares. In all things have I been the sport of Fortune; even in my dying, as it seems.”
She would have interrupted, but he hurried on, deceived by his own weakness.
“Listen a moment yet, lest I go before I have said what is yet to add to the letter that I left for you. I swear, by my last feeble hope of heaven, that I did not know it was you I was to carry off, else I had gone to the hangman before ever I had lent myself to the Duke’s business. You believe me?”
“There is no need for your assurances, Randal. I never doubted that. How could I?”
“How could you? Aye, that is true. You could not. So much, at least, would not have been possible, however I might have fallen.” Then he looked at her with piteous eyes. “I scarce dare hope that you’ll forgive me all....”
“But I do, Randal. I do. I have long since forgiven you. I gave you my forgiveness and my gratitude when I knew what you had done for me, how you risked your life in reparation. If I could forgive you then, can I harbour resentment now that I know all? I do forgive—freely, utterly, completely, Randal dear.”
“Say it again,” he implored her.
She said it, weeping quietly.
“Then I am content. What matter all my unrealized dreams of crowned knight-errantry, all my high-flown ambitions? To this must I have come in the end. I was a fool not to have taken the quiet good to which I was born. Then might we have been happy, Nan, and neither of us would have felt the need to seek the hollow triumphs of the world.”
“You talk as if you were to die,” she reproved him through her tears. “But you shall get well again.”
“That surely were a crowning folly when I may die so happily.”
And then the doctor supervened to interrupt them, and to confirm circumstantially her assertion that Holles was now out of danger.
The truth is that, what he had done for her when she was plague-stricken, she had now done for him. By unremitting care of him in the endless hours of his delirium, reckless of how she exhausted herself in the effort, she had brought him safely through the Valley of the Shadow, and already, even as he spoke of dying, deluded by his weakness and the great lassitude that attends exhaustion into believing that already he stood upon the threshold, his recovery was assured.
Within less than a week he was afoot, regaining strength, and pronounced clear of the infection. Yet, before they would suffer him to depart into the world again, he must undergo the period of sequestration that the law prescribed, so as to ensure against his conveying the infection to others. For this he was to be removed from the pest-house to a neighbouring abode of rest and convalescence.
When the hour of departure came, he went to take his leave of Nancy. She awaited him on the lawn under the tall old cedars of Lebanon that graced the garden of this farm which had been converted to the purposes of a hospital. Slimly graceful she stood before him, whilst in a voice, which he laboured to keep steady, he uttered words of an irrevocable farewell.
It was very far from what she had been expecting, as he might have read in the pale dismay that overspread her countenance.
There was a stone seat near at hand there in the shade, and she sank limply down upon this whilst he stood beside her awaiting her dismissal. He was very plainly clad, in garments which she had secretly caused to be procured forhim, but which he supposed to be the parting gift of the charitable pest-house authorities.
She controlled herself to ask him steadily:
“What are you going to do? Where shall you go when ... when the month is past?”
He smiled and shrugged a little. “I have not yet considered fully,” he answered her in actual words, whilst his tone conveyed that he had neither thought nor care of what might follow. Fortune, it might be said, had been kind to him; for Fortune had given him back his life when it was all but lost. But it was the way of Fortune to fool him with gifts when he could no longer profitably use them. “It may be,” he added, answering the round stare of her eyes, “that I shall go to France. There is usually work for a soldier there.”
She lowered her glance, and for a long moment there was silence. Then she spoke again, calmly, almost formally, marshalling the points of an argument that she had well considered.
“You remember that day when we talked, you and I, in that house in Knight Ryder Street, just after my recovery? When I would have thanked you for my life, you rejected my thanks as you rejected the forgiveness that I offered. You rejected it, persuaded that I was moved only by gratitude for the life you had saved; that I sought by that forgiveness to discharge the debt in which you had placed me.”
“It was so,” he said, “and it is so. It cannot be otherwise.”
“Can it not? Are you so very sure?” One upward appealing glance she flashed him as she asked the question.
“As I am sure that out of your sweet charity you deceive yourself,” he answered.
“Do I? Let us say that I did. But if you say that I still do, then you are overlooking something. I am no longer inyour debt. I have paid it in another and a fuller way. As you saved my life, so have I since saved yours. I thanked God for the merciful chance to do this, since by doing it I could wipe out this debt that seemed to stand between us. We are quits now, Randal. I no longer owe you anything. I have repaid you; therefore I am no longer under any necessity to be grateful. You cannot deny that.”
“I would not if I could.”
“Then, don’t you see? Without indebtedness between us, no longer under any obligation to you, I have given you my forgiveness freely, frankly, and fully. Your offence, after all, was not really against me....”
