“Well,” I murmured, feeling suffocated, “there’s no address here either.”
“No,” he answered; “but, I say, it’s rather crushing. Won’t you come and help me out with it?”
“What do you wantmefor?” I protested. “I’ve no wish to be annihilated in the impact between two great minds. You aren’t afraid?”
“O, no!” he said, perspiring. “It’ll be just a shake, and ‘So glad,’ and ‘Thanks, awfully,’ I suppose, and nothing more to speak of. But you might just as well come, on the chance of helping me out of a tight place. It’sviva voce, don’tcherknow—not like writin’, with all your wits about you. And I shall get some other fellows there, too, so’s we aren’t allowed to grow too intimate; and you might as well.”
“I wonder what the ‘communication’ is?” I mused.
“O, nothin’ much, I don’t suppose,” said Sweeting, with a blushing nonchalance. But it was evident that he had pondered the delirious enigma and emerged from it Sir Marmaduke.
“Well,” I concluded rather sourly, “I’ll come.”
He went away much relieved, and I fell into a fit of stupor. In the afternoon a telegram from Voules reached me, “Be at Sweeting’s 8.45 to-night.”
At a quarter to nine I kept my appointment. Sweeting was insufferably well-to-do, and his rooms were luxurious. They were inhabited at the moment by an irreproachable and almost silent company. Among them I encountered many of the young gentlemen who had been witnesses of, and abettors in, my discomfiture the other night. But they were all too nervous now to presume upon the recognition—too oppressed with the stupendous nature of the honour about to be conferred upon their host—too self-weighted with their responsibility as his kindred and associates. They could only ogle him with large eyes over immensely stiff collars, as he moved about from one to another, panic-struck but radiant. It was the crowning moment of his life; yet its sweeter aftermath, I could feel, reposed for him in the sleek necks of champagne-bottles just visible on a supper-table in the next room. He longed to pass from the test to the toast, and the intoxicating memory of a triumph happily accomplished. And then suddenly Slater came in.
He was not expected, I saw in a moment. Indeed, how could such a death’s-head claim place at such a feast? He was no whit improved upon my single memory of him, unless, to give the little beast his due, a shade less inebriated. But he was as grinning, cocksure, and truculent a little Bohemian as ever. Sweeting stared at him aghast.
“Good Lord, Slate’,” said he, “what brings you here, now?”
“Why, your wire, old chap,” said the animal.
“I never sent one, I swear.”
“Oho!” cries Slater, glaring. “D’ you want to go back on your word? Ain’t I fine enough for this fine company?” and he pulled a dirty scrap of paper out of his pocket, and screeched, “Read what you said yourself, then!”
The telegram went round from hand to hand. I read, when it came to my turn: “Come supper my rooms 8.45 to-night. M. Sweeting.”
“I never sent it,” protested our host. “It must be a hoax. Look here, Slate’. The truth is, the Prime Minister wrote he wanted to make my acquaintance, because—because of the ‘Letters,’ you know; and—and he’s due here in a few minutes.”
The creature grinned like a jackal.
“My eyes, what fun!” he said. “I shall love to see you two meet.”
“There’s—there’s fizz in the next room, Slate’,” said the miserable Sweeting.
“You needn’t tell me,” said Slater. “I’d spotted it already.”
And then, before another word could be said, the door was opened, and the guest of the evening announced.
He came in smiling, ingratiatory, the familiar willowy figure in pince-nez. We all rose, and the stricken Sweeting advanced to meet him. The great man, looking, it is true, a little surprised over his reception, held out his hand cordially.
“And is this——” he purred—and paused.
Sweeting did not answer: he was beyond it; but he nodded, and opened his mouth, as if to beg that the “communication” might be posted into it, and the matter settled off-hand.
“I did not, I confess,” said the Premier, glancing smilingly round, “expect my little visit of duty—yes, of duty, sir—to provoke this signal welcome on the part of a company in which I recognize, if I mistake not, a very constellation of the intellectual aristocracy.”
Here a youth, with a solitaire in his eye, and a vague sense of parliamentary fitness, ejaculated “Hear, hear!” and immediately becoming aware of the enormity, quenched himself for ever.
“It makes,” went on the right hon. gentleman, “the strict limit to my call, which less momentous but more exacting engagements have obliged me to prescribe, appear the more ungracious. In view of this enforced restriction, I have equipped myself with a single question and a message. Your answer to the first will, I hope—nay, I am convinced—justify the tenor of the second.”
He released, with a smile, the hand which all this time he had retained, much to Sweeting’s embarrassment, in his own. Finding it restored to him, Sweeting promptly put it in his pocket, like a tip.
“I ask,” said the Premier, “the author of ‘The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist’ to listen to the following excerpt” (he produced a marked number of the “Argonaut” from his pocket) “from his own immortal series, as preliminary to some inquiry naturally evoked thereby”—and he read out, with the intonation of a confident orator: “ ‘We have (shall I not declare it, my sweet?) the most beautiful women and the most beautiful poets in the world—two very good things, but the latter unaccountable. Passion, in perpetuating, idyllically refines upon the features of its desire; hence the succession of assured physical loveliness in a race which, however insensible to the appeals of emotional and intellectual beauty, can understand and worship the beauty that is plain to see.’ ”
Here the reader paused, and looking over his glasses with a smile, very slightly shook his head, and murmuring, “Thebeautythat isplainto see! H’m! a fence that I will recommend to Rosebery,” continued, “ ‘Passion endows passion, far-reaching, to bribe the gods with a compound interest of beauty. It touches heaven in imagination through its unborn generations. It tops the bunker of the world, and, soaring, drops, heedless of Time the putter, straight into the eighteenth hole of the empyrean.”
The Premier stopped again, and, looking gravely at Sweeting, asked, “What is the eighteenth hole of the empyrean?”
Now I expected my friend to reveal himself, to sally brilliantly, referring his questioner, perhaps, to some satire in the making, some latter-day Apocalypse of which here was a sample extracted for bait to the curious. Well, he did reveal himself, but not in the way I hoped. He just strained and strained, and then dropped his jaw with the most idiotic little hee-haw of a laugh I ever heard, and—that was all.
The other, looking immensely surprised, repeated his question: “What, sir, I ask you, is the eighteenth hole of the empyrean?”
“Why, the one the Irishman poured brass round.”
I started. It was not Sweeting who spoke, but Slater. The little demon stood grinning in the background, his tongue in his cheek, and his hands in his trousers pockets.
“H’mph!” said the Prime Minister. “Very apt, sir. I recall the witticism. It is singularly applicable at the moment to the reorganization of the Liberal party. ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it.’ Exactly.”
His manner, there was no denying it, was extremely severe as he again addressed the perspiring Sweeting—
“Once more, sir,” he said, “I resume our discussion of a passage, the intellectual rights in which you would seem to have made over to your friends.” And, with a positive scowl, he continued his reading.
“ ‘So well’ (writes the impassioned Nonconformist) ‘for the national appreciation of beauty that is physical. On the other hand (tell me, dear. It would come so reassuringly from your lips), what can account for the spasmodic recurrence in our midst of the inspired singer? What makes his reproduction possible among a people endowed with tunelessness, innocent of a metrical ear?’ ”
Quite abruptly the Prime Minister ended, and, deliberately folding his paper, hypnotized with a searching stare his unhappy examinee.
