He either fears his fate too much,Or his desert is small,Who dares not put it to the touchTo gain or lose it all.
He either fears his fate too much,Or his desert is small,Who dares not put it to the touchTo gain or lose it all.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desert is small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
Without, however, stopping to defend or disallow the moral applicability of these lines to our case in point, it may be offered to such objectors that, generally speaking, the rewards most hardly won are the rewards most highly prized by men, that five-sixths of the satisfaction of success lie in the difficulties surmounted to achieve it (the thing may be be-adaged to infinity), and that if there was a scamp in this world alive to that truism, it was your Restoration scamp, with his plethora of experience in the ways of facile conquest. Who, indeed, could for ever take joy or credit of shooting the sitting pheasant, of hunting the fox or the hare if his quarry, the moment it were pursued, squatted down to be trodden on? Rather, would it be his object to scare away, with a view to stalking and circumventing, the affrighted game, than, by coming to straight conclusions with it, to miss all the excitement of the chase.
Now, I do not say that, in this particular scoundrelism he was bent on, Hamilton went deliberately about it to complicate an issue he ardently desired; only, intrigue in such matters being the recognized process, it never occurred to him, perhaps, that satisfactory conclusions could be reached without. It was a superstition of his time that beef to be tender must be first baited; and certainly the sport added a zest of its own to the subsequent feast. Moreover, the relish in the sport itself owed much of its savour, as always with sport, to the fact that the winner’s gains involved the loser’s losses. To the account of his triumph, if triumph it should be, must be put, not only the corruption of the wife but the fooling of the husband. The humour of that result were enough to vindicate in itself the most tortuous of courses; and the fact that the husband happened to be his connection and confidential friend only added in his eyes a touch of exquisite drollery to the situation. In the process of engineering that situation he tasted all the thrilling delectation of the spy, who, conscious of his sole possession of momentous secrets, plays the apparent tool to this side and the other, himself the master of both and the real arbiter of their destinies.
He was walking one afternoon near the Ring in Hyde Park, watching the solemn circumambulation of the coaches about that damned and dusty arena, when a voice hailed him, and he saw Chesterfield’s glum visage protruded from the window of a chariot which had drawn up hard by.
“Prithee come in, coz,” said the Earl, “and help a poor foundered wretch to forget himself in livelier company than that of his own thoughts.”
Hamilton, with a laugh, acceded, and the two rolled on together.
“Is your mood so lugubrious?” asked the rogue. “Why, what a weathercock it is, now pointing hot, now chill, without a devil of a reason that I can see in this temperate climate! But the last time I met you you were all for sultry, and now, to mark your face! I’ve seen a gargoyle, with an icicle hung to its nose, look less dismally frosty.”
“Pish!” exclaimed the other testily. “If ’tis to the Corisande you allude, my fire that night was but a flash-in-the-pan.”
“A touch of the real sulphur in it, nevertheless, I believe.”
“A touch-and-go it was, then. The skit can dance and sing to make a man’s pulses leap—I admit it; but herself soon serves to kill that transitory glamour. She’s her own corrective.”
“Well, I say the more the pity.”
“Why do you say it? I don’t understand.”
He glanced at his companion, a sudden wrath of suspicion in his eyes.
“What don’t you understand?” asked Hamilton, bridling, though with an appearance of extreme urbanity, to the other’s tone.
“That you should deplore my not burning my fingers in the fire I play with. Did you design that I should when you recommended that hussy to me?”
“H’m! In a measure—yes,” drawled Hamilton.
“For what reason? Curse it, I say, for what reason?”
“For what reason?”
“Do you repeat me to gain time, groping for an excuse? Do you, I say?”
“You are full of questions. Will you have me answer them in one, or one by one? Zounds, man, behave less like a pea dancing on a drum.”
“Now, by God, George——!” He set his teeth, hissed in his breath, shook his fists at nothing at all, and fell suddenly calm. “I’ll be reasonable,” he said, apostrophizing space—“quite temperate and reasonable. Is it reasonable to suppose that one, a family connection and my friend, in my close confidence, could make such an admission without some motive designed to serve me—unless, indeed, it pointed to a treachery on his part so black as to constitute a devilry unthinkable?”
Hamilton’s brow corrugated. By a curious psychological perversity he felt as much incensed over the insinuation as if there had actually been no warrant for it. Such is often the case with your wrongdoer; he will justify himself to himself, while remaining perfectly firm on the question of abstract morality.
“You are a master of reason, Phil, we know,” said he, with a sneer; “the which, if I doubted, would not your proviso convince me? So, I have openly confessed my hand—to beguile you to an infatuation that should leave the coast clear for me—me—to play the villain?”
“I never said so.”
“O! did you not?”
“I said specifically the thing was unthinkable.”
“Showing you had thought of it.”
“George, don’t torture me. You said, you know, it was a pity I was not more really touched.”
“I say it again.”
“Why, in God’s name?”
“So your attitude would be more convincing. As it is, the hollow pretence of it would not deceive a child.”
“Is that all you meant? Forgive my words to you—I am so torn and harassed—and you are my only friend, I think. I’ll try to be more natural with the wretch; more—more convincing, damn her! Yet I drove it home with Kate the other night; you saw how she left the room?”
“There you are! because for the moment you were really what you had pretended to be—under the spell. Could you ask a better proof?”
“No, that’s true. But it’s hard to feign the fire you do not feel.”
Hamilton laughed indulgently.
“You take things too seriously. Convince yourself you do not care whatever happens, and Fortune will be kind to you. It is the jade’s way, being a woman. Indifference to her is the only thing she cannot resist. And it isn’t as if the fruit you were asked to handle were rotten medlers. Here’s a sweet country nectarine for which a very epicure might envy you.”
“A country crab, I think, as biting as she’s little. Well?”
“Well, is this to forget yourself in livelier company? Marry, Phil, if you can laugh at nothing else, laugh at yourself—always the best fool in a man’s household. But, come, I’ll give you distraction. Here’s a story just on the town of two rogue apothecaries, partners, which might point the moral of an Æsop’s fable. Have you heard it?”