“It was, it was,” he interrupted fiercely. “It was against you inasmuch as it was against my own honour. It made me unworthy.”
“Even so, you had my complete forgiveness from the moment that I came to know how cruelly you had been driven. Indeed, I think that I forgave you earlier, much earlier. My heart told me—my senses told me when you attempted to rescue me from the Duke of Buckingham—that some such tale of misfortune must lie behind your deed.”
A little flush came to stain the pallor which his illness had left upon his cheeks. He bowed his head.
“I bless you for those words. They will give me courage to face ... whatever may await me. I shall treasure the memory of them, and of your sweetness always.”
“But still you do not believe me!” she cried out. “Still you think that behind it all there are some dregs of ... of ... resentment in my heart!”
“No, no, Nan. I believe you.”
“And yet you will persist in going?”
“What else? You who know all now must see that there is no place for me in England.”
There was a ready answer leaping to her lips. But she could not utter it. At least, not yet. So again she hung her head, and again there fell a pause, in which she was desperately seeking for another line of attack upon his obstinately proud humility. Arguments to reason failing her, she availed herself of an argument to sentiment. She drew from the bodice of her gown a rubbed and faded tasselled glove. She held it out to him, looking up at him, and he saw that her eyes were wet.
“Here is something that belongs to you, at least. Take it, Randal. Take it, since it is all that you will have of me.”
Almost in hesitancy he took that little glove, still warm and fragrant from sweet contact with her, and retained also the hand that proffered it.
“It ... it shall again be a talisman,” he said softly, “to keep me worthy as ... as it did not keep me once.” Then he bowed over the hand he held, and pressed it to his lips. “Good-bye, and God guard you ever, Nan.”
He would have disengaged his hand, but she clutched it firmly now.
“Randal!” she cried sharply, desperately driven to woo this man who would not woo her despite her clear invitation. In gentle, sorrowing rebuke she added: “Can you, then, really think of leaving me again?”
His face assumed the pallor of death, and his limbs trembled under him.
“What else is possible?” he asked her miserably.
“That is a question you had best answer for yourself.”
“What answer can I supply?” He looked at her, almost fearfully, with those grey eyes that were normally so steady and could be so hard and arrogant. He moistened his lips before resuming. “Should I allow you to gather up these poor shards of my broken life with the hands of pity?”
“Pity?” she cried in repudiation. Then, shaking herhead a little; “And what if it were so?” she asked. “What then? Oh, Randal, if I have pity for you, have you then none for me?”
“Pity for you! I thank God you do not stand in need of pity.”
“Do I not? What else but pitiful can you account my state? I have waited years, with what patience and fortitude I could command, for one to whom I deemed myself to belong, and when at last he arrived, it is only to reject me.”
He laughed at that, but without any trace of mirth.
“Nay, nay,” he said. “I am not so easily deceived by your charitable pretence. Confess that out of your pity you but act a part.”
“I see. You think that, having been an actress once, I must be acting ever. Will you believe me, I wonder, when I swear to you that, in all those years of weary waiting, I withstood every temptation that besets my kind, keeping myself spotless against your coming? Will you believe that? And if you believe it, will you cheat me now?”
“Believe it! O God! If I did not, perhaps I could now yield more easily. The gulf between us would be less wide.”
“There is no gulf between us, Randal. It has been bridged and bridged again.”
He disengaged his hand from her clasp at last. “Oh, why do you try me, Nan?” he cried out, like a man in pain. “God knows you cannot need me. What have I to offer—I that am as bankrupt of fortune as of honour?”
“Do women love men for what they bring?” she asked him. “Is that the lesson a mercenary’s life has taught you? Oh, Randal, you spoke of Chance and how it had directed all your life, and yet it seems you have not learnt to read its signs. A world lay between us in which we were lost to each other. Yet Chance brought us together again, and if the way of it was evil, yet it was the way of Chance. Again westrayed apart. You went from me driven by shame and wounded pride—yes, pride, Randal—intending the separation to be irrevocable. And again we have come together. Will you weary Chance by demanding that it perform this miracle for a third time?”
He looked at her steadily now, a man redeemed, driven back into the hard ways of honour by the scourge of all that had befallen him.
“If I have been Chance’s victim all my life, that is no reason why I should help you to be no better. For you there is the great world, there is your art, there is life and joy when this pestilence shall have spent itself. I have nothing to offer you in exchange for all that. Nothing, Nan. My whole estate is just these poor clothes I stand in. If it were otherwise.... Oh, but why waste words and torturing thought on what might be. We have to face what is. Good-bye!”
Abruptly he swung on his heel, and left her, so abruptly, indeed, that his departure took her by surprise, found her without a word in which to stay him. As in a dream she watched the tall, spare, soldierly figure swinging away through the trees towards the avenue. Then at last she half rose and a little fluttering cry escaped her.