“The question, Mr. Sweeting,” said he, “is before the House. You will recognize it as ending—with some psychologic subtlety, to be continued in our next—number 10—the last published of the “Argonaut.” To me, I confess, the answer can be, like the Catholic Church, only one and indivisible. Upon the question of your conformity with my view depends the nature of the communication which I am to have the pleasure, conditionally, of making to you. Plainly, then, sir, what makes possible the spasmodic recurrence of the inspired singer in the midst of a people endowed with tunelessness and innocent of a metrical ear? I feel convinced you can return no answer but one.”
A dead silence fell upon the room. Sweeting scratched his right calf with his left foot, and giggled. Then in a moment, yielding the last of his wits to the unendurable strain, he gave all up, and, wheeling upon Slater—
“O, look here, Slate’!” he said. “What does?” and without waiting for the answer, drove himself a passage through his satellites, and collapsed half dead upon a sofa.
The Premier, with an amazing calm, returned the “Argonaut” to his pocket.
“Surely, sir,” said he, “this is inexplicable; but” (he made a denunciatory gesture with his hands) “it remains to me only to inform you that, conditional on your right reply to your own postulate, it was to have been my privilege to acquaint you of His Majesty’s intention to bestow upon you a Civil List pension of £250 a year; which now, of course——”
He was interrupted by Slater—
“O, that’s all one, sir! Fit the cap on the right head. The answer’s ‘Protection,’ isn’t it? I ought to know, as I wrote, and am writing, the stuff.”
“You, sir!”
All eyes were turned upon the beastly little genius, as he stood ruffling with greed and arrogance, and thence to the sofa.
“O, shut up!” said Sweeting feebly. “It was only a joke. I paid him, handsome I did, to let me have the kudos and letters and things. He’d the best of the bargain by a long chalk.”
“He-he!” screeched Slater. “Why, you fool, did you think merit earned such recognition in this suffering world? Hope you enjoyed reading ’em, Sweet, as I did writing ’em.” He turned, half-cringing, half-defiant, upon the guest. “I’m the author of the ‘Love-Letters,’ sir—honour bright, I am; and I wrote every one of the testimonials, too, that that ass sets such store by. You’ll take those into consideration, I hope.”
“I shall, sir,” thundered the other—“in my estimate of a fool and his decoy.”
He blazed round and snatched up his hat.
“Make way, gentlemen!” he roared, and strode for the door.
A slip of pasteboard fluttered from his hand to the carpet; he flung wide the portal, banged it to behind him, and was gone.
Some one, in a sort of spasmodic torpor, picked up the card, and immediately uttered a gasping exclamation. We all crowded round him, and, reading the superscription at which he was pointing, “Mr. Hannibal Withers, Momus Theatre,” exchanged dumbfounded glances.
“Why, of course,” stuttered a pallid youth; “it was Withers, Voules’s pal; I reco’nize him now. He’s the Prime Minister’s double, you know, and—and he’s been and goosed us.”
“What!” screamed Slater.
But I was off in a fit of hysterical laughter.
It was actually a fact. It is a mistake to suppose that your professional scandal-monger is prepared to build except on a substratum of truth. Voules had pricked the bubble as he had promised. The bargain, it was admitted, had been struck—on Slater’s side for such a consideration as would submerge him in champagne had he desired it. He had written and sent the manuscripts to Sweeting, who had had them typed, and passed them on to the “Argonaut” as his own. But the real author knew that his tenure was insecure so long as the other’s colossal vanity was not ministered to. Hence the correspondence, in which the little monster burlesqued his own lucubrations. It might all have ended in a case of perpetual blackmail (Sweeting never could see beyond the end of his own nose) had not the bait answered so instantly to Voules’s calculations.
There was a bitter attack on the immorality of the stage in the next number of the “Argonaut,” which subsequently had to compound with Voules under threat of an action for libel. But Sweeting had his wish. He was “somebody,” as never yet. Until he took his notoriety for a long sea-voyage, he was more crushingly than any gentleman in the “Dunciad” “damn’d to fame.”
BY A CAPTIOUS LITIGANT
Givena wet night on circuit, a bar parlour with a chattering fire, a box of tobacco, a china bowl of punch, and a mixed forensic company to discuss the lot, and what odds would you lay for or against the chances of a good story or so?
Grope in your memory (before you answer) among legal collectanea and the newspaper reports of famous, or infamous, trials. What then? “Lord!” you admit, “these bones unearthed seem wretched remains indeed! I find your grooms of the horsehair, young and old, cracking their ineffable chestnuts for the benefit of an obsequious tipstavery; I find a bench so conservative that, though it be pitched in the very markets of chicanery, it is never to be won from its affected ignorance of those topical affairs which are matters, else apart, of common knowledge; I find the profession for ever given to whet its wits on a thousand examples of resourcefulness and impudence, and most often failing in the retort piquant.” Give me a cheeky witness to cap the best drollery ever uttered by counsel. Legal facetiæ, forsooth! The wit that tells is the wit that can cheat the gallows, not send to it. Any dullard can hang a dog.
Look at the autobiographies of your retired legal luminaries: what scurvy bald reading they make as a rule. Look at—but no: he rests in Abraham’s bosom; he is studying the Mosaic law; we may be in need of him again some day.
There is an odd family likeness between the personalia of lawyers and of actors. The fellows, out of court, stripped of their melodramatic trappings, can’t raise a laugh which would tickle any one less than a bishop. They are obsessed with the idea of their own importance. Much self-inflation has killed in them all sense of proportion. They prove themselves, the truth is, dull dogs on revision.
The law is not so exhausting a study as it appears on first sight to a layman. Given an understanding of its main principle, which is syllogism, and there you are already in its Holy of Holies. As, for instance, I call a man a beast: a cheetah is a beast: I have called the man a cheater—ergo, he can proceed against me for defamation. There is its rubric in a nutshell—perfectly simple.
However,exceptis excipiendis, there were Curran, and Erskine, and some others. There was also Brindley, the great Crown Prosecutor, whose eloquence was of such persuasiveness that it was said the very Benchhung upon his word. I had the chance to meet him once, in such a place and on such a night as I began by describing. It was in the “Maid’s Head” at Norwich, and my experience is at your service.
It had, I knew, been a full list and a varied; yet the great man, it seemed, had found nothing in it all to stimulate his humorous faculties. The liveliness was all supplied by a pert Deputy Clerk of the Peace, whose bump of reverence was as insignificant as his effrontery was tremendous. The Bar began by tolerating him; went on to humour his sallies; chilled presently over his presumption; grew patronizing, impatient, and at last rude. He didn’t care; nor I, certainly. His readiness was the only relief from a congested boredom.
The talk drifted, in the course of the evening, upon legalposers—circumstantial evidence, ex-statutory cases, and so forth. There were some dull examples proffered, and I observed, incidentally, that the Law, when it couldn’t hark back to precedent, was wont to grow a little hazy and befogged. Many solemn conundrums were propounded; but the Deputy Clerk, as usual, pushed himself to the front with an impertinence—
“If I slink out of the company of a bore, am I guilty of stealing from his person?”
“Pooh, pooh!” said Brindley, with contempt. “Don’t be flippant, sir.”
The Deputy Clerk was not a whit abashed.
“Sir, to you,” he said. “If that isn’t liked, I’ll propose another. If a woman is divorced from her husband, and a child is born to her before the decree is made absolute, is that child, lawfully begot, legitimate or illegitimate?”
They were glad to take this seriously. I forget what the decision was—that, given the necessary interval between the decree and its confirmation, I think, the situation was virtually impossible.