Chesterfield, his eyes perfectly lacklustre, muttered some incoherent response. The other proceeded, undaunted—
“Nixon and Carter were they called, and both attended, among others, on a certain ailing miserly old widow, waiving their fees in hope of some rich bequest half promised to them for their devotion. The day before she died she sent them two old shabby worn-out cloaks, one cloth, one velvet, in reward of their long services to her, and of these garments, Nixon, as the elder, was to choose which he would, the other going to his partner. They were well mad, I can promise you, but, making the best of it, Nixon chose the cloth, as being the more serviceable, and after, in derision, offered to part with it to Carter for a shilling. Which, promptly agreeing to, and securing his bargain, Carter, the more astute knave, discovered each of its twelve buttons to be a gold Carolus hidden under cloth. And so they were at it, Nixon demanding back his goods and Carter resisting, till from quarrelling they came to blows and Nixon killed Carter, for which Nixon is to be hanged. And now comes in the lovely moral; for it seems they were both Fifth Monarchist men, owing their lives to the Act of Indemnity, yet who would have cut off their right hands rather than help the King to a tester of his own coin. And the end is these twelve gold pounds are forfeit to the Crown. What think you of that for a rare combination of law and justice?”
Receiving no answer, he looked at his companion, and perceived him patently oblivious to every word he was saying. He exclaimed, and laid his hand on the door.
“What now?” said Chesterfield, waking up.
The other cursed him fairly. “A pox on your insensibility! Here have I been pouring my precious wine of eloquence into thy cracked measure of a head that hath retained not one drop. I’ll up and begone.”
“No, don’t. Have you been talking in truth?”
“O, listen to him!HaveI been talking! No, sir; I’ve been thinking aloud; and if my thoughts ran on jackasses in their relation to the creature called a mute, you have only to speak without braying to prove yourself not half the donkey you seem.”
“Don’t be offensive, George. Why do you apply such a word to me?”
“Are you not a donkey, to go brooding on thistles when I offer you grapes?”
“I cannot help but brood. Have patience with me, coz. There’s a thought in my mind I cannot rid it of.”
“A thought? What thought?”
“This cursed Kit.”
“Kit?”
“The Kit her friend is for ever alluding to.”
“O! that.”
“There’s some purposed innuendo, I’m convinced, in the hussy’s mockery—perhaps to some former flame of my wife’s known to both. I believe, before God, it is that. You should have heard my lady before you came that night. On my soul, she had almost confessed bare-faced that she used this Kit to console herself for my neglect.”
“The devil she did!”
It was a new and surprising suggestion for Hamilton himself. It seemed to open out a wholly unexpected vista of mortifying possibilities. Could there be anything in it? Little signs—an odd look, a queer inflection of the voice, unsuspected of any significance at the time—occurred to him now in the connection of his cousin’s confidences. Was she really playing a double game with all of them, this little artless-seeming Thais? No! she was altogether too unsophisticated; he could not believe it. Besides, of course, he was actually forgetting that she and Mrs. Moll were but recent acquaintances. They could not have a knowledge of that name in common, unless——
“Did she specifically say ‘him’?” he asked Chesterfield.
“What do you mean?” demanded the Earl.
“You know Mrs. Davis would not admit Kit’s sex when I rallied her.”
Chesterfield shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“Pooh! The merest subterfuge, to mislead and torment me. The dog’s a male dog; there’s no question whatever about it.”
Hamilton sat frowning a while. It was true that that fact of the women’s unacquaintance counted for little. Moll, the prying and mischievous, might easily have made a discovery; or, again, granted the alternative of Kate’s double-dealing, the two might be in a naughty confederacy to punish the master of the house. Truly, if it were no worse than that, he could forgive them, though their understanding meant a certain treachery to himself. But at least it would ease his mind of a qualm which had suddenly overtaken it.
He meditated, on the whole ill at ease. He must find some opportunity, of that he was decided, to question Mrs. Moll more particularly about this Kit, and, though he foresaw well enough an evasive response, he believed he would be able to extract from her some indication of the truth sufficiently illuminating to guide him in his further actions. He turned to his companion with the suggestion—
“Leave the matter to me, Phil, for the moment. I’ll question the slut, and, like the persuasive, artful dog I am, worm the truth out of her.”
“Will you, George? Zounds, if my suspicions should be verified, and there’s secret meetings between them! Though he be a Kit of nine lives, I’ll skewer them every one on my rapier like slivers of dog’s meat. When will you come?”
“When is it safe?”
“My lady rides abroad each day at noon.”
“To-morrow, then.” He put an impressive warning hand on the other’s sleeve. “This must not affect your behaviour to the visitor. Never, whatever you do, relax your attentions there, but rather emphasize them.”
“O! why?”
“Why—why?” He spoke with some impatient irritability. “Are you really so dense? Why, because—if you must be instructed—any slackness on your part might rouse your wife’s suspicions. We want, if it’s to be a question of taking her off her guard, to lull her into a sense of false security; and the more infatuated you appear, the more careless of precaution will she become. Strange that I should have to teachyousexual strategy.”
He would not dismiss the whole suggestion at once, you see, as incredible and preposterous; he was too well versed in the thousand duplicities of which woman is capable ever to accept her innocence at more than its face value. Nor is mere youth a guarantee with her of harmlessness. The little two-inch viper can bite to poisonous effect the moment it is hatched from the egg. No, it was judicious, for the sake of all concerned, to attempt to establish the identity of this hermaphroditic individual. And he thought he could do it.
He went to essay the experiment the next day. A little to his confusion he learned that his cousin, whom he had calculated upon finding out, was not yet departed, but was strolling, pending her horse’s arrival, in the garden. After a moment’s hesitation, he went to seek her there, and encountered her loitering about the paths which led down, among ordered parterres and hedged alleys, to the river-side. She looked very pretty in her scarlet riding habità la mode, with the long-skirted coat, fashioned after a man’s, which was just then come into vogue, and the little plumed hat tilted over one ear; and the picture she made went straight down through his eyes to his heart.Hereyes opened a shade as she turned to recognize him.