“Randal! Randal!”
But already he was too far to hear her even if, had he heard, he would have heeded.
Jesting Fortune had not yet done with Colonel Holles.
A month later, towards the middle of September, without having seen Nancy again—since that, of course, would have been denied him, as it would have nullified his sequestration from infected persons and surroundings—he found himself at liberty to return to the ordinary haunts of man, supplied with a certificate of health.
He had been considering, in the few days preceding his discharge, whither he should direct his steps once he were made free of the world again, and he had returned to that earlier resolve of his to embark as a hand aboard some vessel bound for France. But a vessel must be found quickly, for Holles was utterly penniless. He possessed, as he had reminded Nancy, nothing but the comparatively cheap garments in which he stood. He might have obtained a few shillings from the pest-house authorities, but his gorge rose at the thought of seeking charity, particularly where it would better become him to bestow it, out of consideration for the benefits received.
So within an hour of his discharge he found himself tramping along the empty streets of the City, bound for distant Wapping. He must go afoot, not only because he lacked the means to go otherwise, but because there were no longer any boats plying for hire at any of the steps along the river, nor any hackney-coaches remaining in the streets. More than ever was London become a city of the dead.
He trudged on, and everywhere now he beheld great fires of sea-coal burning in the streets, a sight that puzzled him at first, until a chance wayfarer informed him that itwas done by order of the Lord Mayor and with the approval of His Grace of Albemarle as a means of purifying the tainted air. Yet, although these fires had been burning now for a week, there was no sign yet that they had any such effect as was desired. Indeed, the bill of mortality in that week had been higher than ever before, having risen—as that same wayfarer informed him—to the colossal figure of eight thousand. The marvel was, thought Holles, that any should still be left to die in London.
On through that desolate emptiness he tramped in the noontide heat, which still continued as intense as through the months that were past of that exceptional summer, until he came to the Fleet Ditch. Here it was that he bethought him of The Harp in Wood Street where he had lodged, and of its landlord, the friendly Banks, who at some risk to himself had warned him that the messengers of the law were on his heels. It was his utter destitution that now shaped his destiny. But for that, he might not have remembered that in his precipitate departure from that hostelry he had left some gear behind including a fine suit of clothes. He could have no personal use for such brave raiment now. The homespun in which he stood was better suited far to one who sought work as a hand aboard a ship. But, if he could recover that abandoned gear, it was possible that he might be able to convert it into a modest sum of money to relieve his present necessities. He laughed a little over the notion of Fortune being so kind to him as to permit him to find The Harp still open or Banks alive.
Still, forlorn hope though it might be, forlorn hopes were the only hopes that remained him. So in the direction of Wood Street he now turned his steps.
He found it much as other streets. Not more than one shop in four was standing open, and trade in these was idle and stagnant. Proctor’s famous ordinary at the sign ofThe Mitre—the most reputed eating-house in London—was closed and shuttered. He regarded this as an evil omen. But he passed on, and came presently to stand before the more modest Harp. He could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw its windows clean and open, its door flung wide.
He crossed the threshold, and turned into the common room on his left. The room was clean-swept, its long deal tables were well scoured; but trade was slack, for the place contained a single occupant, a man in an apron who started up from a wooden armchair in which he had been dozing, with an ejaculation of:
“As God’s my life, a customer!”
Holles stared at him and the man stared back at Holles. It was Banks, the vintner himself. But a Banks whose paunch had shrunk, whose erstwhile ruddy cheeks had lost their glow and fullness.
“Colonel Holles!” he cried. “Or is it your ghost, sir? There’s more ghosts than living men in this stricken city.”
“We are both ghosts, I think, Banks,” the Colonel answered him.
“Maybe, but our gullets ain’t ghostly, praise the Lord! And there’s still some sack left at The Harp. It’s the greatest of all electuaries is sack, as Dr. Hodges has it. Sack with plenty of nutmeg, says he, and avoid sweating. And that’s how I’ve kept myself alive. Shall we have a bottle of the medicine, Colonel?”
“I’d say yes, with all my heart. But—lackaday!—I’ve not the means to pay for the sack.”
“Pay?” The vintner made a lip. “Sit ye down, Colonel.”
Banks fetched the wine, and poured it.
“A plague on the plague, is the toast,” said he, and they drank it. “’Slife, Colonel, but I am glad to see you alive. I feared the worst for you. Yet you’ve contrived to keepyourself safe, avoiding not only the plague, but them pestilential fellows that was after you.” Without waiting for a reply, he dropped his voice to add: “Ye’ll have heard how Danvers was took, and how he broke away and won free—good luck to him! But all that is a dream by now, that conspiracy business, and no one bothers much about it. Not even the government. There’s other things to engage them, and not much government left neither. But of yourself now, Colonel?”
