CHAPTER IVShowing Storm Within and Without
Showing Storm Within and Without
Thereare some who seem to be destined always to keep on top as the wheel of life revolves; no matter how others may suffer from the law of its relentless motion.
My Lady Kilcroney (still in the minds of those who had first known her in her brilliant widowhood “Incomparable Bellairs!”) might be counted among the rare ones who are thus miraculously favoured.
Beauty, wit, charm, wealth, rank and the irresistible dash of the born leader she had already possessed; now she had attained to Court favour: she was Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Charlotte! It is scarcely necessary to add that she had become a power in the world; should she choose to exercise her influence on behalf of anyone clever and virtuous enough to profit of it, that person’s fortune might be regarded as safe.
So do great planets, following their allotted orbits, carry in their wake lesser stars that bask and shine in a reflected light!
In the instance of Miss Pamela Pounce the luminary thus lifted into prominence, possessed a very considerable power of shining on her own account; and, once her position in the hemisphere assured, she required no borrowed brilliancy.
In other words, my Lady Kilcroney’s recommendation obtained for Pamela Pounce a new start in life. Madame Mirabel, exceedingly dissatisfied with her head milliner, aware that Madame Eglantine of Paris was growing sleek on the very cream of her rightful British custom, andbeing moreover much struck with Pamela’s genteel appearance, her manner and her aptitude, was all readiness to oblige so distinguished a client as my Lady Kilcroney, and give the young woman a trial.
Before the autumn of her disastrous summer had waned, the younger Miss Pounce found herself firmly established in the very position which had been the object of her wildest dream. She was head of the millinery department of the great Bond Street mantua maker.
Like her unexpected patroness, it might seem that her cup of happiness was full. But there is no factor in the calculations of existence so easily forgotten as that most important item of all; the human heart.
Pamela, in making her courageous plan of life, had forgotten to reckon with her heart!
And this tiresome, irresponsible, uncontrollable organ began to trouble her exceedingly. In those hours of leisure when she was not concocting delightful schemes for the breaking of other people’s hearts—for every one knows what a killing hat will do—she found herself considerably inconvenienced by the peculiar conduct of her own.
Said Miss Polly Popple, of the millinery department, to Miss Clara Smithson, the book-keeper:
“You mark my words, my dear, there’s something up with that young woman Pounce! She’ll be getting herself into a regular scandal with that dashing young spark of hers! And if she ain’t got something on her conscience already ... I don’t know the signs!”
Miss Smithson leant forward, wheezing heavily.
“Providence ain’t always unjust, Polly,” she said, “and people do come by their rights, no matter how many viscountesses is against them!”
“Ah,” said Polly, swelling her fine bust, and looking at herself in the fly-blown glass which hung over the chimney in the little room at the back of the Bond Street shop where she was sitting, after hours, with her friend. “That was a bit of jobbery, that was! There isn’t onein the establishment, I do believe, that wasn’t struck all of a heap when they heard that a strange young female was put into old Mrs. Dodder’s place instead of me, which the next in rank is always, by law, you might say, entitled to. Lady Kilcroney being that prodigious in the fashion—not that I was ever one to admire her; give me breeding!—and Madame Mirabel being so set on cutting out Madame Eglantine—not that she ever will, and you mark my words, for London ain’t Paris, I say, and that I’ll maintain, and you may talk yourself blue in the face, Clara, and you won’t alter that! If it hadn’t been for that put-up job, ’tis I’d have been head of the millinery here this moment.”
Miss Polly Popple’s case was clear, but Miss Smithson’s reasons for disliking Pamela were perhaps more abstruse. She talked big of the claims of friendship, of her sympathy for Miss Popple, and also of a “rising within her,” which with her was an infallible sign of “something fishy” in somebody else. But the truth was that the new-comer’s radiant youth, her success, her spirit of enterprise, had started the base passion of envy in Miss Smithson’s withered breast; a passion the more prejudicial that it flourishes entirely outside the pale of reason! She listened very greedily, therefore, to Miss Popple’s rapid exposition of her suspicions. Between gossip, malice, and inventiveness, the new head milliner’s character seemed indeed in a parlous condition when Miss Popple concluded.
That wheezing breath of Miss Smithson’s was drawn with ever-increased intensity.
“Walking with the young gentleman late of an evening in the Green Park! Upon my word! If it had been you that had seen her last night, now, Miss Popple dear, instead of that poor foundling of a Mary Jane, which Madame Mirabel was saying only yesterday could scarce be trusted to match a skein of blue silk, I’d go to Madame Mirabel this minute with it, I would, being so to speak, a cousin——”
“Beware what you does, Miss Smithson, you’ll ruin all. Give her rope.”
“Rope, Miss Popple?”
“Rope to hang herself with,” said Miss Popple vindictively. “That’s in a manner of speaking. Plain, she’ll give herself away or he’ll give her away,” she had an ill-natured giggle, “so as we give them time. It’s his game to give her away, a devil-may-care hand, some young buck who only wants to have her at his mercy, just for his fun. Wasn’t he after her here—open—three afternoons out of last week?”