“Are you coming to offer to ride with me?” she said. “Because, if you are——”
“Yes?” he asked.
She tossed her head suddenly, with a little shrug.
“O! no matter. What the world can see the world will not suspect. Come, if you wish it.”
“Meaning by the world, I suppose, your husband. Then you have thought better of my suggestion?”
“What suggestion?”
“That you should use me to stimulate his jealousy.”
“I have thought of you as my kinsman and his friend.”
“Is that a reproof, Kate Chesterfield?”
She ruffled a box border with her little pointed toe, looking down the while.
“Why should you think it so, cousin? You are a man of honour, are you not? And I have your own word for it your offer was a quite disinterested one.”
“That may be; but to turn it to no better account than riding innocently in company is not the way to make it effective.”
She did not reply for a moment, then looked him straight in the eyes.
“What would you have us do?”
“I could answer for one thing,” he said. His gaze was on a knot of rosebuds fastened in her bosom. “These walls are argus-eyed. Grant me a token from that sweet nest.”
“And earn,” she said, “a credit I do not deserve. Why should I go out of my way so to damn myself?”
“He’llhear of it.”
“The only one of all that would not care.” A sudden flush came to her face. She leaned forward a little, and spoke three words: “Who is Kit?”
It fairly took him aback. He was so startled that for a moment he could not answer.
“Kit!” he stammered then.
“You are my husband’s friend,” she said—“in his confidence; you know and have shared, no doubt, the secrets of his past. Was it not enough to force upon me the daily insult of this Davis creature’s presence, but he must make a jest through her lips of other infamies in which it seems they were both implicated? Who is this Kit, I say?”
Now, one thing, in his astonishment, was made clear to Hamilton. Kate was as innocent of Kit as Kit of Kate. That reassurance was consoling, though it left him more confounded than ever as to the identity of the strange being.
“On my honour, cousin,” he said, “I have no idea.”
“You have not?”
“Not a shadow of one. But, whoever she is, if she she is, what reason have you to connect Phil with her?”
She made a sound of scorn.
“What reason? Am I deaf and blind to all hints and innuendoes—to their conspiracy to mock me with veiled references to the part she has played in his life? O, reason, indeed!”
“I think, on my soul, you are letting your imagination master you. Has he ever really confessed to this Kit?”
“You did not hear him? No, it was before you came. He did as much, referring to her as the substance of happiness for which he had exchanged its shadow—the shadow—the wife—O, I am in truth a shadow of a wife!”
“Then, I say, if that be so, he deserves no mercy.”
“I intend to show him none.”
“Give me the rose, then.”
“Why do you want it? In reward of your disinterestedness?”
“Just that.”
She gazed at him a moment—a fathomless look; then—O, woman, microcosm of all incomprehensibilities!—detached a bud from the group and held it out to him. He received it in rapture, and dared to put it to his lips. But at that she flushed pink, and turned from him.
“I will ride alone,” she murmured. “Nay, do not press me further.”
He forbore to. It suited his plans to remain behind, and he let her go without protest. And the moment he was sure of her departure he went to seek Mrs. Davis. His veins were hot; there was a glaze over his eyes. “She hath put foot within the magic circle,” he thought, “and I have her.”
He went to find a servant, and to dispatch him in quest of Mrs. Moll. The baggage came down to him presently into the great room, and, when they were left alone together, danced gleefully up to him and dropped a curtsey.
“Is not that to the manner?” she said. “Or is it the bong tong to offer you my cheek?”
“Come,” he said, with a shadow of impatience. “I want to have a serious talk with you.”
“Lud! What mischief have I been up to?”
“Not mischief enough—that is my complaint.”
“Well, that’s easy remedied.”
“Is it? I’m beginning to doubt.”
“Ah! You don’t know me.”
“You are enjoying yourself here, are you not?”
“Passably. ’Tis dull sometimes—too much confinement, and not enough fresh air.”
“You’d like to be released, perhaps, from your duties?”
“Should I? What makes you think so?”
“It has occurred to me. Supposing I were to tell you you might go?”
“Supposing? Well, I shouldn’t go, that’s all.”
“You wouldn’t? Do you mean to say you’d defy me?”
“Yes, I do mean to say it.” She came close before him, put her little fists behind her back, and tilted her chin at him. “What’s all this about? Aren’t I wanted any more, or have you changed your mind? That ’ud be a pity, because I’m not the sort, you know, to be taken or left just as it suits a man’s convenience.” She laughed—not pleasantly. “Has it never occurred to you, George, that you happen to be just a little bit in my power?”
“The devil I am!”
“So am I—on occasion. You might find that out if you provoked me.”
“Why, what could you do?”
“I could blab, couldn’t I—make havoc of your little plot?”
He was a trifle staggered. Here was something overlooked in his calculations. He had only designed, in fact, to stimulate her efforts; this threatened rebellion revealed some mistake in his methods.
“And lose for ever your chance of promotion,” said he. “Well, if you wish to make me your enemy——”
She nodded her head once or twice.
“I don’t. But I’d lose twenty kings sooner than sit quiet under a dirty trick like that.”
“Do you propose staying on, then, till this imposture is discovered, as every day makes more probable? As well betray me at once.”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. But I like the fun and I like the life, and I see no more risk of discovery now than when I came. Why do you want me to go?”
“I never said I did. I don’t, as a matter of fact, if you will only not like these things so well as half to forget your purpose in them.”
“My purpose? That’s to make the lord creature in love with me. Well, haven’t I?”
“I miss the conclusive evidence—the proof of the pudding that’s in the eating.”
“That wasn’t in the bargain. Be fair, George. I’m doing all that was asked of me, and doing it faithful.”
She was, in fact; yet he had actually hoped for more. She was so excessively alluring that he could not believe Chesterfield capable, in spite of his apparent insensibility, of ultimately resisting her charms, were she fully resolved he should not.