“Very well,” said the Deputy Clerk. “But perhaps one can conceive such a question rising. Let it pass, however; and answer me this, gentlemen: If one is imprisoned unjustly—that is to say, for a crime one has not committed—and, breaking out of prison, gives proof of one’s innocence, can one be indicted for prison-breaking?”
This, at least, was a fair poser, and discussion on it grew actually warm.
“Bosh!” said a fierce gentleman. “You ain’t going to justify your defiance of the law by arguing that the law is liable to make an occasional mistake—don’t tell me!”
Here a very young barrister dared the revolutionary sentiment that the law, being responsible in the first instance to itself, might be treated, if caught-stumblingin flagranti delicto, as drastically as any burglar with a pistol in his hand. He was called, almost shouted, down. The suggestion cut at the very root of jurisprudence. The law, like the king who typified it, could do no wrong; witness its time-honoured right topardonthe innocent victims of its own errors.
“It may detain and incarcerate one for being only a suspected person,” said Brindley. “That its suspicions may prove unfounded, is nothing. It must becum privilegio, or the constitution goes. A nice thing if the Crown could be put on its defence for an error in judgment.”
“A very nice thing,” said the Deputy Clerk.
Brindley snorted at him. “Perhaps,” said he sarcastically, “the gentleman will state a case.”
The gentleman desired nothing better. I would have backed him to hold his own, anyhow; but, in this instance, I was gratified to gather from his manner that he had a real story to tell. And he had.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it occurred within my father's memory; but my own is good enough to reproduce it literally. It made a rare stir in the Norwich of his day, and quite fluttered, I assure you, the dovecots of the profession.
“The parties chiefly concerned in it were three: old Nicholas Browbody, his ward Ellen, and Mr. George Hussey, who was put on his trial for burglary and murder. Mr. George was quite a notable cracksman in his day, which was one pretty remote from ours in everything but the conservatism of the law. He was ‘housebreaker’ in the indictment; he was arrested by the Tombland patrol; and he was carried to court in a ‘chair,’ attended by a party of the City Guard.
“George, says the story, was an elegant figure of a man, and not at all regardless of the modes. Dark blue coat with brass buttons, fancy vest, black satin breeches, white silk stockings, hair full dressed and a brooch in his bosom—that was how he appeared before his judges.
“The facts were simple enough. On a night of November, a shot and a screech had been heard in Mr. Browbody’s house in Unthank, a ward of the city; an entrance had been made through a window, opportunely open, by the Watch as opportunely handy, and the housebreaker had been discovered, a warm pistol in his hand, standing over the body of old Nicholas, who lay dead on the floor with his head blown in.
“The burglar was found standing, I say, like as in a stupor; the room was old Browbody’s study; the door from it into the passage was open, and outside was discovered the body of a girl, Miss Ellen, lying, as it were, in a dead faint. There you have the situation dashed in broad; and pretty complete, you’ll agree, for circumstantial evidence.”
“Wait, my friend,” began Brindley, putting up a fat pompous hand. “Circumstantial, I think you said?”
“Yes, I said it,” answered the Deputy Clerk coolly; “and if you’ll listen, you’ll understand—perhaps. I said the girl was in a faint,as it were, for, as a matter of fact,she never came out of it for seven months.”
He leant back, thumbing the ashes into his pipe, and took no heed while the murmurs of incredulity buzzed and died down.
“Not for seven months,” he repeated, then. “They called it a cataleptic trance, induced by fright and shock upon witnessing the deed; and they postponed the trial, waiting for this material witness to recover. But when at last the doctors certified that they could put no period to a condition which might, after all, end fatally without real consciousness ever returning, they decided to try Mr. Hussey; and he was tried and condemned to be hanged.”
“What! he made no defence?” said a junior contemptuously.
“Well, sir, can you suggest one?” asked the other civilly.
“Suicide, of course.”
“With the pistol there in the burglar’s own hand?”
“Well, he made none, you say.”
“No, I don’t say it. He declared it was ridiculous attempting a defence, while he lacked his one essential witness to confirm it. He protested only that the lady would vindicate him if she could speak.”
“O, of course!”
“Yes, of course; and of course you say it. But he spoke the truth, sir, for all that, as you’ll see.
“He was lodged in Norwich Jail, biding the finish. But, before the hangman could get him—that time, at least—he managed to break out, damaging a warder by the way. The dogs of the law were let loose, naturally; but, while they were in full cry, Mr. Hussey, if you’ll believe me, walks into a local attorney’s office with Miss Ellen on his arm.”
Brindley turned in his chair, and gave a little condescending laugh.
“Incredible, ain’t it?” said the Deputy Clerk. “But listen, now, to the affidavits of the pair, and judge for yourselves. We’ll take Miss Ellen’s first, plain as I can make it:—
“ ‘I confess,’ says she, ‘to a romantic attachment to this same picturesque magsman, Mr. Hussey. He came my way—never mind how—and I fell in love with him. He made an assignation to visit me in my guardian’s house, and I saw that a window was left open for him to enter by. My guardian had latterly been in a very odd, depressed state. I think he was troubled about business matters. On the night of the assignation, by the irony of fate, his madness came to a head. He was of such methodical habits by nature, and so unerringly punctual in his hour for going to bed, that I had not hesitated to appoint my beau to meet me in his study, which was both remotest from his bedroom, and very accessible from without. But, to my confusion and terror, I heard him on this night, instead of retiring as usual, start pacing to and fro in the parlour underneath. I listened, helpless and aghast, expecting every moment to hear him enter his study and discover my lover, who must surely by now be awaiting me there. And at length Ididhear him actually cross the passage to it with hurried steps. Half demented, dreading anything and everything, I rushed down the stairs, and reached his room door just in time to see him put a pistol to his head and fire. With the flash and report, I fell as if dead, and remember nothing more till the voice of my beloved seemed to call upon me to rise from the tomb—when I opened my eyes, and saw Hussey standing above me.’
“Now for Mr. Hussey’s statement:—
“ ‘I had an assignation with a young lady,’ says he, ‘on the night of so-and-so. A window was to be left open for me in Unthank. I had no intent whatever to commit a felony. I came to appointment, and had only one moment entered when I heard rapid footsteps outside, and a man, with a desperate look on him, hurried into the room, snatched a pistol from a drawer, put it to his head, and, before I could stop him, fired. I swear that, so far from killing him, I tried to prevent him killing himself. I jumped, even as he fell, and tore the pistol from his hand. Simultaneous with his deed, I heard a scream outside. Still holding the weapon, I went to the door, and saw the form of her I had come to visit lying in that trance from which she has but now recovered. As I stood stupefied, the Watch entered and took me. From that time I knew that, lacking her evidence, it was hopeless to attempt to clear myself. After sentence I broke prison, rushed straight to her house, found her lying there, and called out upon her to wake and help me. She answered at once, stirring and coming out of her trance. I know no more than that she did; and there is the whole truth.’ ”
The Deputy Clerk stopped. No one spoke.
“Now, gentlemen,” said he, “I don’t ask you to pronounce upon those affidavits. In the upshot the law accepted them, admitting a miscarriage of justice. What I ask your verdict on is this: Could the law, after quashing its own conviction, hold the man responsible for any act committed by him during, and as the direct result of, that wrongful imprisonment?”