“After her here?” Miss Smithson again repeated her friend’s last words. She was exceedingly shocked.
“Why, mercy to goodness,” she went on in horrified tones: “Ain’t it the rule of the house? No male belongings is allowed after the young ladies here if they were grandfathers itself. And they churchwardens.”
“Oh, tush, Smithson,” interrupted Polly contemptuously. “Of course my sly young beau comes dangling in with some lady friend, to help her to choose a hat—by way of—” Polly winked. “Toosday, it was Mrs. Lafone as brought him, or, to be correct, he brought her, which, knowing the minx as I do—I refers here to Mrs. Lafone—’tis my intimate conviction ’tis he will pay for that there hat! But, as you knows, Miss Smithson, and none better, ladies’ morals ain’t our concern, thanks be, so long as we keeps our own respectable.”
Miss Smithson admitted this regrettable truth with a doleful sigh. Polly took another pull at the brew of hot spiced beer which they had concocted for their comfort this cold December night, and proceeded:
“Thursday, if Mr. Stafford doesn’t bring him along all innocent! He, with his handsome lady on his arm, up from Windsor for the day, to buy her a stylish head for a Christmas present. And, ‘What are you doing, looking in at a hat-shop window, Bellairs,’ says he, laughing and joking (’tis his way, my dear, a very agreeablegentleman!) ‘Gad,’ says he, ‘you’ve not got a wife to run you up bills! Your chinkers goes hopping out on hosses and dice and cards, and what not! Selfish fellows you bachelors are!’ And Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, bowing to Mr. Stafford and declaring he only wished he had other people’s luck—and indeed, Miss Smithson, Mrs. Stafford is a real beauty!—but all the while, my dear, who is he looking at and ogling and taking occasion to whisper to—but Miss Pounce, if you please! And if I didn’t see the way her kerchief lace was quivering with the palpitation of her heart, and her hands shaking as she took down heads for Mrs. Stafford and held them up for her—well, my name’s not Popple.”
Miss Smithson leant over the sulky coal fire and lifted the saucepan from the hob to refill her glass. Her own hands shook. That Pamela was a disgrace and would bring discredit on the whole house of Mirabel! She felt it in her bones.
“You may say so, dear.” As her friend drank, Polly Popple tendered her own tumbler for replenishment, murmuring parenthetically, however: (“Not a drop more, love. I never did hold with stimulants, only you were so pressing and it is a foggy night, I won’t deny, and a drop of cordial, a mere medical precaution, so to speak)—you may say so,” the slighted young lady of the bonnet department took up her theme with fresh gusto. “And you’d say so a million times more if you had seen them to-day. For Mr. Jocelyn comes in with my Lady Kilcroney—and oh! the bold brazenness of it!—there he stands behind my Lady’s chair and Pounce—La! I declare I’d have been sorry for her if she wasn’t what she is, the baggage—red and white and not knowing where to put her eyes with him signalling to her. Yes, and if he did not thrust a letter into her hand as I went out, you may set me down a liar. And her stuffing it into her kerchief under my very nose!”
“Don’t, dear, don’t,” moaned Miss Smithson, beating the air with her bony hand. Then, after a long pause,during which she seemed to be painfully bringing her virginal mind to confront the awful pictures just presented to it, she went on acridly: “There’ll be a bust up. When a girl comes to thatpintof disreputableness things is bound to happen. It can’t go on like this—you mark my words.”
Now, strangely enough, barring the inexactitude of the premise, such a conclusion had just formed itself in Pamela’s own mind.
It could not go on. Something was bound to happen. She had saved the life of Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs; and he had demonstrated his gratitude by promptly falling head over heels in love with her. So far, so good; or rather, so far, so bad, where a dashing young gentleman of expensive habits, small principle and remarkable fascination and a young person of the working classes are concerned. For the mischief of it was she had fallen in love with him. Poor Pamela, with her high spirit, her clear brain and her strong courage, to be betrayed by a heart as vulnerable as any silly girl’s of the lot! She was clear-sighted enough to know that, stripped of the golden glamour, the path of her romance led to a very ugly gulf. She despised herself for her weakness. She had no illusions on the quality of the attachment offered to her by Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, but, as the short December days dropped away to Christmas, she found, growing within her, a dangerous new self; a reckless creature who cried:The Devil might take the consequences; a girl was young but once; you found your fate, and had to clasp him or lose him; the one man you could love, and him only, or go wanting to your grave!
“I know it’s death and destruction some time,” said Pamela to herself, sitting hugging her knees in the neat little chamber in Shepherd Street, where she lodged with a most respectable widow woman who had once seen better times, “but isn’t it death and destruction anyhow and at once if I have to give him up?”
She re-read the letter he had slipped into her hand—theaudacious fellow—a few hours ago at Madame Mirabel’s.
“It must be yes or no, my darling lovely girl.”
My darling, lovely girl. That was what his eyes were always saying, and oh! it was sweet!