“And is that,” he said, “suggesting the little piece too much? You’ve grown very fastidious of a sudden. I told you I was beginning to doubt.”
She looked at him queerly a moment.
“Isn’t it going as well with you as you expected?” she asked.
“Your finishing him could do my cause no harm, at least,” said he, and bit his lip.
“Well, I vow I’m sometimes a’most sorry for her,” she said. “She’s but my own age, and—and the man’s in love with her all the time, and at a word she’d be with him. Don’t I know that? What a brace of blackguards we are, George!”
“Speak for yourself, Mrs. Moll,” said Hamilton, a little hotly. “Love absolves all sinners. It knows no villainy but incompetence.”
“Sure, you must be a saint, then. But betwixt this and that, and your doubt’s despite, it wasn’t in the bargain and I won’t do it.”
“Then that settles it, and we must manage without.”
“As you like.” She brought her hands to the front, and, linking them in the most decorous of love-knots, stiffened her neck and tossed her head backwards and a little askew. “Besides,” she said, “you seem to forget that I’ve got a husband myself.”
He burst into a laugh, vexed but uncontrollable, and immediately checked himself.
“I had forgot—I confess it,” he said. “Kit, is it not?”
“Kit!” she ejaculated, in deep scorn. And then she, too, laughed derisively.
“Not Kit?” said he.
“If you knew Kit you wouldn’t ask such a silly question,” she answered.
“Well, why shouldn’t I know Kit? He seems an attractive person.”
“O! Kit’s attractive.”
“I see, I see. Pardon my stupidity.”
“What do you see?”
“Kit’s a—hem!—friend of yours.”
“Indeed, Kit is—the best, a’hem, friend of mine that ever hemmed a hem.”
“What! a woman?”
“Either that or a tailor.”
“Damn it! Not a tailor?”
“Damn it, why not? Though it takes nine tailors to make a man, one woman can make a tailor.”
“Come, Moll, thou art goosing me.”
“A tailor’s goose, maybe.”
“Tell me, who is this friend of yours?”
“I wonder.”
“Frankly, is it man or woman?”
“Frankly, I’ve never asked.”
“Ah! you won’t tell me. Are we not good comrades now, and as such should have no secrets from one another?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What is Kit?”
“Sometimes this, sometimes that. We all have our moods.”
“I believe he has no existence but in your imagination. Who is he? Tell me.”
“Will you kiss me, George, if I tell?”
“That I will.”
He suited the action to the word, putting his lips to hers, while she submitted quietly.
“Now,” said he.
“But I haven’t told,” she protested.
He could have boxed her pink ear; and he did fling from her with some roughness.
“P’sha!” he said. “I am wasting time.”
“And that is not all,” said she.
He saw a warning flush in her cheek, and forced his vexation under.
“Well,” he said, with a propitiatory laugh, “if you tell me nothing, I’ve got the kiss for nothing; and so mine is the best of the bargain. But I count you a little unkind, Mollinda.”
“I don’t mean to be that, George,” she answered, somewhat penitent. “But I shouldn’t tell secrets not my own; now should I?”
That only served to restimulate his doubts and perplexity; but he said no more on the subject, feeling it wiser to desist.
“Never mind,” he said. “You have your own good reasons for silence, of course, and it’s no business of mine to press them. What is more to the point is this question of your scruples regarding his lordship. So you won’t go to extremes? Then, what is to be the course? With all deference, Mrs. Moll, you can’t surely be planning to stay on here indefinitely.”
“Well, I’ll work up to any conclusion you like, short of that.”
“You will?”
“Sure.”
“Even if it were to an appearance—of that?”
“Why not? ’Twould be enough for me to know my own innocence, since I’m the only one that ever believes in it.”
He pondered, musing on her. “I’ll think it out, faith. We’ll arrange some trick between us—somecoup de grâcefor her ladyship. Shall we?”
“O, go to grass yourself!” she said. “Speak English.”
Tothe Duke of York’s chambers in Whitehall came a mincing exquisite, with a guitar slung from his neck by a broad silver ribbon. He was dressed in silvered white from chin to toe, and he strutted exactly like a white leghorn cock surveying his seraglio. His long, straw-coloured hair was elaborately curled over his temples; the lashes to his eyes were like pale spun glass; a tiny cherished moustachio, pointed upwards at the tips, stood either side his round nose like a couple of thorns to a gooseberry. He hummed as he walked, flourishing a beringed and scented hand to such palace minions as met and saluted him by the way, and reaching the Duke’s quarters, acknowledged, with a charming condescension, the respectful greetings of M. Prosper, gentleman of the Chamber to his Highness, who accosted him at the door of the anteroom.
“Ha, my good Prothper! I thee you well,j’ethpère bien?”
“Vair well—most—milord of Arran. You are to come this way, sair. His Royal ’Ighness ’e expectorate you.”
Bowing and waving his arms, as if he were “shooing” on a fowl, M. Prosper conducted the visitor by a private passage to the Duke’s closet, where, committing him to the hands of a page, he bobbed and ducked himself away. And the next moment the Earl found himself in the presence of the Lord High Admiral.
James Stuart was seated at a table liberally strewn with documents, writing, and mathematical implements. There were no gimcracks visible on it, unless a little bronze ship, which served for a paper-weight, deserved the title. The aspect of the room, like his own, inornate, businesslike, severe, was in odd contrast with the silken frippery which came to invade it. One would have guessed some particular purpose to lie behind the permitted violation of those austere privacies. His Highness was minutely examining a chart when the lordling entered. Standing over him and occasionally dabbing a forefinger, like a discoloured banana, on some specified shoal or anchorage, was a huge individual, in a full-skirted blue coat, trimmed with the coarse lace called trolly-lolly, whose bearing spoke unmistakably of the sea. This was Captain Stone, of theNasebyfrigate, in fact—a practical sailorman, much in favour with his royal master. He was a rough-and-ready specimen of his class, with manners as blunt as his features. He turned to stare at the sugary apparition as it sailed into view, and a grin of derision, which he made no effort to conceal, widened his already ample features.