This started the ball, and for minutes it was tossed back and forth. Presently the tumult subsided, and Brindley spoke authoritatively for the rest—
“Certainly it could, and for any violence committed in the act. Provocation may extenuate, but it don’t justify. Prison-breaking,per se, is an offence against the law; so’s being found without any visible means of subsistence, though your pocket may just have been picked of its last penny. Any concessions in these respects would benefit the rogue without helping the community. I won’t say that if he hadn’t, by assaulting the warder, put himself out of court——”
“That was where he wanted to put himself,” interrupted the Deputy Clerk. It was certain that he was deplorably flippant.
Brindley waved the impertinence by.
“The offence was an offence in outlawry,” he said.
“But how could it be,” protested the Clerk, “since, by the law’s own admission, he was wrongfully convicted? If he hadn’t been, he couldn’t have hurt the warder. If you strike me first, mayn’t I hit you back? I tell you, the law acknowledged that it was in the wrong.”
“Not at all. It acknowledged that the man was in the right.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“O, my friend! I see you haven’t got the rudiments. Hussey was a prisoner; a criminal is a prisoner;ergo, Hussey was a criminal.”
“But he was a prisoner in error!”
“And the law might very properly pardon him that; but not his violence in asserting it.”
The Deputy Clerk shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.
“Well, it was all the same in the end,” said he; “for it hanged him for pointing out its error to it, and so spoiled a very pretty romance. The lady accompanied him to the scaffold, and afterwards died mad.Sic itur ad astra.I will cap your syllogism, sir. An ass has long ears; the law has long ears;ergo, the law is an ass.”
“Young man,” said Brindley, with more good humour than I expected, “you have missed your vocation. Take my advice, and go to writing for the comic papers.”
“What!” cried the Deputy Clerk. “Haven’t I been a law reporter all my life!”
I’ll example you with thievery.—“Timon of Athens.”
I’ll example you with thievery.—“Timon of Athens.”
Thedear old lady was ninety, and it was always Christmas in the sweet winter of her face. With the pink in her cheeks and the white of her hair, she came straight from the eighteenth century in which she was born. They were not more at odds with nature than are the hips and the traveller’s joy in a withered hedge; and if at one time they paid to art, why it was a charitable gift to a poor dependent—nothing more, I’ll swear.
People are fond of testing links with the past. This sound old chatelaine had played trick-track, and dined at four o’clock. She had eaten battalia pie with “Lear” sauce, and had drunk orgeat in Bond Street. She had seen Blücher, the tough old “Vorwärts,” brought to bay in Hyde Park by a flying column of Amazons, and surrendering himself to an onslaught of kisses. She had seen Mr. Consul Brummell arrested by bailiffs in the streets of Caen, on a debt of so many hundreds of francs for so many bottles of vernis de Guiton, which was nothing less than an adorable boot-polish. She had heard the demon horns of newspaper boys shrill out the Little Corporal’s escape from Elba. She had sipped Roman punch, maybe;—I trust she had never taken snuff. She had—but why multiply instances? Born in 1790, she had taken just her little share in, and drawn her full interest of, the history, social and political, of all those years, fourscore and ten, which filled the interval between then and now.
Once upon a time she had entered a hackney-coach; and, lo! before her journey was done, it was a railway coach, moving ever swifter and swifter, and its passengers succeeding one another with an ever more furious energy of hurry-scurry. Among the rest I got in, and straight fell into talk, and in love, with this traveller who had come from so far and from scenes so foreign to my knowledge. She was as sweet and instructive as an old diary brought from a bureau, smelling of rose-leaves and cedar-wood. She was merry, too, and wont to laugh at my wholly illusory attachment to an age which was already as dead as the moon when I was born. But she humoured me; though she complained that her feminine reminiscences were sweetmeats to a man.
“You should talk with William keeper,” she said. “Heholds on to the past by a very practical link indeed.”
It was snowy weather up at the Hall—the very moral of another winter (so I was told) when His Majesty’s frigate “Caledonia” came into Portsmouth to be paid off, and Commander Playfair sent express to his young wife up in the Hampshire hills that she might expect him early on the following morning. He did not come in the morning, nor in the afternoon, nor, indeed, until late in the evening, when—as Fortune was generous—he arrived just at the turn of the supper, when the snow outside the kitchen windows below was thawing itself, in delirious emulation of the melting processes going on within, into a rusty gravy.
“You see,” said Madam, “it was not the etiquette, when a ship was paid off, for any officer to quit the port until the pennant was struck, which the cook, as the last officer, had to see done. And the cook had gone ashore and got tipsy; and there the poor souls must bide till he could be found. Poor Henry—and poor little me! But it came right.Tout vient à qui sait attendre. We had woodcocks for supper. It was just such a winter as this—the snow, the sky, the very day. Will you take your gun, and get me a woodcock, sir? and we will keep the anniversary, and you shall toast, in a bottle oftheMadeira, the old French rhyme.”
I had this rhyme in my ears as I went off for my woodcock—
Le bécasseau est de fort bon manger,Duquel la chair resueille l’appetit.Il est oyseau passager et petit:Est par son goust fait des vins bien juger.
Le bécasseau est de fort bon manger,
Duquel la chair resueille l’appetit.
Il est oyseau passager et petit:
Est par son goust fait des vins bien juger.
I had it in my ears, and more and more despairingly, as I sought the coverts and dead ferns and icy reed-wrecked pools, and flushed not the littleoyseau passagerof my gallantry’s desires. But at last, in a silent coomb, when my feet were frozen, and my fingers like bundles of newly-pulled red radishes, William keeper came upon me, and I confided my abortive wishes and sorrows to his velveteen bosom.
He smiled, warm soul, like a grate.
“Will’ee go up to feyther’s yonder, sir,” said he; “and sit by the fire, and leave the woodcock to me? The old man’ll be proud to entertain ye.”
“I will go,” I said meanly. “But tell me first, William, what is your very practical link with the past?”
He thought the frost had got into my blood; but when I had explained, he grinned again knowingly.
“ ’Tain’t me my lady meant, sir,” he said. “ ’Tis old feyther, and his story of how the mail coach was robbed.”
The cottage hung up on the side of the coomb, leaning its back to an ash wood, and digging its toes well into the slope to keep itself from pitching into the brook below. There were kennels under the faggot stacks, a horse-shoe on the door, red light behind the windows. It looked a very cosy corner after the white austerity of the woods. William led me to it, and introducing me and my errand to his father, left the two of us together by the fire.
It was a strange old shell of a man, russet and smooth yet in the face; but his breath would sometimes rattle in him to show how dried was the kernel within. Still his brown eye was glossy, and his voice full and shrewd; and in that voice, speaking straight and clear out of the past, and in an accent yet more of the roads than of the woods, he told me presently the story of the great mail robbery.
“It ruined and it made me, sir,” said he; “for the Captain, hearing as how the company had sacked me for neglect of duty, and knowing something of my character, swore I’d been used damnably, and that he’d back his opinion by making me his gamekeeper. And he did that; and here I be, waiting confident for him to check my accounts when I jine him across the river.”
He pointed to a dusky corner. There hung on the wall an ancient key-bugle, and an old, old napless beaver hat, with a faded gold band about it.
“I was twenty-five when I puttheyup there, and that was in the year ’14; and not me nor no one else has fingered them since. Because why? Because it was like as if my past laid in a tomb underneath, and they was the sign that I held by it without shame or desire of concealment.
“In those days I was guard to the ‘Globe’ coach, that run between London and Brighton. We made the journey in eight hours, from the ‘Bull and Mouth’ in Aldersgate to the ‘New Inn’ in North Street—or t’other way about; and we never stopped but for changes, or to put down and take up. Sich was our orders, and nothing in reason to find fault with ’em, until they come to hold us responsible to something besides time. Then the trouble began.