It must be yes or no! She told herself that if she couldn’t say yes, it was still more impossible to say no. Backwards and forwards she struggled with the insolvable problem, till her tallow candle expired with a great stench, and she was left in darkness and misery. Worn out with her long day she fell at last asleep, to be wakened by the call of a cock in Shepherd’s Market. Perhaps it was this farmyard cry which, weaving into her consciousness, had made her dream so strongly of the old place at home. When she woke she could hardly believe she was not in the billowing four-poster in the great attic, with pretty Sister Susie asleep beside her.
Again the cold, foggy, bleak London morning was rent by the crow of the cock. Then Pamela knew where she was, and she knew something else, too.
That other self which had got into her must not be listened to on any account. It must indeed be stamped out of existence with the utmost promptitude.
Now Pamela was considerably wiser than most young women in her position. She took a sensible resolution.
“I’ll go to Mrs. Mirabel this very morning,” she decided, “and ask for a Christmas holiday. She won’t refuse me, being the good-natured soul she is, and me so useful to her. And once I get home and feel mother’s arms about me—there! I know I’ll be all right. I needn’t be afraid of myself any more.”
Pamela Pounce took seat in the Dover coach. She was in a sedate flutter, an admirably dignified bustle. She knew to the fraction of an inch the amount of space towhich she was entitled, and she possessed herself of it determinedly. She had, besides her own agreeable person, divers bandboxes and loose parcels to place, and this she did with an amiable assurance that put protest to the blush, and set other passengers’ pretensions in a gross light. When her arrangements were concluded she heaved a sigh, presented a vague smile, and lay back, her hands folded, to survey the other travellers at leisure. She was herself better worth looking at than any of the coach-load, which contained a foreign couple, one or two of the usual bagmen on the road to France, a Dover shopkeeper, a farmer’s wife, and an elderly gentleman of delicate and serious mien, who drew an old calf-bound volume from a shabby bag, and fixed large gold-mounted spectacles upon his high, transparent nose with all the air of one prepared with solace for the journey.
But as he sat exactly opposite Miss Pamela Pounce, his shrewd, cold eyes wandered ever and anon from the print to fix itself upon her, as though—which was indeed the fact—he were puzzled in what category to place her. It was obvious to Sir Edward Cheveral, who, though impoverished, was himself a gentleman of the first water, that the ambulent nymph in front of him was not of his class, perfect as was the fit of her grey riding coat, refined and reposeful as were the hands in their long grey gloves, tasteful in its coquettishness as was the grey riding toque, set on chestnut curls, and suitably as these curling tresses, unpowdered, were smoothed away to be tied with a wide black ribbon at the back of the long proud throat.
In the first instance, no young person of family with such claims to distinction as her elaborate travelling gear pointed to, would be voyaging in the public coach unattended; in the second, in her quiet ease, and the full yet not immodest assurance of her glance, the manners of one accustomed to fight the world for herself were very obvious; in the third, there was anindefinable lack of the never-to-be-mistaken stamp of breeding.
“For all your clever counterfeit, my good girl,” reflected Sir Everard, “you haven’t the ring of the guinea gold.”
Yet he reproached himself for the accusation. Here was, after all, no counterfeit; very good metal of its kind. “Fine yellow brass,” thought he with a chuckle. “All in a good sense, my dear.”
What was she? From whence and whither speeding? Not an actress. That fresh, close-textured skin had never known paint on its flower-like surface. The cheeks were not even rouged; indeed, after the flush of bustle, the colour of them was now settling back in a curious ivory pallor, which went well with the ardent hair. No fine lady’s young woman; every movement had betrayed conscious independence. A shop-girl? The wife of some small merchant? Nay, ’twas the impersonation of maiden liberty, and what shop-girl could encompass such a wealth and detail of modishness?
She caught his gaze upon her, leaned forward and smiled. He had already noticed that her smile was rather dazzling. He quite blinked to find it addressed to himself.
“I trust, sir,” said she, “my bandboxes do not incommode you?”
“By no means, madam,” answered he civilly; and moved his long, thin legs back a further fraction beneath the seat.
“I haven’t been home,” said she, “for four years, and luggage do grow when one has five young sisters at home, sir, and presents run to hats.”
“To hats?” he repeated, with that interested air that obviates the audacity of a question.
“Along, sir,” said Miss Pounce, and her smile broadened, “with me being in the millinery business.”
She drew herself up with a very pretty and, to his mind, becoming pride.
“A business,” he said, “which I take it, madam, is in a flourishing condition.”
“You may say so, sir.” Her pride increased. “Since Miss Pamela Pounce—that’s me!—has been made head of the department, Madame Mirabel can scarce execute the vast number of orders.”
“Upon my word!” He had removed his spectacles, and was smiling on her in his turn in a kindly, detached, faintly satiric way. “I trust Madame What’s-Her-Name recognises her debt to you?”
The head milliner gave her curls ever so slight a toss.
“Well, sir, she wouldn’t like to lose me. She knows I’m worth my weight in gold to her.”
His glance flickered over her comely proportions. Tall, generously made, he had called her a nymph. “Goddess would have been the better appellation,” murmured he.
“Well, ’tis a comfort to an old man like myself to meet one so youthful to whom work is proving both fruitful and blessed.”
