CHAPTER XIII.FLIGHT.
In the street Lady Bell set out walking rapidly—she dared not run—straight on in the opposite direction from her lodging. She had a conviction that she would get out of the town presently, and on the great road, where she might overtake a conveyance.
She had an instinctive perception that Mrs. Sundon, however grateful and concerned that Lady Bell should not suffer by her magnanimity, would be too much taken up with Mrs. Sundon’s own husband, with enlarging to him on the risk he had run, and the necessity of prudence in his future movements, to enter at once into a searching investigation of what had become of Lady Bell, and an eager tracking of her footsteps. After Mrs. Sundon had discovered that Lady Bell had not waited, but had gone with as little ceremony as she had come, Mrs. Sundon would naturally conclude that she had returned immediately to her husband, to prevent all suspicion, and to carry out her programme. For Lady Bell’s own sake, Mrs. Sundon would resolve to be quiet on the incident of her visit.
Lady Bell reckoned herself secure of not being missed by her husband for hours; and so soon as she was beyond the town the probability of her being recognised was lessened. She could venture to walk more slowly, and not wear out her strength at starting, to raise her veil, to push down the neckcloth wound about her chin and mouth, and allow herself a breath of the cool autumn air, in the fever heat of her progress, and the agitation which had attended on her adventure.
It was in the latter end of the month of September, but the season and weather were fine, and there were still hours of daylight.
Lady Bell was furnished with money; she had got an ample sum to spend at Peasmarsh. The idea which had been in her head when she had still thought of confiding her case to Mrs. Sundon, and bespeaking her support, was to be put in the way of reaching London as speedily as possible.
When in London she might apply to any survivor of Lady Lucie’s friends to hide her from Squire Trevor and his vengeance, to procure for her a separation from him, to help her to get her own livelihood. This would no longer be by the poorest place at Court—Lady Bell had resigned that aristocratic resource—Queen Charlotte was too good and happy a wife herself to pardon readily the errors of a miserable young wife.
But Lady Bell’s vision had enlarged so that she conceived—Lady Bell though she was, she might bedame de compagnieto some old lady of quality, on the model of Lady Lucie Penruddock.
Or she might turn her little talents and accomplishments, the frivolousness of which had been so scouted, to use, after all, by imparting them to the children of some great house.
Her imagination had grown, like everything else about her (she was half an inch taller since her marriage), though even her imagination could not persuade her that the bread of service would taste anything save bitter to a woman of her degree, but it would be less bitter than what she had eaten at Trevor Court and St. Bevis’s, and bitter as it might be, it was all the bread that remained to her, unless she were willing to go back and be killed by Squire Trevor.
On the contrary, she could not help rejoicing that she had left him and bondage behind, and that the world was before her. The sense of freedom and of a new life sent a certain glow and throb of elasticity through her veins.
Lady Bell trudged on alongside the ragged hedges, and keeping by the posts which marked the king’s highway, in the broken, deeply-rutted road. She ceased to see any trace of the election, beyond a spurring messenger now and again. The few travellers were of an honest though homely description. The electioneering had done good for the moment, scoured the neighbouring country, and collected the stoutest beggars, the most rampageous tramps, into their dens in Peasmarsh.
There was a rustic yeoman, mounted on his best cart-horse, with his sister behind him, clasping him round the capacious waist, trotting away to spend the evening in hunting the slipper and roasting hot cockles with some neighbours. There were farm-servants and labourers hieing home from their day’s work ere nightfall.
These wayfarers glanced with a little wonder at Lady Bell, even in her ordinary scarlet habit, and her neckcloth, as a lady who ought to be on her horse, with her servant behind her, and who might be on foot and by herself as the result of an accident, or in consequence of keeping a private appointment. But these were worthy people who took their neighbours’ adventures coolly, and did not, when they were not accosted and asked to interfere, see themselves called on to forsake their proper business and pleasure for the sake of a third party, in an adventure which might be sorry enough.
The country folks were much the same as those whom Lady Bell had stared at in the light of a novelty on the occasion of her journey from London to St. Bevis’s. It was not quite a year since then; Lady Bell was still only between fifteen and sixteen, an age, indeed, not very practical, and alternating between rashness and timidity.
She walked on in the lengthening shadows and growing chilliness, not knowing whither she walked, only feeling that she was getting tired and footsore. She resisted, for a wonderful length of time, the perplexity and downcastness which stole over her, and took the place of her foolish satisfaction.
