XV
XV
XV
Wherein Sir Percy and Sir Robin come faceto face, to the unfeigned amazement ofeach: and where My Lady takesto her heels and a wherry.
Wherein Sir Percy and Sir Robin come faceto face, to the unfeigned amazement ofeach: and where My Lady takesto her heels and a wherry.
Wherein Sir Percy and Sir Robin come face
to face, to the unfeigned amazement of
each: and where My Lady takes
to her heels and a wherry.
When Lady Diana and Percy quitted the box, he, after conducting her to the care of Lady Brookwood, strode off into the Dark Alleys, taking with him, not Kennaston, for the hopeless youth, flouted still by Diana, had gone a-mooning by the river’s bank, but a company of valiant and merry gentlemen all raised a bit by the partaking of the famous Vauxhall punch; and to them he confided sufficient of his reasons and intentions, as made plain their course to them as his friends, to do aught and all in their several powers toward the promotingof a quarrel betwixt him and Sir Robin McTart; whom, he would presently point out to them, as they should stroll, seeming careless, the length of the walk.
Thus, arm in arm, Sir Percy, Sir Wyatt Lovell, His Grace of Escombe, and Mr. Jack Chalmers, across the path, swaggering with sticks and tassels hanging, hats at a cock, perfumed with Venus oil, and most jocund of demeanor; with Beau Brummell behind ’em spying, waving his little muff, and chatting with Lord Wootton and one or two more gay sparks, all disporting themselves carelessly, but hilts eased for the drawing.
Just as they were nearing the wooden lion of Sir Robin’s tryst, Lady Biddy’s shriek assailed their ears, and Sir Percy, thanking Providence for so opportune an occurrence, which, not to say that it was in any way premeditated, yet continued to ring out louder and louder, even after Sir Robin had ceased to pull at her mask-string and stood, held fast in Her Ladyship’s stout grasp, the very center of a blaze of light from footmen’s flambeaux,—they and the masses pushing every way, screaming and cursing.
Into the thick of this mêlée dashed Sir Percy de Bohun, with his friends on either side of him.
But a moment sufficed for him to wrest the Lady from her assailant and to deliver her over to the care of Diana and the Duchess, who carried her swooning (whether with laughter or emotion ’twould be difficult to set down), to the Room.
In another second, taking his silver-fringed gloves from his pocket he threw them into the masked face of Sir Robin McTart.
The little Baronet, who had both temper and vanity, which brace now got the upperhand of his cowardice, and, believing that Lady Peggy’s eyes were upon him, that Sir Percy was at the bottom of the Thames, and with full foreknowledge that he could run away before the meeting could be arranged, caught the gloves as they struck and flung them back into their owner’s covered countenance.
“Take that! ’sdeath!” squeaked Sir Robin, now much the more valiant as he beheld the Vicar screwing his way toward him through the excited crowds.
I am Sir Robin McTart!...
“Unmask, and show yourself for who you are!”cried Percy, every one of his companions echoing:
“Unmask! Unmask! Unmask, or we’ll run ye!”
“Willingly,” responded the trembling gentleman from Kent, tugging at the slip-knot in his mask-string.
“I am Sir Robin McTart! Who, the devil, are you?”
“I am Sir Percy de Bohun!” replied his opponent, as both masks came off at the same instant, and the two confronted one another, staring with four eyes that fairly popped in their sockets.
’Twould be hard to say which of these two was the more astounded, although Sir Percy’s amazement had quite a different flavor from the Baronet’s abject terror.
“You! Sir Percy de Bohun!” he quavered, turning ashy pale. “I’ll not believe it. ’Tis a lie!”
“You! Sir Robin McTart!” replied Percy, hotly. “Gentlemen,” turning to his friends, “I pray you bear me out in this, not to the exclusion of my challenge of this impostor, which holds good until one or t’other of us sheds blood, but for the preservation of the honor of a valiant gentleman,who is not far off of us now. That this weazen wretch may meet his dues, for not only does he masquerade his face, but seeks to usurp the character and name of one whom we all know to be both handsome, brave and courageous.”
Percy’s blood runs high as he speaks these generous words, while every soul about him stands breathless, staring, struck dumb with the singularity of the episode.
“But I am Sir Robin McTart,” cries the Baronet, brandishing his weapon with a will, since there is none to oppose him, and the Vicar, now, although well-nigh choked, not above ten yards distant from him.
“Tut, tut, Sir, whoever you are,” interposed Lord Escombe. “Your game’s up, and you’d better give your lies a rest.”
“Hold!” cries Sir Percy to Robin, “whoever you are, I challenge you to fight me ten minutes hence, yonder in the open, towards the river, and those ten minutes my friends and I’ll spend in calling the actual Sir Robin McTart into your presence, and confronting your impudence with his reality. Lend me your lungs, My Lords andGentlemen; Sir Robin’s in call somewhere in the Gardens as we all know.”