Miss Pamela Pounce didn’t need any old gentleman to commend her. She knew the value of work, and who better? And if it was blessed to her, why she took good care that it should be. And, as to content with her lot—sure, if she hadn’t been, she wasn’t a fool, she’d have picked out another for herself.
“’Tis some old clergyman,” she thought, and laughed. “He’ll scarce know what a hat means. Clergyman’s wives and daughters in the country would give any woman of taste bad dreams for a fortnight. There was Mrs. Prue Stafford. Had she not still to learn that to wear pink and blue with such cheeks as she had was positive vulgar? And she married to the finest of fine gentlemen.”
Sir Everard folded his spectacles, put them carefully into his breast pocket, and closed his Virgil. Here was an opportunity of studying a—to him—hitherto quiteunknown branch of humanity, after an unexpectedly pleasant fashion. The girl pleased him. He had called her brass and humoured the simile. A shining, solid composition of metal that took a handsome polish and showed itself boldly for what it was. He liked her for her spring of youth, her frank pride of her trade, for having no petty nonsense nor poor pretentiousness to pass for what she was not. He liked her brave independence. There was, he thought, a better modesty in her quiet certainty than any prudish airs and graces could have lent her.
“’Twould be a presuming fellow,” he mused, “that would dare to try his gallant ways with such an one, and if he did, I would back my young milliner to teach him a lesson.”
She told him how she had, so to speak, graduated in Paris, which accounted, thought he, for a taste that was scarcely indigenous. And her home was between Canterbury and Dover, and she, brought up till seventeen on the farm, the eldest of eleven. Then he knew whence she had drawn that sap of splendid vigour; a hardy flower of English soil. And the chief of his many prides being that he was an Englishman, he was still better content.
She would alight, she told him, at “The Rose” at Canterbury, where she would lie the night. And father would fetch her in the morning; for ’twas mortal cold across the downs on a winter’s evening, and ’twas a long drive for the mare even in good weather.
“Bravo,” said he. “I, too, halt at ‘The Rose,’ I am glad to know that I shall have such good company. May I sit beside you at supper in the eating-room, my dear young lady?”
“Oh, you’re vastly obliging, sir!” said Pamela Pounce, and a faint pink crept, like the colour of a shell, into her smooth, pale cheek, for she had a good eye for a gentleman, and she knew that she was honoured.
Her tongue ran on gaily, and he listened with a gentleair of courtesy and an interest which in truth was not assumed.
In spite of her sophisticated manner her chatter was very artless. It was a revelation of a character which had remained curiously untouched by the world. The busy mart in which she lived had cast none of its dust upon her soul.
Dear, to be sure, how prodigious joyful they would be at home to see her back!
“Four years, sir, think on it! I was but a child when I left them, and now I’m a woman!” ’Twas like, indeed, that none would recognise her again, should they just happen to meet, accidental like. She half wished she could have walked in upon them and taken them by surprise. But then: “Father, sir, would ha’ lost the pleasure of coming to fetch me,” and her mother might have been vexed. “Mother’s very house-proud, sir. She’d want to have things pretty for me, and bake cakes and that.”
And they’d all be looking out for her on the house step. Just to think of their dear faces fair turned her silly. She blinked away a tear and gave her bright smile. But as he smiled back it was with a certain melancholy. The farmer with his eleven children—poor, struggling fellow!—the hardworked mother, the good, industrious child, returning home with her hands full of gifts, blessed in her honest toil for them, were they not all about to taste joys from which he had deliberately cut himself off in his fastidious isolation? He had scarcely ever regretted his chosen solitariness. His beautiful old shabby home, set in the loneliness of the snowy park, the wood fire in the library in the company of a favourite book, the ministrations of a couple of well-drilled servants, an austere silence, a harmonious communion with the high spirits of the dead; that was the Christmas to which he himself had looked forward with complacency. Now he wondered; his heart contracted with a most unusual sense of pain; had he lost the best in life? If he had had adaughter by his shoulder with a white, pure forehead such as this girl had, and had seen her eyes fire with love, heard her voice tremble at the thought of meeting him, her old father, would not that have brought him a sweetness finer than the most exquisite page in Virgil?
The day, which had opened blue and gold, with a high wind and clear sunshine, began to gather threatening clouds by the time the posting station was reached; and the “Dover High-Flyer” plunged away again into a snow squall with all the speed of its fresh horses.
“We are like to have a seasonable Christmas,” quoth Sir Everard, and was pleased to note that, while the rest of the company grumbled and complained, the fine specimen of young womanhood opposite to him produced a warm shawl from a bundle, tucked it round her knees, and offered him the other end, declaring, with a smile, that she was as warm as a toast, and that she did love a white Christmas.
They all dined at Rochester, and had hot punch, of which Miss Pounce partook with enthusiasm, but in very discreet measure.