“Now, sir, as you may know, the coachman’s seat was over the fore-boot, and, being holler underneath, was often used as a box for special parcels. So it happened that this box was hired of the owners by Messrs. Black, South, and Co., the big Brighthelmstone bankers, in order to ship their notes and cash, whenever they’d the mind to, between London and the seaside, and so escape the risks and expense of a private mail. The valiables would be slid and locked in—coachman being in his place—with a private key; and George he’d nothing to do but keep his fat calves snug to the door, till someun at the other end came with a duplicate key to unlock it and claim the property. Very well—and very well it worked till the fifteenth of December in the year eighteen hundred and thirteen, on which day our responsibility touched the handsome figure—so I was to learn—of £4000 in Brighton Union bank notes, besides cash and securities.
“It was rare cold weather, much as it is now, save that the snow was shallower by a matter of two inches, and no more bind in it than dry sand. We was advertised to start from the ‘Bull’ at nine; and there was booked six insides and five out. At ten minutes to the hour up walks a couple of Messrs. Pinnick and Waghorn’s clerks from the borough, with the cash box in whity-brown paper, looking as innocent as a babby in a Holland pinifore. George he comes out of the shades, like a jolly Corsican ghost, a viping of his mouth; the box is slung up and fastened in; coachman climbs to his perch, and the five outsides follow-my-leader arter him to theirs, where they swaddle ’emselves into their wraps strait-veskit-vise, and settin’ as miserable as if they was waitin’ to have a tooth drawed. Not much harm there, you’ll say—one box-seat, two behind, two with me in the dickey—all packed tight, and none too close for observation. Well, sir, we’ll hear about it.
“Out of the six insides, all taken, there was three already in place: a gentleman, very short and fierce, and snarling at everything; gentleman’s lady, pretty as paint, but a white timidious body; gentleman’s young-gentleman, in ducks and spencer and a cap like a concertina with the spring gone. So far so good, you’ll say again, and no connexion with any other party, and leastways of all with the insides as was yet wanting, and which the fierce gentleman was blowin’ the lights out of for bein’ late.
“ ‘Guard,’ says he, goin’ on outrageous, while the lady and the young gentleman cuddled together scared-like in a corner, ‘who are these people who stop the whole service while they look in the shop-vinders? If you’re for starting a minute after the stroke,’ says he, ‘dash my buttons,’ he says, ‘but I’ll raise all hell to have you cashiered!’
“ ‘All right, sir,’ I says. ‘I knows my business better’n you can tell it me—’ and just as I spoke, a hackney kerridge come rumbling into the yard, and drew up anigh us.
“ ‘Globe?’ says a jolly, fat-faced man, sticking his head out of it. ‘All right, Cato—’ and down jumps a black servant, in livery, that was on the box, and opens the door.
“The fat man he tumbled out—for all the world like a sheetful of washing a wallopin’ downstairs—Cato he got in, and between them they helped from the hackney and across to the coach as rickety a old figure as ever I see. He were all shawls and wraprascal. He’d blue spectacles to his eyes, a travellin’ cap pulled down on ’em, his mouth covered in; and the only evidence of flesh to be seen in the whole of his carcass, was a nose the colour of a hyster. He shuffled painful, too, as they held him up under the arms, and he groaned and muttered to himself all the time he were changing.
“Now, sir, you may suppose the snarling gentleman didn’t make the best of what he see; and he broke out just as they was a-hauling the invalid in, wanting to know very sarcastic if they hadn’t mistook the ‘Globe’ for a hearse. But the fat man he accepted him as good-humoured as could be.
“ ‘It’s nothing affectionate, sir,’ says he. ‘Only paralysis, which ain’t catching. The gentleman won’t trouble you.’
“ ‘Not for my place,’ says the fierce gentleman, bristling up like a dog. ‘Damme, sir, not for my place. O, I can see very well what his nose is a-pinting to, and damme if it isn’t as monstrous a piece of coolness as ever I expeerunced.Theseseats, sir, are the nat’ral perkisite of a considerate punctiality, and if your friend objects to travelling with his back to the ’orses——’
“ ‘Now, now,’ says the fat man—‘nothing of the sort. You don’t mind sitting with your back to the ’orses, do you, nunky?”
“ ‘Eh,’ says the old man, ’usky-like, and starting a bit forward—‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no—’ and he sunk into the front cushions, while Cato and the fat ’un dispodged him to his comfort.
“ ‘Time, gentlemen!’ says I.
“ ‘Wait a bit’ says snarler. ‘It can’t never be—why, surely, it can’t never be that the sixth inside is took for a blackamoor?’
“ ‘Alfred,’ says the lady, half veeping: ‘pray let things be. It’s only as far as Cuckfield we’re goin’, arter all.’
“ ‘A poor argiment, my dear,’ says he, ‘in favour of suffering forty miles of a sulphurious devil.’
“ ‘Pray control yourself, sir,’ says the fat man, still very ekable. ‘We’ve booked three places, for two, just to be comfortable. Our servant rides outside.’
“Well, that settled it; and in another minute we was off. I laughed a bit to myself as I swung up; but I hadn’t a thought of suspicion. What doyousay, sir? Would you have? Why, no, of course not—no more than if you was a Lyons Mail. There was the five o’ them packed in there, and one on the roof behind the coachman—three divisions of a party as couldn’t have seemed more unconnected with one another, or more cat and dog at that. Yet, would you believe it, every one of them six had his place in the robbery that follered as carefully set for him as a figure in a sum.
“As for me, sir, I done my duty; and what more could be expected of me? At every stage I tuk a general look round, to see as things were snug and nat’ral; and at Croydon, fust out, I observed as how the invalid were a’ready nodding in a corner, and the other two gents settled to their ‘Mornin’ Postses.’
“Beyond Croydon the cold begun to take the outsides bitter; and the nigger got into a vay of drummin’ with his feet so aggerawacious, that at last George he lost his temper with him and told him to shut up. Well, he shut up that, and started scrapin’ instead; and he went on scrapin’ till the fierce gentleman exploded out of the vinder below fit to bust the springs.
“ ‘Who’s that?’ roars he—‘the blackamoor? Damme!’ he roars, ‘if you aren’t wus nor a badger in more ways than one,’ he roars.
“ ‘All right, boss,’ says the nigger, grinning and lookin’ down. ‘Feet warm at last, boss,’ and he stopped his shufflin’ and begun to sing.
“Now, sir, a sudden thought—I won’t go so far as to call it a suspicion—sent me, next stop, to examine unostentatious-like the neighbourhood of them great boots. But all were sound there, and the man sittin’ well tucked into his wraps. It wasn’t like, of course, that he could a’ kicked the panels of the box in without George knowin’ somethin’ about it. And he didn’t want to neither;for he’d finished his part of the business a’ready. So he just sat and smiled at me as amiable as Billy Vaters.
“Well, we went on without a hitch; and at Cuckfield the three back insides turned out into the snow, and went for a bespoke po’-chaise that was waitin’ for ’em there. But, afore he got in, the fierce gentleman swung round and come blazin’ back to the vinder.
“ ‘My compliments, sir,’ says he, ‘at parting; and, if itshouldcome to the vorst,’ he says, ‘I’d advise you to lay your friend pretty far under to his last sleep,’ he says, ‘or his snores’ll wake the dead.’