But fatigue and uncertainty increased until they well-nigh overpowered her, and she was in danger of sinking down at any moment in utter exhaustion and consternation, weeping at the prospect of having to stay there all night, and of dying of cold, if she were not murdered by footpads.
At last a country cart, on which a number of pieces of furniture, chests of drawers, and bookcases were piled, indicating the removal from one dwelling to another of some household of condition, came along, and drew up just after it had passed Lady Bell.
She was too inexperienced a traveller, and had been too dispirited to call to the driver and ask him to give her a cast in his cart. When he stopped, her strained nerves caused her heart to beat fast, while she urged her trembling steps to carry her on, as she pretended not to notice the stoppage.
The driver was occupied with a commission and a puzzle of his own. He first peered through the sinking sunbeams, and next shouted after her, leaping from his cart, flinging down his reins—confident in the discretion of his team of horses, running heavily in pursuit, and finally laying a powerful hand on Lady Bell’s shoulder to arrest his object. Happily, he spoke in the same breath, before she shrieked out, with no Squire Trevor near at this time to come to the rescue.
“Holloa! madam, be you parson’s new wife as I was to overtake and pick up, if so be she hadn’t met and ridden on with parson? We ha’ mounted and wedged in the feather bed, ready, where yo’ll sit soft and steady, and I ha’ been told to take you to the town.”
Lady Bell recovered her wits immediately. “No, my good man,” she said; “I think the lady must have met her husband, since it is getting late; but will you let me take her place till we come up with her?”
The man in the smock had pulled his forelock, had looked and spoken simply and kindly, and she believed she could see that she might trust him, while her circumstances would hardly be rendered more wretched though he failed her.
The driver consented without any difficulty, and hoisted her carefully to her seat, where, as the horses jogged on, she could think of nothing for a time but the welcome rest and comparative ease which had succeeded her sore weariness and flagging exertions.
But as the sun set, the evening fell, and the September night-air blew chill and cold, the horses floundered in and out of the holes in the road; the countryman shouted to the horses in language which Lady Bell could not understand, with a violence which seemed to contradict her impression of his kindliness, and he took it upon him to beguile his way with a lusty stave, fit to split her ears.
Lady Bell began to think that she knew of no house to shelter her, no bed to lie down upon, except that on which she sat by a countryman’s charity. Her deed might have got wind, her husband might be following her; and what countryman, for the very reason that he was simple and honest, would keep a runaway wife from her husband? Then she commenced to shake and shiver as with an ague fit, till even the attention of her unobservant companion was called to her.
“Dang it!” he cried in loud but not unfriendly surprise, “you are not so afeard as that of the footpads? Why, none of them has been heard on for weeks in these parts. And if they did turn up, I lay it, they would not be the rogues to put hands on a cart with sticks of furniture, and the loike of a parson’s wife, with a husswife, and a groat or two in her pocket, i’stead o’ king’s gold. My Liz wouldn’t be so bad at the ghosteses; but mappen it is the night air gotten into your bones—you beant cold now, be you? There ought to be a bed-cover here-a-ways.”
Lady Bell took heart again, and observed to herself that if he roared to his horses, he did not strike them; and he spoke gently of his Liz, though poor little Lady Bell had not much experience of the home charities which soften a man, be he fine gentleman or clown. But she was capable of distinguishing that her companion pulled out the woollen bed-cover, and wrapped it round her feet with good will.
After that, the stars shone out in the sky; and she could read this in them, with her childish, ignorant eyes, so much accustomed to look at artificial ceilings, whether painted in fresco, or moulded in stucco, or left simple oaken beams—so little used to look at the blue vault of heaven, what Daniel read on the walls of a Babylonish palace, the handwriting of a divine presence, the same which still finds the mighty monarch wanting, and watches over the desolate and oppressed.
Back at Peasmarsh, Squire Trevor had been engaged in a deeper carouse than usual; had been carried home dead drunk to his lodgings, and had slept off the fumes which had mounted to his brain, before he learnt the absence of Lady Bell.
In the meantime, the partially informed landlady had been quite unconcerned since she had learnt by Lady Bell Trevor’s own hand that she had gone to a friend’s where she might stay late.