Conversation flagged on this, their last, stage. The snoring of the foreign pair who, having tied their heads up in terrible coloured handkerchiefs, leant against each other and gave themselves up to repose with much the same animal abandonment as that with which they had gobbled the beef-steak pie and gulped the hot rum of the “Bull Inn” at Rochester; the sighing fidgets of the farmer’s wife, and the grunts of her neighbour, the Dover tradesman, each time they jarred him from a fitful somnolence, alone broke the inner silence. Without, the multiple rhythm of the horses hoofs and the varying answer of the road to the wheels—now the scrunch of cobble stones, now the slushy whisper of the snow-filled rut, now the whirring ring of a well-metalled stretch—formed a monotonous whole which lulled to silence those who could not sleep.
Sir Everard saw, by the shifting flicker of the lamps, how pensiveness gathered on the bright face opposite him. Once or twice the girl raised a finger to the corner of her eyelid as if to press back a rising tear; sighs lifted her bosom.
“Ah!” thought the old philosopher, “the goddess of modes is not so fancy free as I had thought. Here, truly, are all the signs of a gentle love tale. Perhaps the young man in the counting-house, or some sprightly haberdasher, who sees Miss pass to her work, and would fain capture for his own counter a face so fair and charming.”
Sir Everard felt very old and stiff by the time Canterbury was reached, and half regretted his suggestion to his travelling companion, to continue their comradeship at supper. He thought it might have better become his years and aching bones to retire into a feather bed with a basin of gruel. Far indeed was he from guessing the singular emotions into which his old age was destined to be plunged that evening.
A fine room with a four-poster, no less indeed than the chamber which went by the name of “Great Queen Anne,” this was what the landlord proposed to allot to Sir Everard. A chimney you couldn’t beat in the kingdom for drawing, mine host averred, and a fire there this minute; agreeable to Sir Everard’s obliging communication. And what could he do for Miss?
Sir Everard was a little shocked to hear Miss Pounce enter upon a brisk bargain for an attic, and hesitatingly began a courteous offer of his own apartment, when she interrupted him with the valiant good sense which he had already had cause to admire in her.
“Not at all, sir! ’Tis what suits my station—so long as the sheets are clean and there’s a good bolt to the door; you’ll promise me that, Mr. Landlord? And if you can’t spare a warming pan, sure a hot brick will dovastly well. And now, sir, give me time to see my bandboxes in safety, and I’m for supper.”
Even as she spoke she started. Her eye became fixed, her lips fell open upon a gasp of amazement. The healthy white bloom of her countenance turned to deathly pallor, and then a tide of blood rushed crimsoning to her forehead. Beholding this evidence of strong emotion, it scarcely needed the sight that met Sir Everard’s glance as he followed the direction of her eyes to confirm his instant conclusion. The young man, of course! Stay, the young man is a gentleman—poor nymph! Here then were joy, and fear, confusion, the warning of conscience, and artless passion, all mixed together.
The young gentleman advanced; a fine buck, of the very kind, thought Sir Everard, who took an instantaneous dislike to him, to turn the head of any girl beneath him in station, whom he might honour with his conquering regard. There was a black and white handsomeness about his chiselled countenance; all the powder in the world could not disguise that those jet eyebrows were matched with a raven spring of hair. With a smile, a dilation of nostrils, a swagger of broad shoulders, a leisurely step of high-booted legs, he came forward out of the tap-room. No surprise on his side: my gentleman had planned the meeting.
“La, Mr. Bellairs!” Pamela Pounce exclaimed, and her voice trembled. Then she rallied, and strove to pursue with lightness, “who ever would have thought of seeing you here?”
He took her hand and lifted it to his lips with an exaggerated courtesy, as if he mocked himself for it the while.
“Why, did I not guess rightly, my dear, you would be spending a lonely evening here on your way home?”
“Oh, Mr. Bellairs!”
He kept her hand in his, to draw her apart. Sir Everard, gazing at them, his chin sunk in his muffler,with severe, sad eyes, saw how she swayed towards him, as she went into the window recess, as if her very soul floated on the music of his voice. He watched them whisper ardently together, and then she went by him like a tornado, picking up her bandboxes as she passed, quite oblivious of his presence, or of anything, apparently, save the young rascal, so Sir Everard apostrophised him, who stood gazing after her with the same insufferable smile; the smile of the easy conqueror.
Sir Everard never had had a high opinion of women. Life had given him no reason to indulge in illusions. But now all his condemnation was for the man. The strong, self-reliant creature who had faced him all those weary hours with such unalterable good humour, such a candid outlook, such a pleasant acceptance of her own position that it was the next thing to high breeding, what was this Captain Lothario planning to make of her? And how, since he had found her already so hard to win that he must travel to Canterbury for the purpose, did she now thus readily yield herself to his plucking hand? Ay, the villain had struck at some peril point in the life of her soul. The child was tired after her long journey; tired too, perhaps, by the mental conflict from which her integrity had hitherto emerged triumphant. A sudden assault had found the fortress unprepared. ’Twas the old story!
Sir Everard went wearily to his room. The thought of the feather bed and the gruel, of a selfish withdrawal from further association with what was like to end in sordid tragedy tempted him perhaps, but he did not yield to it. The girl’s smile haunted him. It had been so brightly innocent; and he was haunted, too, by the last memory of her face, stricken with astonishment, quivering with joy. However she might fall, it would not be through light-mindedness. The folly, the misery, was deep rooted in her poor heart.