“ ‘Hush,’ says the fat ’un. ‘It’s the drowndin’ spirit in him comin’ up to blow like a vale.’
“ ‘Is it?’ says the fierce gentleman. ‘Then it’s my opinion that the outsides ought to be warned afore he gives his last heave——’ and he went off snortin’ like a tornader.
“The fat man shook his head when he were gone. His mildness, having sich a figger, was amazing. He sat with his arm and shoulder for a bolster to old paralysis, who was certainly going on in style.
“ ‘Now, sir,’ says I, ‘the whole blessed inside is yourn till the end of the journey.’
“ ‘Thank you, guard,’ says he; ‘but I won’t disturb my friend, and we’ll stay as we are, thank you.’
“I got up then, and on we went—last stage, sir, through Clayton, over the downs, whipping through Pyecombe and Patcham, swish through Preston turnpike, and so into East Street, where we’d scarce entered, when there come sich a hullabaloo from underneath as if the devil, riding on the springs, had got his tail jammed in the brake. Up I jumps, and up jumps the blackamoor, screeching and clawing at George, so as he a’most dropped the ribbins.
“ ‘Eh, boss!’ he yelled. ‘De old man—down dere!—damn bad!’
“George he pulled up; and I thought he’d a bust, till I climbed over and loosened his neckercher, and let it all out. Then down we got—nigger and I, and one or two of the passengers—and looked in. ‘What the thunder’s up?’ says I. The fat man were goin’ on awful, sobbin’, and hiccupin’, and holding on to old paralysis, as were sunk back in the corner.
“ ‘I’m afraid he’s dyin’,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid he’s dyin’! O, why did I ever give way to him, and let him come!’
“Well, we all stood pretty foolish, not knowing what to say or do, when his great tricklin’ face come round like a leg o’ mutton on a spit, and, seein’ the nigger, bust into hystrikes.
“ ‘O, Cato!’ he roars; ‘O Cato, O Cato! Sich a loss if he goes!’ he roars. ‘Run on by a short cut, Cato,’ he says, ‘and see if you can find a doctor agen our drawin’ up at the “New Inn.” ’
“That seemed to us all a good idea, though, to be sure, there was no cut shorter than the straight road we was in. But anyhow, before we could re’lise it, the nigger was off like a arrer; and one of the gentlemen offered to keep the fat man company. But that he wouldn’t listen to.
“ ‘If heshouldcome round,’ he said, ‘the shock of a stranger might send him off agen. No, no,’ he said: ‘leave me alone with my dying friend, and drive on as quick as ever you can.’
“It were only a matter of minutes; but afore we’d been drawed up half of one afore the inn, a crowd was gathered round the coach door.
“ ‘Is he back?’ says the fat man—‘Is Cato come back with a doctor? No, I won’t have him touched or moved till a doctor’s seen him.’
“Then all at once he was up and out, rampageous.
“ ‘Where is he?’ he shrieks. ‘I can’t vait no longer—I’m goin’ mad—I’ll find one myself’—and, afore you could say Jack Robinson, he was off. I never see sich a figger run so. He fair melted away. But the crowd was too interested in the corpse to follow him.
“Well, sir, he didn’t come back with a doctor, and no more did Cato. And the corpse may have sat there ten minutes, and none daring to go into it, when a sawbones, a-comin’ down the street on his own account, was appealed to by the landlord for a verdict, seein’ as how by this time the whole traffic was blocked. He got in, and so did I; and he bent over the body spread back with its wraps agen the corner.
“ ‘My God!’ I whispers—‘there’s no breath comin’ from him. Is he dead, sir?’
“The sawbones he rose up very dry and cool.
“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘there ain’t no breath comin’ from him, nor there never will. It ain’t in natur’ to expect it from a waxworks.’
“Sir, I tell you I looked at him and just felt my heart as it might be a snail that someun had dropped a pinch of salt on.
“ ‘Waxworks!’ I says, gaspin’. ‘Why, the man spoke and groaned!’
“ ‘Or was it the gentleman you was tellin’ me of as did it for him?’ says the sawbones, still as dry as cracknels.
“Then I took one jump and pounced on the thing, and caught it up;—and I no sooner ’ad it in my ’ands, than I knew it were a dummy—nothing more nor less. But what I felt at that was nothin’ to the shock my pullin’ it away give me—for there, behind where it had set, was a ’ole, big enough for a boy to pass, cut right through the cushions and panels into the fore boot; and the instant I see it, ‘O,’ I says, ‘the mail’s been robbed!’ ”
The old man, who had worked himself up to a state of practised excitement, paused a dramatic moment at this point, until I put the question he expected.
“And it had been?”
“And it had been,” he said, pursing his lips, and nodding darkly. “In the vinter of ’13, sir—the cleverest thing ever planned. It made a rare stir; but the ’ole truth was never known till years arterwards, when one o’ the gang (it was the boy as had been, now growed up) were took on another charge, and confessed to this one. The fat man were a ventriloquist, you see. That, and to secure the ’ole six insides to themselves while seemin’ strangers was the cream of the job. They cut into the boot soon arter we was clear of London, and passed the boy through with a saw and centre-bit t’other side o’ Croydon. He set to—the young limb, with his pretty innocent ducks!—tuk a piece clean out of the roof just under the driver’s seat, and brought down the cash-box; while Mr. Blackamoor Cato kep’ up his dance overhead to drown the noise of the saw. The box was opened and emptied, and put back in the boot where it was found; and the swag, for fear of accidents, was all tuk away at Cuckfield.”
He came to an end. I was aware of William gamekeeper, the younger, standing silent at the door, with a couple of speckled auburn trophies in his hand. The fire leapt and fluttered. I rose with a sigh—then with a smile.
“Thank you, William,” I said gratefully, as I took the woodcock. “How plump they are; and how I love these links with the past.”
Thelittle story I am about to tell will meet, I have no doubt, with a good deal of incredulity, not to say derision. Very well; there is the subject of it himself to testify. If you can put an end to him by any lethal process known to man, I will acknowledge myself misinformed, and attend your last moments on the scaffold.
Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John Belmont hated Miss Belmont. And the visible token of this antagonism was a button.
It was of jade stone, and it was a talisman. For three generations it had been the mascot of the Belmont family, an heirloom, and symbolizing in its shining disk a little local sun, as it were, of prosperity. The last three head Belmonts had all been men of an ample presence. The first of them, the original owner of the stone, having assigned it a place in perpetuity at the bottom hole of his waistcoat (as representing the centre of his system), his heirs were careful to substantiate a tradition which meant so much to them in a double sense.
Indeed, the button was as good as a blister. It seemed to draw its wearer to a head in the prosperous part of him. It was set in gold, artfully furnished at its back with a loop and hank, and made transferable from waistcoat to waistcoat, that its possessor for the time being might enjoy at all seasons its beneficent influence. In broad or long cloth, in twill or flannel, by day and by night, the button attended him, regulating indiscriminately his business and his digestion. In such circumstances, it is plain that Death must have been hard put to it to find a vulnerable place; and such was the fact. It has often been said that a man’s soul is in his stomach; how, then, could it get behind the button? Only by one of those unworthy subterfuges, which, nevertheless, it does not disdain. The first Belmont lived to ninety, and with such increasing portliness that, at the last, a half-moon had to be cut, and perpetually enlarged, out of the dining-room table to accommodate his presence. Practically, he was eating his way through the board, with the prospect of emerging at the other end, when, in rising from a particularly substantial repast one night, he caught the button in the crack between the first slab (almost devoured) and the second, wrenched it away, and was immediately seized with apoplexy. He died; and the Destroyer, after pursuing his heir to threescore years and ten, looking for the heel of Achilles, as unworthily “got home” into him. He was lumbering down Fleet Street one dog-day when, oppressed beyond endurance by the heat, he wrenched open—in defiance of all canons of taste and prudence—his waistcoat. The button—thebutton—was burst from its bonds in the act, though, fortunately—for the next-of-kin—to be caught by its hank in the owner’s watch-chain. But to the owner himself the impulse was fatal. A prowling cutpurse, quick to the chance, “let out” full on the old gentleman’s bow-window, quenching its lights, so to speak, for ever; and then, having snatched the chain, incontinently doubled into the arms of a constable. The property was recovered—but for the heir; the second Belmont’s bellows having been broken beyond mending.