And with one accord the shout went up, ringing up and down the river and far across to the highway, where it caused the horse-patrol to think that every highwayman in the kingdom had broken loose upon Vauxhall, and presently brought them rearing, plunging, swearing, firing, thumping cutlasses right and left, into the midst of the surging thousands, by this all shouting:
“Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin! Sir Robin! Sir Robin McTart!” at the top of their voices.
But for all their bawling, no one answered, no one came, and but one of the vast throng went.
This was Lady Peggy, at a loss to know the meaning of the shouts, not having been near enough to the scene of the encounter to learn its purport, and only now realizing that ’twas herself was sought and meant by the concerted cry that rent the air. Scenting a new if unknown danger, she followed her woman’s instinct, and, in the waiting pause that succeeded the tumultuous call, Peggy fled to the landing, pressed a handful ofshillings, almost her last, into the palm of the only boatman there, jumped into the wherry and bade him get her as swiftly as he could to Queenhithe Stairs; for determined was she, now more than ever, to leave no traces in her wake, and to return, at all risks, to Mr. Brummell’s house for her bundle of woman’s clothes.
For a long way down the Thames the renewed cry of the Vauxhall crush rang in her distracted ears:
“Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin! Sir Robin! Where are you? Come forth! Show yourself!”
But none other came forth, and the Baronet, taking such courage as he might through his astonishment at Sir Percy’s being alive,—and not forgetting, even at this point, to reckon how much the lying assassins had mulcted him of, now, in the second breathless halt of the calling his own name, waved his weapon and answered it, saying again:
“I am Sir Robin McTart!”
“Prove it,” shouted Chalmers, with a derisive shrug.
“Faith! and so he can by me!” exclaimed the panting Vicar, as, borne rather by the surging of the people than by his slender legs, the tenant of the cloth was pitched somewhat unceremoniously head-first into his pupil’s middle. Sputtering, but yet winning the attention which truth and the clergy usually and righteously obtain, the Vicar raised his right hand, and, laying his left on the Baronet’s shoulder, he spoke:
“This is Sir Robin McTart of Robinswold, Kent. I have known him from his birth; his father before him; he has been my pupil. Who dares use his name than himself is an impostor and a thief!”
“What!” and now comes forward Mr. Brummell with open hand. “And my old friend,” says he, “’sdeath, Mr. What’s-your-name, you were a curate when we met last, twenty years ago, but I remember you, Sir, at Robinswold. So this,” surveying the Baronet, “is my old friend’s son and heir? Of a truth he favors his sire more than the pretty young rapscallion that’s been a-fooling us all for now these four weeks past; for gentlemen,” adds the Beau, turning to Sir Percy, “’tis as well we confess ourselves to have been duped. Gad,Sir,” thissotto voceto Percy alone, “I always wondered where Sir Hector found that handsome lad, for he was as ugly a gentleman as ever was wedded to wife.”
After the storm there came that calm which is the inevitable successor, save that, in this case, while the noise subsided, the wonder grew. Every one of Mr. Brummell’s company and all of the rest of the world beside, was rehearsing his and her own surmise as to the identity of the young gentleman who had, for above a month, been the town toast, and who had now disappeared as suddenly as he came. Some believed him to be Tom Kidde himself; some, a Lord out of France; some, a Prince of the blood; some, the Devil; some, an astrologer; there was no lack of inventions as to Her Ladyship’s identity by the time the ten minutes of Sir Percy’s setting had come to an end.
He cast an eye about the place looking for Sir Robin, and his veins were fairly on fire to know the color of his rival’s blood and wring from his, he hoped, dying lips, a confession of where Lady Peggy was. Presently, not spying his opponent, he begged Escombe and Chalmers to have thegoodness to seek him out; settle the spot; ask him to choose his seconds; call a surgeon (of whom there were always a score in attendance at Vauxhall, ready for just such affairs), while he himself swung down toward the river to look for Kennaston and give him one last word for Peggy, should Sir Robin run him through.
Peg’s twin lay on the turf sleeping. Such are the effects of being at once a poet and a lover, not yet twenty, and quite fagged with wide-awake nights and days and a fair lady’s cruel caprices. Sir Percy looked at him, smiled, and whispered as he knelt:
“Dear lad, thou that art My Lady’s twin, when next thou seest her, sure I know she’ll lay her dear lips on thy brow, and there she’ll find, this.” Percy kissed the boy as he spoke. “’Tis doubtless more than she’d care to discover, but, if death comes, ’twill ease the blow and charm the pain while I remember this message that I send her now.”
He turned away and left Peg’s brother lying there to waken at his leisure.
When he reached the Walk again, another clamor greeted him identical with its predecessor.
“Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin! Sir Robin! Come forth of your seclusion. The time is up. Sir Robin, I say-y-y-y!”
This Sir Robin McTart had vanished as mysteriously as the other one, and though the entire company made the welkin ring with the same cry over again:
“Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin! Sir Robin! Sir Robin McTart!” no Sir Robin appeared or could be found, and they were fain be content, reinforced by the ladies now well out of their swoons and terrors, to finish up the night with punch and loo in the boxes, all brains much of a muddle with the strange adventures and miraculous disappearances incident upon Beau Brummell’s never-to-be-forgotten masquerade party at Vauxhall.