He made a careful toilet, and went down the slippery oak stairs, leaning on his gold-headed cane, looking avery great personage indeed, delicately austere and nobly haughty.
Alas! Pamela never so much as lifted her radiant head when he came into the eating-room. She was seated beside her gallant at the end of the table in close conversation—that whispered, blushing, laughing, sighing conversation of lovers—and if the roof had fallen over them, Sir Everard thought, the two would scarce have noticed it, so absorbed were they in each other.
The young man had ordered champagne, and the girl’s glass was filled, but the bubbling wine had barely been touched. Another intoxication, more deadly and more sure, was working through her veins. The old philosopher, seeing her condition, resigned for the moment all thought of interference, and sat down to his bottle of claret and bowl of broth.
Hardly, however, had he broken his hot roll, than the room was invaded by fresh arrivals; a young woman, wrapped in furs, conducted by a gentleman who had not removed his travelling coat, and kept his hat pressed on his brows; a personage who entered with an intolerable arrogance as if the place belonged to him, who ordered champagne and supper for the lady, and fresh horses for his coach, in a voice which rang like the crack of a whip. He could not wait; the servers must bustle. A guinea each to the ostlers if they harnessed within ten minutes. “And, hark ye, sirrah, a bottle of your best Sillery, and——”
“Surely I know this autocratic fellow,” thought Sir Everard, and as the traveller drew his companion with an imperative sweep of his arm about her, to the end of the table opposite to that at which Mr. Bellairs and his Dulcinea were seated. “My Lord Sanquhar!” cried Sir Everard, “by all that’s outrageous! And who in the name of pity is his victim now?”
That the two were lovers, of a stage considerably more advanced than the poor milliner and her Beau, wasobvious to the onlooker, and as my Lord Sanquhar now tore his hat from his head, to dash the snow that covered it into the fire, where it hissed and spluttered like a curse, the young woman who accompanied him let herself fall on to the settle and turned a look of darkling challenge, of brooding suspicion, into the room.
She was clad in the most sumptuous garments. There was a bloom of royal purple against the tawny clouds of her sables. There was a fire of ruby at her throat, caught up and repeated at each ear, as if deep gouts of a lover’s blood had taken to themselves flame for her adorning. But the countenance she turned upon the room was, Sir Everard thought, so striking, that all this splendour seemed its natural attribute; striking with a Spanish beauty, a richness and depth of colour, with flashing orbs, high nostrils, and scarlet lips.
“Good Heavens!” Sir Everard mused, “where has he picked the jade? Victim? Nay, ’tis the kind that keeps a knife in her stocking and will whip it out and under your rib, and make an end of you with less ado than another will shed a tear. My Lord Sanquhar will have to look out for himself. Illicit love is a dangerously charged atmosphere in which to handle live gunpowder.”
The “Dover High-Flyer” had only dropped two of its passengers at “The Rose,” and the landlord was free to attend to his imperious guest. He himself served my Lord Sanquhar’s champagne, and with bent back received his “pishs” and “pshaws” on the dearth of proper entertainment for the lady. She wanted fresh fruit, and there was none. She asked for chocolate, and pettishly refused to touch it. One sniff was enough. All her desires and denials she communicated in a guttural undertone to her companion, who translated them into oaths.
Sir Everard, who had had but a poor appetite, was now, his broth bowl pushed on one side, dipping bits of roll into his wine after a foreign fashion, and watchingthe while the two sets of lovers at the further end of the room. He noticed, not without some satisfaction, that constraint had fallen upon the ardent Bellairs and his fair milliner. The colour on the young man’s face fluctuated. He bit his lip and shot doubtful looks of question from the blatant couple to the downcast countenance of his companion, who had grown very pale, scarcely spoke, and seemed now and again as if she was struggling with tears.
A clatter of hoofs, the clang of a bell, and a shout from the door announced another guest, a solitary horseman, it seemed. The landlord, who was just entering the room with a plate of dried plums in the hope of tempting the appetite of the capricious lady—he had scented my Lord’s quality with unerring nose—here thrust the dish into the hands of a waiter and turned back to receive the newcomer. He had left the door open behind him and all could hear the passionate explosion of a hoarse voice in the hall.
The dark little lady on the settle by the fire sprang to her feet, and stood, tense. Her companion gave a swift frowning look of surprise. Sir Everard, gazing upon her also, drew a quick breath. “By the immortal gods,” said he to himself, “the drama is coming swifter than one could have imagined.” And, indeed, what the ancient quiet inn was destined to hold for the next ten minutes in the way of human passion, conflict, and tragedy, might happily be never as much as guessed at in the lifetime of most men.