The third met with as inglorious an end, and at a comparatively early age; for the button—as a saving clause to whatever god had thrown it down, for the fun of the thing, among men—was possessed with a very devil of touchiness, and always instant to resent the least fancied slight to its self-importance. Else had Tithonus been its wearer to this day, as——but I won’t anticipate. The third Belmont, then, in a fit of colossal forgetfulness, sent the button,ina white waistcoat, to the wash. The calamity was detected forthwith,but not in time to avert itself. After death, the doctor. Before the outraged article could be restored to its owner and victim, he had died of a rapid dropsy, and the button became the property of Mrs. John Belmont, his relict and residuary legatee, who——
But, for the history of the button itself? Why, in brief, as it affected the Belmont family, it was this. Mr. Adolphus Belmont had been Consul at one of the five treaty ports of China about the troublous years of 1840-42. During the short time that he held office, a certain local mandarin, Elephoo Ting by name, was reported to Peking for high treason, and honoured with an imperial ukase, or invitation to forestall the headsman. There was no doubt, indeed, that Elephoo Ting had been very strenuous, in public, in combating the intrusion of the foreign devil, while inviting him, in private, to come on and hold tight. There is no doubt, too, that in the result Elephoo and Adolphus had made a profitable partnership of it in the matter of opium, and that the mandarin had formed a very high, and even sentimental, opinion of the business capacities of his young friend. Young, that is to say, relatively, for Adolphus was already sixty-three when appointed to his post. But, then, of the immemorial Ting’s age no record actually existed. The oldest inhabitant of Ningpo knew him as one knows the historic beech of one’s district. He had always been there—bland, prosperous, enormous, a smooth bole of a man radiating benevolence. And now at last he was to die. It seemed impossible.
Itwasimpossible, save on a condition. That he confided to his odd partner and confidant, the English Consul, during a last interview. He held a carving-knife in his hand.
“Shall I accept this signal favour of the imperial sun?” he said.
“Have you any choice?” asked the Consul gloomily. “The decree is out; the soldiers surround your dwelling.”
Elephoo Ting laughed softly.
“Vain, vain all, unless I discard my talisman.” He produced the jade button from his cap. “This,” he said, “I had from my father, when the old man sickened at last of life, desiring to be an ancestor. It renders who wears it, while he wears it, immortal; only it is jealous, jealous, and stands upon its dignity. Shall I, too, part with it, and at a stroke let in the light of ages?”
He saw the incredulity in his visitor’s face, and handed him the carving-knife.
“Strike,” he said. “I bid thee.”
“You take the consequences?”
“All.”
With infinite cynicism, Mr. Belmont essayed to tickle, just to tickle, the creature’s infatuation with the steel point. It bent, where it touched, like paper. He thrust hard and ever harder, until at last he was thrashing and slicing with the implement in a sort of frenzy of horror. The mandarin stood apathetic, while the innocuous blade swept and rustled about his huge bulk like a harmless feather. Then said he, as the other desisted at length, unnerved and trembling: “Art thou convinced?”
“I am convinced,” said the Consul.
Elephoo Ting handed him the button in exchange for the knife.
“Take and wear it,” he said, “for my sake, whom you have pleased by outwitting, on the score of benefiting, two Governments. You have the makings of a great mandarin in you; the button will do the rest. Would you ever escape the too-soon satiety of this stodgy life, pass it on, with these instructions which I shall give you, to your next-of-kin. Be ever deferential to the button and considerate of its vanity, for it is the fetish of a sensitive but undiscriminating spirit. So long as you cherish it, you will prosper. But the least apparent slight to itself, it will revenge, and promptly. As for me, I have an indigestion of the world that I would cure.”
And with the words he too became an ancestor.
Then riches and bodily amplitude came to Adolphus Belmont, until the earth groaned under his importance. He was a spanker, and after him Richard Belmont was a spanker, and after him John Belmont was a very spanker of spanks, even at thirty-two, when he committed the last enormous indiscretion which brought him death and his fortunes almost ruin. For the outrage to the button had been so immeasurable that, not content with his obliteration, it must manœuvre likewise to scatter the accumulations of fortune, which it had brought him, by involving in a common ruin most of the concerns in which that fortune was invested, so that his widow found herself left, all in a moment, a comparatively poor woman.
And here Mrs. John Belmont comes in.
She was a little woman, of piquancy and resource, and a very accomplished angler of men. She could count on her pink finger-tips the ten most killing baits for vanity. And, having once recovered the button, she set herself to conciliating it with a thousand pretty kisses and attentions. It lived between the bosom of her frock and the ruff of her dainty nightgown. Yet for a long time it sulked, refusing to be coaxed into better than a tacit staying of its devastating hand. And so matters stood when the Assembly ball was held.
Miss Emma Belmont and Mrs. John Belmont lived in the same town, connexions, but apart. Their visits were visits of ceremony—and dislike. Miss Emma was Mr. John’s sister, and had always highly disapproved of his marriage with the “adventuress.” Her very name, she thought, bordered on an impropriety! How could any “Inez” dissociate herself from the tradition of cigarette-stained lips and white eyeballs travelling behind a fan like little moons of coquetry? This one, in fact, took no trouble to. Her reputation involved them in a common scandal; and it was solely on this account, I think, that she so resented her sister-in-law’s appropriation of the button. She herself was devoted to good works, and utterly content in her mission. She did not want the button; but, inasmuch as it was a Belmont heirloom, and Mrs. John childless, she chose to symbolize in it the bone of contention, and to use it as a convenient bar to amenities which would, otherwise, have seemed to argue in her a sympathy with a mode of life with which she could not too emphatically wish to disconnect herself.
They met at the Assembly ball. Miss Belmont, though herself involved in the financial ebb, had considered it her duty to respect so respectable an occasion, and even to adorn it with a silk of such inflexibility that (I tremble as I write it) one could imagine her slipping out of it through a trap, like the vanishing lady, and leaving all standing. Presently Mrs. John Belmont, with a wicked look, floated up to her.
“Youhere, Inez!” exclaimed Miss Emma, affecting an amazement which, unhappily, she could not feel.
The other flirted and simpered. When she smiled, one could detect little threads drawn in the fine powder near the corners of her mouth. There was no ensign of widowhood about her. She ruffled with little gaudy downs and feathers, like a new-fledged bird of paradise.
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And I’ve brought Captain Naylor, who’s been dining with me. Shall I introduce him to you?”
Miss Belmont’s sense of decorum left her speechless.
Inez, on the contrary, rippled out the most china-tinkling laugh.