“My tale’s soon told. I’ve not fared quite as well as you suppose. I’ve had the plague.”
“The devil you have. And ye’ve won through!” Banks regarded him with a new respect. “Well, ye were born lucky, sir.”
“You give me news,” said the Colonel.
“There isn’t many escapes,” the vintner assured him ruefully. “And you having had the pestilence makes you a safe man. Ye can come and go as ye please without uneasiness.”
“And your sack as an electuary is wasted on me. But if I’m safe I’m also penniless, which is what has brought me here: to see if some gear of mine is still in your possession that I may melt it into shillings.”
“Aye, aye, I have it all safe,” Banks assured him. “A brave suit, with boots and a hat, a baldric, and some other odds and ends. They’re above-stairs, waiting for you when you please. But what may you be thinking of doing, Colonel, if I may make so bold as to ask?”
Holles told him of his notion of sailing as a hand aboard a vessel bound for France.
The vintner pursed his lips and sadly shook his head, regarding his guest the while from under bent brows.
“Why, sir,” he said, “there’s no French shipping and no ships bound for France at Wapping, and mighty few ships of any kind. The plague has put an end to all that. Theport of London is as empty as Proctor’s yonder. There’s not a foreign ship’ll put into it, nor an English one go out of it, for she wouldn’t be given harbour anywhere for fear of the infection.”
The Colonel’s face lengthened in dismay. This, he thought, was the last blow of his malignant Fortune.
“I shall have to go to Portsmouth, then,” he announced gloomily. “God knows how I shall get there.”
“Ye never will. For Portsmouth won’t have ye, nor any other town in England neither, coming as ye do from London. I tell you, sir, the country’s all crazed with fear of the plague.”
“But I’ve a certificate of health.”
“Ye’d need to have it backed by a minister of state or ever Portsmouth would let you inside her gates.”
Holles looked at him blankly for a moment, then expressed his bitterness in a laugh.
“In that case I don’t know what remains. Ye don’t need a drawer these days, I suppose?”
The vintner was frowning thoughtfully, considering the first of those two questions.
“Why, ye say ye’re a safe man. Ye’ll not have seen His Grace of Albemarle’s proclamation asking for safe men?”
“Asking for safe men? To what end?”
“Nay, the proclamation don’t say. Ye’ll find that out in Whitehall, maybe. But there’s a service of some kind his grace has to offer to them as is safe. Things being like this with you, now, ye might think it worth while to ask. It might be something for ye, for the present at least.”
“It might,” said Holles. “And, apparently, it’s that or nothing. He’ll be needing scavengers, likely, or drivers for the dead-cart.”
“Nay, nay, it’ll be something better than that,” said Banks, taking him literally.
Holles rose. “Whatever it may be, when a man is faced with starvation he had best realize that pride won’t fill an empty belly.”
“No more it will,” Banks agreed, eyeing the Colonel’s uncouth garments. “But if ye’re thinking of paying a visit to Whitehall ye’d be wise to put on that other suit that’s above-stairs. Ye’ll never get past the lackeys in that livery.”
So you see issuing presently from the sign of The Harp a Colonel Holles very different from the Colonel Holles who had entered it an hour earlier. In a dark blue suit of camlet enlivened by a little gold lace, black Spanish boots, and a black beaver set off by a heavy plume of royal blue, without a sword, it is true, but swinging a long cane, he presented a figure rarely seen just then in London streets. Perhaps because of that his appearance at the Cockpit made the few remaining and more or less idle ushers bestir themselves to announce him.
He waited but a moment in the empty anteroom where three months ago he had overheard Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office proclaiming England’s need of practised soldiers. The usher who went to announce him returned almost at once to conduct him into that pleasant chamber overlooking the park where His Grace of Albemarle acted to-day as deputy for the pleasure-loving libertine prince who had forsaken his stricken capital.
The Duke heaved himself up as the Colonel entered.
“So you’re come at last, Randal!” was his astounding greeting. “On my life, you’ve taken your own time in answering my letter. I concluded long since that the plague had carried you off.”
“Your letter?” said Holles. And he stared blankly at the Duke, as he clasped the proffered hand.
“My letter, yes. You had it? The letter that I sent you nigh upon a month ago to the Paul’s Head?”
“Nay,” said Holles. “I had no letter.”
“But....” Albemarle looked almost as if he did not believe him. “The landlady there kept it for you. She said, I think, that you were absent at the time, but would be back in a day or two, and that you should have the letter at once on your return.”