The landlord, his wig awry, his features discomposed, puffing and blustering, was vainly endeavouring to prevent the ingress of a small thick-set man, who though wrapped in a cloak and carrying some considerable burden, which he kept hidden under its folds, contrived by a single violent thrust of his shoulder, to send him spinning out of the way. The intruder advanced then at a headlong run, brought himself up short, flung back his cloak, and with the same gesture his hat, and stoodrevealed, swarthy, grizzled, livid, panting through dilated nostrils, glaring upon the woman by the settle. There was a great flare of colour on his broad chest, where, wound in a scarlet shawl, a little child of about two, with a head of curls of that dark copper hue destined to turn black with years, lay placidly asleep; the curve of a plump apricot cheek was all that was visible of its face.
“Good heavens,” said Sir Everard, and at the sight of the sleeping innocence, something in his old heart began to lament.
There was a moment’s extraordinary silence, broken only by the breathing of the man with the child, which hissed through his set teeth like the strokes of a saw. Then my Lord Sanquhar laughed.
The man leaped as if he had been struck. A torrent of words broke from him—guttural, fierce, intolerably anguished. Sir Everard knew a little Spanish.
The unfortunate was pleading: “Come back, come back! I will forgive all. Come back, Dolores, you cannot leave us. You cannot leave the little one. Come back in the name of God, in the name of His Holy Mother.Madre di Dios, look at her! You cannot leave that! Ah! unhappy one, you want gold and jewels. Was not our love your treasure? Is not our child a pearl? Look at her!”
In singular contrast to the unrestrained violence of his outburst, the manner in which he held out the child was pure tender. The little one woke, stared about her with devouring black eyes of amazement, caught sight of the standing woman’s face and cried, joyfully beating the air with minute dusky hands, “Mamma, mamma!”
At this a sob burst from the unhappy father, so deep and tortured it was as if it rent him.
“Dolores, our little girl, she calls you ‘Mamma, mamma!’ Call again my angel! ‘Mamma, mamma!’”
He went down on his knees and held out the babe, and as he did so she wailed.
The mother, meanwhile, stood, insolent lids half closed, red lips thrust forward, tapping the floor with impatient foot, the embodiment of cruel disdain.
At her child’s cry she stuffed her fingers into her ears with savage gesture, stamped, and flung a raging glance at her lover as one who said, “How long am I to endure this?”
He answered it by the movement of a beckoning finger, which brought her to his side. Then he cast a gold piece on the table, clapped his hat on his head, and together they moved towards the door.
“Ah! By the blessed saints!”
The Spaniard in a bound was before them. He shook the screaming infant in their faces as if it had been a weapon.
“I swear this shall not be. I swear that I shall kill you and your paramour and the child and myself rather than that this shall be.”
It was here that Pamela caught the little one from him. He was perhaps too far gone in passion to notice the action; perhaps he was glad to have his hands free for his fierce purpose—anyhow, he relaxed his hold. And the girl, clasping the baby in her arms, hushing it and soothing it, ran with it to the further end of the room. Sir Everard had also risen and Bellairs had started forward. But it would have been as easy to baulk a wild cat of its leap as to arrest the betrayed husband in his spring upon his betrayer.
No one ever quite knew how it happened. There was the flash of a knife, an oath, and my Lord Sanquhar’s “Damn you, you would have it!” and the explosion of a pistol.
The Spaniard fell without a groan, right across the doorway. Sir Everard and Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs both knew that he was a dead man before he touched the ground.
“You are witness all,” said my Lord Sanquhar, “that this was in self-defence.”
The woman cast a backward glance into the room. Her rich bloom had faded. She was white, but with a palpitating whiteness as of fire at its intensest, and the gaze of her great eyes was as fire too. Almost red they shone, repeating the blood fires of the rubies. Then she gave herself to Lord Sanquhar’s embrace, and together they rushed out into the night.
“Odds my life!” said Mr. Bellairs, looking up at Sir Everard. He had flung himself on one knee beside the stricken man, and was going through the vain parade of seeking for a pulse which he knew no longer beat. “Did you see that, sir?”
“He lifted her across her husband’s very body! He lifted her right across the body?” said Sir Everard, in a hushed voice of disgust.
“Lifted her? Sir, she jumped!”
Pamela kept the child’s face turned against her breast with a loving hand, and as she rocked and soothed, she herself wept as if her heart would break.
Through the doors, cast open to the night, the roar of a new snow wind hurtled in upon them. There followed a sudden clamour of voices, as the host endeavoured to arrest my lord’s departure and was borne down, well-nigh annihilated, from his path; the crackling shout of my lord’s orders; the plunge and clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. It seemed as if the blood-guilty pair had gone on the wings of the storm, and that the very elements cried after them as they went.
Sir Everard, as the most responsible witness, assisted the landlord in the preliminary investigation of magistrate and constable. He took a certain grim pleasure in furnishing Lord Sanquhar’s name, and trusted the nobleman might be summoned to answer for his action. Even if acquittal were a foregone conclusion, to a reputation already tarnished this incident was not likely to add a lustre. By the quality of the murdered man’s clothes, the massive gold of his watch-chain, the signet ring onhis dead hand, it was judged that he was a merchant of the better class, and that the unfortunate incident would probably make some stir among his compatriots.
The cold and stiffening body which had been so short a while before pulsing with agony and passion, was laid in the harness-room of the inn, covered with a white sheet. Scarce ten yards away the grey horse that had borne its rider on the wild race to death was placidly munching its corn, the sweat not yet dry on its flanks.