“Ha, my lord!” said the Duke; “you are welcome. Be seated, sir, be seated. I shall be disengaged in one moment. Stone, oblige me by removing your hat from that chair, that my lord of Arran may come to anchor.”
The bulky sea-captain, with a most offensive affectation of alacrity, skipped to obey. He swept the chair with his hat; more, he produced from somewhere an enormous blue handkerchief like a small ensign, and elaborately polished the seat with it.
“Now,” says he, “if your lordship’s breeches will deign to reconsecrate the altar my top-gear hath profaned.”
The Duke, his elbow leaned on the table, shaded his face with his palm, and laughed noiselessly. As for the sweet puppy himself, self-esteem had thickened his moral cuticle beyond penetration by anything less than a pickaxe of ridicule. He closed his lids, and, with an ineffable smile and wave of the hand, dropped languidly into the proffered place. Duke and Captain continued for a while their investigation of the chart. Then the former put it away, and, leaning back in his chair, addressed a question to the latter.
“What is this I hear, Captain, of decent folk impressed illegally in the City by order of my Lord Mayor?”
The burly seaman shrugged his shoulders.
“He’s an ass, sir, that Bludworth, yet an ass in some sort deserving commendation.”
“In what way?”
“Why, in the way that leads by short-cuts to disputed ends. He gets there, while your wise man talks.”
“Aye, but he tramples rights to do it.”
“He may. We must have men.”
“They were given no press money, I understand.”
“He had none to give them. Still, we must have men.”
“The thing should be in order. There were those among them, I hear, of quite respectable estate.”
“Aye, but we must have men, I say. Your fool, on occasion, can have his uses.”
The Duke, as if involuntarily, shot a swift glance towards the seated figure.
“Could they, under the circumstances,” he said, “be broke for desertion?”
“I leave that,” answered the seaman dryly, “to your Highness.”
“’Tis not the way, at least, to make the King’s service popular.”
“Well, I could venture a better way.”
He meant, of course, the settlement of long arrears of pay—a chronic scandal in the Navy. But the obvious was not palatable. The Duke, just raising his eyebrows at the speaker, bent them in a frown, and sat drumming for some moments with his fingers on the table. Suddenly he turned to Arran.
“What wouldyousuggest, my lord,” said he, “to make the Navy popular? The lay opinion, given an intelligence such as yours, is often valuable in these matters.”
His lordship, exquisitely flattered, sat up.
“I should offer a handthome bounty, Thir,” said he—with perhaps some vivid recollection of personal sufferings endured in the Channel—“to the man who should devith or invent a thertain cure for thea-thickneth.”
Captain Stone, regardless of his company, burst into a roar of laughter.
“By Gog, your Highness!” cried he, “here’s the pressman for our money. To make the Navy popular, quotha—give them stomach for it! Aye, why not? And lace our sails with silver twist, and hang a silken tassel at the main, and pipe to quarters on a hurdy-gurdy! O, we’ll have our Captain’s monkey yet with lovelocks to his head and white ribbons to his shoon!”
His lordship, on whom this pickaxe had wrought at last, flushed up to the eyes with anger and resentment. He rose to his feet.
“Thith monthtruth inthult,” he began; “I crave your Highnetheth grath——” and stuck for lack of words.
The Duke, whose cue was nothing if not propitiation, turned in some genuine wrath on the seaman.
“You forget yourself, sir,” he said sternly. “You will favour me by retiring. Waiving the question of respect for his lordship’s opinions, you fail in it to me, who invited them. Nor need you be so cocksure in your own. Who knows what inclinations might have served us but for dread of that malady! You must go.”
The Captain, not venturing to remonstrate, but seeing, as he thought, through the other’s motive, obeyed, and so much without rancour that he could not forbear some subdued sputtering laughter as he left the room—an ebullition which, in fact, found its secret response in the Duke’s own bosom. He addressed himself, the man gone, with a rather twinkling blandishment to his remaining guest.
“A rough, untutored fellow, my lord; but reliable, according to his lights. They are not penetrating, perhaps; yet clear as regards the surface of things. You must forgive him. That was an original suggestion of yours. He would not grasp its inner significance, naturally. To cure sea-sickness, now. There is something in it.”
“I am happy,” minced the bantling, “in your Highnetheth commendation. Thatmal-de-meris a very dithtrething thing. It maketh a man look a fool; and a man dothn’t like to look a fool.”
The Duke considered.
“But for the character of the remedy? What do you say to music? Music will not, according to Master George Herbert, cure the toothache: but is sea-sickness the toothache, my lord?”
“Not the toothache; no, Thir.”
“Is it not rather, by all reports, a surging or vertigo of the brain, induced by that reversal of the laws of equilibrium which transposes the offices, as it were, of matter animate and matter inanimate?”
“I—I take your Highnetheth word for it.”
“Why, it is clear. We are designed and organized, are we not, to be voluntary agents on a plane of stability?”
“Yeth, yeth, O yeth!”
“Very well. So we lie down or rise at will, the solid earth abetting. But supposing the parts reversed, ourselves the willingly quiescent, the earth the one to rise or fall? Would not our brain, devised on the opposite principle, be naturally upset, carrying with it the stomach, its most intimate relation?”
“I’m thure it would; quite thure to be thure.”
“Take my word for it. When we go to sea we are transposing the functional processes of mind and matter. How, then, to render that exchange nugatory? The sense of it is conveyed through what? The eyes, is it not?”
“O yeth, indeed! You thee the heaving before you heave yourthelf.”
“Exactly—a sympathetic emotion, or motion. Our vision, then, is the direct cause of sea-sickness. Why? Because in pursuing an unstable thing it becomes itself unstable. And there I see light. The eyes are at right angles to the ears, are they not? And we are agreed that the sense of instability is conveyed through the eyes?”
“Through the eyeth.”