The landlady was not surprised that the young madam had stretched her tether and lain at her friend’s; nay, was she not better out of the way, the worthy woman calculated, though she herself was not at all sensitive with regard to the state in which her lodgers were brought home to her house. Moreover, she had known many a madam not much older than Lady Bell, make no bones about it, but take it as a matter of course, that their gentlemen should be lifted out of their chairs like so many logs on their return from the tavern, and not be fit to bite a finger when they were set down.
But the woman was thrown into the utmost dismay by the effect of her words, and by the changeful gusts of passion, each more terrible than another, which her announcement roused in Mr. Trevor.
Lady Bell had no friend in Peasmarsh, or out of it. She had played him false. She should rue it to the last day of her life. He should never let her put a foot within his doors again.
Zounds! had a girl like Lady Bell been exposed in a place like Peasmarsh at a time like this, all night? She must have been decoyed, made away with. He would give Trevor Court—his life—to see her in honour and safety again. He would cause this woman, who had suffered Lady Bell to be lost, to pay for it with her miserable means, her vile body. He should have her before a magistrate, lay her in prison, and leave her to rot there among the demireps, and felons, who were fit company for her.
“Oh, gracious sir! have mercy on me!” implored the woman, “listen to reason! I never knowed there was any harm in my lady going abroad, when she had been flourishing up and down, here and there, and everywhere, for the last ten days, by your own orders, Squire. I’ll take my Bible oath on that; and you too up to the ears with the ’lection to bear her company. How could I know that she were to go wrong all at oncet, and be lost, and bring this trouble on my poor innocent head?”
An unexpected arrival came to the landlady’s aid. Mrs. Walsh, the Squire’s cousin, entered, walked up to the Squire, and spoke to the point of his misery and his conscience.
“I have ridden over, cousin, because I have heard word that, in your arrogance and lust to win this canvass, you have been exposing Lady Bell, like a bird with its wings unclipped, to the snare of the fowler. Now, by the first word I hear from you, the bird has flown, or been stricken down, and its blood be on your head.”
The difficulty of the situation in which Squire Trevor was placed, could not have been surpassed; even if Lady Bell had deliberately selected the occasion of her quitting him for the purpose of baffling and discomfiting him, she could not have succeeded better. He could not throw up the chances of his election, and abandon his party and his supporters in order to seek her. Political feeling ran too high then, to admit of such a course, even in a more devoted husband than Mr. Trevor. His very vanity and obstinacy which, without knowing that she had divulged his secret and provided for the safety of his enemy, were enlisted in recovering his marital rights, and humbling and punishing Lady Bell, were equally enlisted in his standing to his colours, not showing the white feather, and going through with, and, if possible, winning the election.
It became a matter of peevish policy even, and of rage repressed, that it might be more scathing in the end, to be gloomily silent on the domestic misfortune which had befallen him. He was constrained to seek in the dark in order to discover what could have become of Lady Bell. He had to let rumour give out that she was gone, while the person most concerned concealed the inexplicable nature of her absence.
Thus it happened, that Lady Bell Trevor’s disappearance was whispered as a mystery in Peasmarsh, and that all sorts of astounding and contradictory accounts prevailed.
It was said that Lady Bell had gone up secretly to London, to see about getting a King’s patent for conferring a peerage on Squire Trevor, because she, a peer’s daughter, could not brook the descent involved in her being married to a simple commoner.
On the other hand, it was whispered that Squire Trevor was so displeased with his wife, because she had lost him Goodman Rickards’s vote, which Madam Sundon had beguiled from Rickards, by presenting all the women of the Rickardses with feather tippets, while Lady Bell had only gone the length of bestowing cloth spencers; that Squire Trevor had determined, without delay, on parting from Lady Bell. As she had no private fortune, or even pin-money, he had whipped her off to France, with the view of confining her in a convent for the rest of her life.
There were other individuals besides Mr. Trevor in Peasmarsh, who were behind the curtain; but who, however anxious and full of pity, were reduced to listening to these absurd stories, and to doing nothing beyond contributing one or two opposite and enigmatical advertisements which were inserted, at this date, in the PeasmarshChronicle.
The first was a bounce, and ran as follows: “Information is demanded immediately by the lawful guardian, with respect to the minor who has broken bounds and is in hiding, whose hiding-place will be tracked without fail, and to whom it will be worse in the end if immediate satisfaction is not granted.”
The second entreated thus: “The deeply indebted friends of an innocent sufferer, beseech that sufferer to afford them the opportunity which is ardently desired to relieve undeserved misfortunes.”