“You dear old thing,” she tittered. “Don’t look so shocked. I knew you’d be here to chaperon me, and——” She came a step closer. “Yes, the button’s there, Emma. You may stare; but make up your mind, I’m not going to part with it.”
Miss Belmont found herself, and responded quietly—
“I hope not indeed, Inez. I don’t ask or expect you. You might multiply it to-night by a dozen, and only offend me less.”
Mrs. John laughed again, rather shrilly.
“O, fie!” she said. “Why, even you haven’t a high-necked dress, you know.”
And then a very black and red man, in a jam-pot collar and with a voice like a rook, came and claimed her.
“Haw, Mrs. Belmont! Aw—er, dance, I think.”
Miss Belmont, to save appearances, rigidly sat out the evening. When at last she could endure no more, she had her fly called and prepared to go home. She was about to get into it, when she observed a familiar figure standing among the few midnight loafers who had gathered without the shadow of the porch.
“Hurley!” she exclaimed.
The man, after a moment, slouched reluctantly forward, touching his hat. He had once been her most favoured protégé—a rogue and irreclaimable, whom she had persuaded, temporarily, from the devil’s service to her own. He had returned to his master, but with a reservation of respect for the practical Christian. Miss Belmont was orthodox, but she had a way with sinners. She pitied and fed andtrustedthem. She was a member of the Prisoners’ First Aid Society, with a reverence for the law and a weakness for the lawless. Her aim was to reconcile the two, to interpret, in a yearning charity, between the policeman and the criminal, who at least, in the result, made a common cause of honouringher. Inez asserted that, living, as she did, very nervously alone on the outskirts of the town, she had adopted this double method of propitiation for the sake of her own security. But, then, Inez had a forked tongue, which you would never have guessed from seeing the little scarlet tip of it caressing her lips.
Well, Miss Belmont had once coaxed Jim Hurley into being her handy man, foreseeing his redemption in an innocent association with flowers and the cult of the artless cabbage. He proved loyal to her, gained her confidence, knew all about the button and other matters of family moment. But the contiguity of the kitchen-garden with Squire Thorneycroft’s pheasant-coops was too much for hereditary proclivities. He stole eggs, sold them, was detected, prosecuted, sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and disappeared. Miss Belmont herself met him on his discharge from the jail gates, but he was not to be induced to return. The wild man was in his brain, and off he had gone, with Parthian shots of affection, in quest of fun. And for two years she had not seen him again until to-night, when his scratch of red hair and beard—which always looked as if he had just pulled his head out of a quickset—suddenly blew into flame before her. And then there followed a shock of distress.
“Jim! Why, what’s happened? What’s the matter with you?”
There was no need to specify. The man was obviously going off his tramp—nearing the turn of the dark road. He was ghastly, and constantly gave little spasmodic wrenching coughs during the minute he stood beside her.
“Well,” he gasped, “I dunno. The rot has got into my stummick. I be all touchwood inside like an old ellum.”
“Will you come and see me?”
“ ’Es. By’m-by.”
“Why not now? Where are you going to sleep?”
He grinned, and coughed, half suffocated, as he backed.
“I’ve got my plans, Missis. You—leave me alone.”
It did not sound gracious. One would not have guessed by it his design, which was nothing less than a jolly throw against the devil in the teeth of death. Miss Belmont, a little hurt, but more sad, got into her fly and was driven home. Arrived there, she sat up an hour contemplative. She was just preparing to go to bed in the grey dawn, when she heard the garden-gate click and footsteps rapidly traverse the path to the front door. Her heart seemed to stop. She stole trembling into the hall. “Who’s there?” she demanded in a quavering voice. The answer came, with a clearness which made her start, through the letter-box.
“Me, Missis—Jim Hurley.”
Amazed, and a little embarrassed, she opened. The man burst, almost fell in, and, staggering, recovered himself.
“ ’Ere!” he said, with eager manipulation trying to force something upon her. “I’ve done ’er! I’ve got it for yer! Take it—make ’aste—they’re arter me. It’s yourn as by rights, and she’s got to crow on the wrong side of ’er woundy little mouth.”
But Miss Belmont, with instinctive repulsion, had put her hands behind her back and retreated before him.
“Jim!” she said sickly. “Whathave you got? What do you mean? I’ll take nothing from you.”
“O, go along!” he insisted. His cough was gone. He seemed animated with a new masterfulness. “Ain’t I in the know? It’s yourn, anyhow, and”—his eye closed in an ineffable rapture—“I done the devil out of his own when I heard I be booked to go to him. He’ll pay me, I reckon; but I don’t care. You take it. It’s your dooty as a good woman.”
“No, no,” cried Miss Belmont, beating him away with her hands. “Don’t let me even see it to know. How could you suppose such a thing? Take it back while you’ve time.”
B’s 33 and 90 wore their list-footed boots; but Jim’s ear was a practised one. Swiftly summoned, they had raced on his tracks from the Assembly Rooms. He had known it, and had laboured merely to keep his start of them by three minutes—two—one. Now, while their sole was yet on the threshold, he darted into the dining-room and was under the table at a dive. They had him out and handcuffed, of course, in a jiffy; and then they stood to explain and expostulate.
“Well, you ain’t a cheeked one neither, Hurley! To run up here of all places for cover! Don’t you mind him, Miss.” (She stood pale and shivering. “The shock!” she had murmured confusedly.) “Why,” said 33, “the man was heard by plenty proposing of hisself to visit you; and looked to your hold kindness to him to take and shelter, is supposed.”
She found voice to ask: “What’s he done?”
“Done!” said 33. “Why, bless you, Miss! Treating of you as if you was in collusion, ain’t I?” (She shivered.) “Why, he grabbed a jewel—a gold button, as I understand—out o’ the buzzim o’ your own late brother’s good lady as she was a-stepping into her broom, and bolted with it. It’ll be on ’im now if we’re lucky.”
“You ain’t then, old cock,” said Jim, with a little hoarse laugh and choke.
“Chuck it!” said 90, a saturnine man.
“That’s what I done, Kroojer,” said Jim. “You go and ’unt in the bloomin’ ’edges if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s my duty to tell you,” said 33, “that whatever you says will be took down in evidence agen you.”
“Not by you,” said Jim. “Why, you can’t spell.”
They carried him off dispassionately, with some rough, kindly apologies to Miss Belmont for the trouble to which they had put her. She locked and bolted the door when they were gone; mechanically saw to the lamps, and went upstairs to bed in a sort of stunned dream. So she committed herself to the sheets, and so, in a sort of waking delirium, passed the remaining hours of slumber. She felt as if the even tenor of her way, her stream of placid days, had been suddenly dammed by a dead body, the self-destroyed corpse of her own character. Sometimes she would start from a suffering negation to feel B 90’s hand upon her shoulder. “What have I done—O! what have I done?” she would moan in anguish; and B 90 would glower from under his helmet like a passionless Rhadamanthus—
“What have you done? What but, like our second Henry, meanly, by inference and innuendo, imposed upon your wretched tool the responsibility for a deed which you dared not seek to compass by the open processes of the law. Did you dispute the right ownership of the button? Then why choose for your confidant an ex-thief and poacher? No use to say you designed no harm. By the flower be known the seed. Come along o’ me!”
She rose late, ate no breakfast, and sat awaiting, pinched and grey, the inevitable ordeal. It opened, early enough, with the advent of Mrs. John. The little widow came sailing in, with a face of floured steel. When she saw, the edge of her tongue seemed to whet itself on her lips. Miss Emma broke out at once in an unendurable cry—