“Well, supposing now we introduce a second appeal to the senses through the ears; that second appeal would traverse the first appeal, would it not, at right angles, the two forming together a sort of sensory cross-hatch, or truss, which would immediately produce the stability necessary to keep the otherwise unsupported sight from accommodating itself to the action of the waves? You follow me?”
“I think—— O yeth!”
“Your suggestion was a really very able one, my lord, and it speaks loudly against the folly of scorning all ex-official criticism in these matters. But, to follow our theorizing to a practical end. We are at one, then, in believing it possible that the sense of sight could be trussed and stiffened by the introduction of the sense of sound. To make an effective business of it, however, that sense of sound would have to be compelling enough to arrest and neutralize the visual tendency; it would have to be, that is to say, exceedingly strong and exceedingly sweet. It might be possible to introduce on each of our ships a professional harpist, or lutist, to supply with their music a prophylactic against sea-sickness; but one has to remember that not all musicians are sailors, and that it might prove disastrous to the moral should one fail in his own sea-legs at the very moment he was trying to provide another with his.”
“Yeth; that ith very true.”
“Then, again, as to the force of the appeal. Not all performers have that convincing mastery of their instruments, my lord, which according to what I hear, is peculiarly your own.”
“O, truth, your Highneth flatterth me!”
“You shall prove it.” He smiled very pleasantly. “But, believe me, my lord, I am infinitely your debtor for a suggestion whichmaygo far to revolutionize the whole question of impressment and the popularity of the Navy. Now, will you not give me a taste of the quality which has come to enter so aptly into the context of our discussion? You know I play a little on the guitar myself, but not so well as to refuse a hint or two from a master of the instrument. There was a question of a saraband. I would fain take a lesson in its presentation.”
“Corbetti’th, your Highneth meanth.” The puppy—strange scion of a house distinguished, in the persons of its head and firstborn, for both courage and nobility—glowed with gratified vanity. He really believed at last that ’twas he himself had originated that exquisite specific against the curse of the ocean, and that the Duke was his admiring debtor for it. He struck an attitude, slung his guitar into position, and, receiving a nod from his auditor, forthwith touched out the measure of Signor Francesco’s saraband. It was a quite graceful composition, and he played it well.
The Duke was enraptured.
“It is in truth a most sweet and moving piece,” he said, “and masterly rendered. I have never known to be displayed a more perfect accord between composer, performer, and instrument. Yet, if they were to be considered in order of merit, I should put, without hesitation, the executant in the first place and the guitar in the least.”
“Yet it’th a good guitar, Thir,” ventured the glowing youth. He lifted and eyed with beatific patronage that faithful recorder of his genius.
“Good,” answered the Duke; “yet good is not good enough to be the servant of the best. But where, indeed, could one look for an instrument worthy of an Orpheus?”
“O, I bluth, your Highneth! Yet I will not thay but what I might give a better account of mythelf on an inthtrument pothethed by my thithter, my lady Chethterfield. It ith a wonder, that. Corbetti himthelf hath declared it.”
“Indeed?” James spoke abstractedly, seeming hardly to attend. “Now, will you make me your debtor, my lord, for a hint or two. It would flatter my poor skill to expend it on so rare a melody.”
He was so full of compliment and ingratiation, that the first diffidence of the sweet Earl was soon exchanged for a vanity approaching condescension. He took his royal pupil in hand, and conducted him over the opening bars of the composition. But the Duke, strange to say, proved himself a most sad bungler. He could not, for some reason, master the air, and finally, with a shrug of impatience, he desisted, and begged his instructor to repeat to him his own version of certain ingenious passages.
“I will murder the innocents no longer,” quoth he, handing back the instrument. “Render them again in living phrase, and so take the taste of my own villainy out of my mouth.”
“It is thith way,” said his lordship, and went on thrumming most mellifluously.
“Ah!” said the Duke. “If one could take the way of genius only by having it pointed out to one! Yet, did not that last note ring a little false?”
“No, by my fay, Thir.”
“You may be right. Yet methinks I have a very hair-splitting ear. It will quarrel on so little as a fraction of a tone. Not the player, but the string, maybe, was to blame. Even your best of instruments will lack perfection, betraying weak places in their constitution, like broken letters in a printed type. Sound it again. ... Ah! it is not quite true, indeed.”
“Your Highneth, thith ith a very ordinary fair guitar; but, ath I thay, I know a better.”
“True; my lady Shrewsbury’s.”
“No.”
“Not? I thought you mentioned hers?”
“Not herth. My lady Chetherfield’th.”
“O! Your sister’s. So, she is the possessor of that masterpiece. Is it indeed so excellent?”
“None better, I dare to venture, in all the world.”
“My lord, you must let me hear you on it. So near the perfect achievement, and yet to fall short of it by a hair! ’Twas not to be endured. We must visit your sister, you and I together, and beg this favour of her kindness.”
Now, even the Court of the Restoration had its codes of etiquette—more particular, in some odd ways, than to-day’s—and among them was none which permitted a prince of the blood royal to condescend to social intercourse with a young married woman without danger to her reputation. Arran, to be sure, knew this well enough, shallow dandiprat as he was, and the slight qualm he felt over the proposition was evidence of a certain suspicion awakened in him for the first time. But it was faint, and no proof against his vanity. He was not so base as to design any deliberate treachery to his own flesh and blood; but his conscience was an indeterminate quantity, easily at the mercy of any plausible rascal. He considered, and decided that the inclusion of himself in the Duke’s suggestion was the surest proof that there could be noarrière penséebehind it. An intrigant, bent on some nefarious conquest, would not propose a brother to assist him in his purpose. He gave a little embarrassed laugh, nevertheless, and hung his foolish head.
“If your Highneth thinkth it worth your Highnetheth while,” he said.
“Worth, my lord, worth?” said the Duke warmly. “What is this genius of yours worth, if not the most perfect of mediums through which to give itself expression?”
“You are very good.”
“I am very impatient, and shall continue so, until we have given effect to this arrangement.”
LittleLady Chesterfield sat in her private boudoir, looking out on a glowing section of the palace gardens. Thirty feet away a marble basin, shaped like a tazza, bubbled with a tiny jet of water; and on the rim of the basin, as if posed for a picture, sat a single peacock. Great white clouds loitered in a sapphire sky, a thousand flowers starred the beds, the box borders were lush with growth, and all between went a maze of little paths, frilled with green sweetness. It was an endearing prospect, spacious and peaceful, hardly ruffled by the murmurs of the great life in whose midmost it was cloistered; yet small consciousness of its tranquillity was apparent in the blue eyes whose introspective vision reflected only the mists and turbulence of a troubled heart.
Now, as regards physical infection, one may be susceptible to the predaceous germ on one occasion and not on another: it is a question of bodily condition. So, there is a moral microbe whose insidious approaches may find us pregnable or not according to our spiritual temper of the time. The healthiest constitutions enjoy no absolute immunity in this respect, and those which do escape harm often owe their reputation for incorruptibility to no better than the accident which found them free from attack at the weak moments. Evil disposition makes no more sinners than the lack of it does saints. It is mostly a question of coincidence between the alighting seed-down and the soil suitable to its germination.
Well, there are soils and soils, and as one seed which sickens on a rich loam will wax bursting fat in an arid crevice, so sand will not produce roses. Yet, I should say, if one sought a common denominator in this matter of proneness to moral infections, one could not instance a state more typically susceptive to all than that of idleness and boredom.
And to that perilous condition had poor Kate succeeded. She was ennuyée, sick of soul, tired of everything and everybody. Her matrimonial barque, she felt, had been flung on a shoal, where it lay as divorced from wreck as from rescue. There appeared no alternative but to abandon it; and yet all her instincts of faith and decency still fought against that seeming treachery to her vows. She had really at one time believed in the poor creature her husband—even though necessarily at the modified valuation imposed upon wives of her date and condition: she had not utterly abandoned her hope in him yet. But little of it remained, and that little so tempered with scorn and disgust as to seem hardly worth the retaining. Still, the wifely instinct clung by a thread, and was so far her resource and safety. Yet not much was needed to snap that last strand, and she knew it, and felt it, and was wrought thereby to a state of nervous irritability which halted, in its sense of sick isolation, between fidelity and revolt. She was susceptible, in fact, when the germ made its appearance.
It was a flattering germ, garbed royally, with a melting eye and an insinuative manner. She may have been already conscious in herself of premonitory symptoms betokening its approach, as the wind of the avalanche heralds the fall thereof; I will certainly not commit myself to any statement to the contrary. But even were that the case, it is not to say that her hold on the thread continued less fond and desperate. It is likely, indeed, that it acquired a more urgent grip, as foreseeing a particular strain upon its resources. Royalty could pull so hard with so little effort of its own. However that may be, it is worthy of note that she displayed at least the courage of her sex in facing the possibility of infection instead of flying from it.
Now, as she sat, gazing out on the quiet scene with unregarding eyes, and obsessed with the sole thought that she was the most aggrieved and weary-spirited woman in the world, she heard a sound in the room behind her, and turned to see her second brother, young Arran. He minced forward, the darling, and saluted her with the most unimaginable grace, though there was certainly a little tell-tale flush on his callow cheek.
“Thithter Kit,” quoth he, “I have taken the privilege of a brother to introduth a vithitor to your private apartment.”
“A visitor!” She rose, uncertain, to her feet, and was aware, with a little shock of the blood, of the figure of the Duke of York standing in the doorway. His Royal Highness, with a grave smile, in which there was nevertheless a touch of anxiety, advanced into the room, closing the door behind him.
“Uninvited, but not too greatly daring, I hope,” said he. “Formality, ceremonial, were all incompatible with the boon we designed to ask of your ladyship.”
A vivid flush would rise to her cheek; she could not help it, nor control, with all her will to, the self-conscious instinct betrayed in her drooped lashes. For a moment, in the embarrassment of her youth, she stood dumb before this realized liberty.
“A privilege, your brother called it,” continued the Duke. “Then, if for him, how much more for me! Of its extent, believe me, I am so fully sensible, that, accepting your silence for condonation of my presumption, I hesitate to abuse a favour so freely vouchsafed by taking advantage of it to beg another.”
She raised her lids, and again dropped them. The shadow of a smile twitched the corners of her mouth. And then her breath caught, suddenly and irresistibly, in a little half-hysterical laugh. The pomposity of this prelude was after all too much for her.
“O, my lord Duke,” she said, “if I were to assume the nature of this favour from the solemnity of its introduction, I should have no alternative but to refuse it offhand, as implying something grave and weighty beyond my years. I pray you bear my youth in mind.”
He smiled, relieved and at ease.
“Most tenderly, madam. For all that resounding symphony, you shall find the piece, when we come to play it, a verypastoralein lightness. Will you not be seated?”
“By your favour, your Highness—when you have set me the example.”
She sought to take refuge from her fluttering apprehensions behind that shy insistence on punctilio. The Duke bowed, and accepting a chair from his lordship of Arran, signified his entreaty that the lady should occupy another contiguous. Kate had no choice but to obey. She was not yet mistress of her blushes, and she blushed as she seated herself. But there was a strange excitement in her heart, nevertheless.
“Now,” said his Highness, “I am in the position of a litigant, who hath engaged an advocate to plead his cause for him. So, like a sensible client, I leave the first word to him.”
He waited, in a serene confidence. Lady Chesterfield looked at her brother.
“What is it, Richard?”
His lordship giggled, “hem’d,” pulled at his cravat, and spoke.
“Nothing in the world, thithter Kit.”
“O!” she said, “nothing is easily granted. I give you the case, your Highness.”
“He rates his own genius too lightly,” cried the Duke. “I see that, for the sake of his modesty, I must reverse the parts. Take me for advocate, then, and hear my plea. It is that, saving one factor, your brother is the most accomplished guitarist at Court.”
“O, fie, your Highneth!” said Arran, squirming in every limb. “Think of Corbetti.”
“A master, I grant,” said the Duke, “but with the faults incident to professionalism. A perfect executant, art hath yet despoiled him of nature. For pure sympathy, give me your born musician before your trained.”
Again Arran squirmed. “O, your Highneth, your Highneth!”
The Duke turned to Kate.
“Do you not love your brother’s playing?”
“Indeed,” answered the girl, perplexed, “Richard plays well.”
“Well?” he echoed, protesting. “Have you heard him in the new saraband?” She shook her head. “Ah!” he said: “not Corbetti himself could so interpret the loveliness of his own composition. I speak as one who knows. My lord’s performance, to eschew superlatives, was divine. Yet there was a flaw. The perfect master lacked the perfect instrument. To attain the latter, or at least more nearly approximate it, only one resource offered. Your ladyship, as he informed me, was owner of the finest guitar in all England. To hear him on that guitar became then a necessity with me—a fever, a passion. It was to entreat that opportunity that I ventured this descent upon your ladyship’s privacy.”
She heard; she opened her eyes in ingenuous wonder. Before she could consider the words, they were on her lips.
“Is that all?”
“Nay, not all,” he answered softly—“not all. But thatyoumight hear and feel.”
Involuntarily she shrank away a little.
“Richard knew,” she said, “that he could always have my guitar for the asking.”
“Is that so?” said his Highness. “But he did not tell me—perchance because he would have his sister learn the estimate in which he is held by others, to show his power to move me in your presence. Ah!” he waved a playful hand—a very white and shapely one: “relations are notoriously grudging critics of their own.”
Still she struggled faintly.
“This is a poor room for resonance, my lord Duke. The audience-chamber would have been better chosen.”
“Nay,” he said; “are we not private here?”
“Private, Sir?”
“Is not privacy the very essence of all sweet sounds and thoughts? To risk interruption is to risk the jarring of their lovely sequence. No, we are happiest where we are, apart and secluded. The loneliest bower is that where the bird sings his song to an end.”
She rose hastily, and with an effort to control her agitation.
“I will go and fetch it,” she said. “It is not here.”
He sought to detain her.
“Does not your brother know the place?”
Arran interposed. Some vague uneasiness, perhaps, was making itself felt in the shallow brain of the nincompoop.
“No, by my thoul, your Highneth,” he said, “nor underthtand if she told me.”
Kate hurried to the door. As she did so, a feminine form outside whisked into the near shelter of some hangings. Then, foreseeing certain detection if she remained where she was, waited until the issuing figure had vanished down a passage, when she herself slipped away incontinent in another direction.
The Duke in the meanwhile sat frowning and silent, half suspecting a ruse on the lady’s part to escape him. But in that he did the Countess too much or too little justice. For whatever reason—of honour or perversity; you may take your choice—Kate acquitted herself faithfully of her errand, and came back with the guitar; whereat the royal brow cleared wonderfully.
And Arran played the saraband—this time to perfection, exclaimed his Highness. Sweet melody, sweet touch, and sweetest atmosphere—it had been all a banquet of delight, served, as it were, amidst the tenderest surroundings, in a self-contained corner of Eden, by the most paradisical of chefs. The Duke was transported; he was really transported, though it is true some ecstasies stop short of heaven. There are sirens in Campania to see to that.
And Kate was also moved; she could not well help but be. Her heart was in too emotional a state to be safe proof against such soft besieging. When the Duke leaned towards her, she did not stir, but sat with eyes downcast, her bosom plainly turbulent.
“Was I not right,” he said, “and could any gain in resonance have improved on this faultless unison of parts? Perfection must know bounds, even like a framed picture, or the soul cannot compass it. To have enlarged these but in one direction would have been to sacrifice the proportions of the whole—the harmonious concord of place, and sound, and tenderest feeling. Give me this bower, lady, for your rounded madrigal, wherein sweetest music lends itself with love and beauty to weave a finished pattern of delight. My lord, grant me the instrument a moment.”
He took the guitar, somewhat peremptorily, from the Earl’s hesitating hands; but he was in no mood, at this pass, to temporize or finesse. And, having received it, he went plucking softly among the strings, gathering up sweet chords and sobbing accidentals, as it were flowers, to present in a nosegay to the heart of his moved hearer. There was a knowledge, a sure emotionalism, in his touch which went far to discount his earlier pretence of inadequacy; and Arran in his weak brain may have felt somehow conscious of the fact, and of a suspicion that he had been subtly beguiled into lending his own vanity for a catspaw to the other’s schemes. But he had no wit to mend the situation he had encouraged; and so he only stood silent, with his mouth open—sowing gape-seed, as they say in Sussex.
The Duke, ending presently on a “dying fall,” sighed and looked up.
“Lady,” he said, “there is a test of the interpretative power of music (which some deny), to render the very spirit of a flower in sound, so that one listening, with closed eyes, will say, ‘That be jonquils,’ or ‘That be rosemary,’ or lavender, or what you will. Only the player must have that same blossom he would explain nigh to him, that his soul may be permeated by its essence while he improvises. What say you, shall we put it to the proof? Poor artist as I am, if my skill prove but twin-brother to my wish I will interpret you my blossoms so that you shall cry, ‘That’s for the one in flower language called Remembrance,’ or ‘That’s for gentle Friendship,’ or ‘That’s for Love.’ Will you be so entertained? Only—for the means.”
He looked to the Earl. This was no more than a ruse, devised on the moment to rid himself of that simple incubus.
“My lord,” said he, with an ingratiatory smile, “will you favour me so far as to go gather me a posy from the garden?”
But before the sappy youth could fall into that palpable trap, Kate had risen hurriedly to her feet.
“Nay, brother,” she said, “stay you here. I know better than you where to find the blooms most meet to his Highness’s purpose”—and she was going, half scared and yet half diverted.
But scarce had she taken a step or two, when a sudden voice singing outside the window brought her to an instant standstill—