When Sir Everard returned to the eating-room he found Pamela still on the settle, the child asleep on her lap. On the board beside her a half-finished bowl of bread and milk showed that she had been occupied with the worse than motherless babe, while he had attended to the last concerns of its doomed father. On the other side of the hearth, one elbow propped on the high mantelshelf, stood Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs. The old man’s entrance had evidently interrupted a conversation between the two lovers, of an interest so vital that both the faces now turned upon him were stamped with fierce emotion.
Sir Everard removed a chair from before the table and sat down on it facing the fire, and for a space no one spoke.
Pamela had cast the scarlet shawl across one shoulder so as to shade the child’s head from the light. Her hand patted and her knees swayed, rocking the infant sleeper.
“Poor little creature!” said Sir Everard at last.
The girl gave him a quick glance.
“I’ll keep her to-night. I’ve told the landlord I would, and I’d keep her always if I could.”
“’Tis a generous thought,” said the old gentleman, with a faint smile for the magnanimous impractibilities of youth, and as he smiled he was aware that Mr. Bellairs snapped his fingers and jerked his foot on the edge of irritable outburst.
Suddenly Pamela began to sob quickly under herbreath; turned her head aside so that her tears should not fall on the little placid face.
“I’ve been a wicked girl! A wicked girl!”
“Hush!” cried Mr. Bellairs, and flung out his hand.
“No, sir; I won’t be silent!”
“But, good God, my dear, need you drag this stranger into our intimate concerns?”
“He’s no stranger to me, Mr. Bellairs. We travelled down in the coach together, and he couldn’t have been more civil to me if I’d been a lady born; no, nor kinder if he’d been my father. Oh, sir, I don’t know your name, but I know by the pitying way you looked at me that you understood what dreadful danger I was in and how—” again she sobbed—“how ready I was to yield to it! He wanted me to go to Paris with him. He did, indeed! He wanted his love to be my all-in-all, and nothing else was to matter. I’ve been a wicked girl! I listened to him. I never would listen to him before—not when he spoke like that—but to-night I did. Heaven forgive me! What took me?”
“Confound!” said Mr. Bellairs.
He wheeled away from the sight of her weeping, clutched the mantelpiece with both hands, and dropped his head on them.
“Well, ’tis all over now.”
Sir Everard spoke uneasily. This openness upon a subject so delicate was painful to him, but Pamela had the yearning to relieve herself by confession.
“Oh, sir, how could I do it? I don’t know myself. I swear when I look back ’tis as if I had not been myself at all. Something came into me—so rash, so desperate! ’Twas as if nothing mattered but just his love, our love. And then—then—when those two came in I saw our sin as it was. Oh, heavens! Oh, Heaven forgive me! Murder and every evil was there. Would I not have been just as cruel, done just as horrid murder? When the truth came out, would my father and mother and my own dear loves at home, waiting for me so fond and so trusting,and so proud of their poor, silly Pam, ever have held up their heads again? Oh, base, base! I would have murdered them for my pleasure. And that love, what was it? The thing that those two looked at each other, something vile, something that brought contamination even just to see go between them. Did he and I look at each other like that? It turned me sick even to think on, even before—before that poor, poor man came in! Heaven forgive me! Heaven strike those two in their bad hearts! Oh, sir, did you look at her when she stared back upon us, that woman? I suppose there was beauty in her face; I suppose he who went with her thought her handsome airs worth the cruelty and the blood and the crime on his soul. But to me she was ugly, all ugly, with the ugliness of her sin——”
She broke off, bit her quivering lip, and stared fixedly before her; an expression of horror on her countenance as if she still beheld the ugliness of which she spoke.
Mr. Bellairs straightened himself and snapped his fingers again.
“Tall talk, my dear,” he began; and then broke off, dropped his eyes under Sir Everard’s stern gaze, and stood abashed. Then: “Perhaps you’re right,” he said in an altered, strangled voice; and dashed from the room as if driven.
Pamela started, glanced after him, and then wiped her wet cheeks with the end of the baby’s shawl.
“Let him go,” she said.
“You’re a brave girl.”
“Oh no, sir! Only so grateful, so wonderfully saved, so ashamed. Oh, this little creature against my breast—must I not feel it—think of it—if I had had my foolish way I should never have been worthy to hold such a lovely, lovely little dear in my arms again.”
Sir Everard insisted on lighting Pamela to her attic chamber. She went up before him with a step so elastic,in spite of the burden of the child in her arms, that she had to wait for him on every landing; which she did with a return of her bright amiability and even a flicker of its former radiance in her smile. Each time she halted she rocked the baby, swaying from foot to foot, murmuring under her breath a crooning song which the old man thought very sweet; so sweet indeed, that, with a swing of memory’s pendulum it brought him back to his own childhood’s days and the tender face of his mother, long dead—a mother who had never been old like him.
On the threshold of her poor room they parted. She spared him her right hand for a second from its motherly caressing and patting of the child which she bore with such ease on her left arm. He bowed over it as if it had been his queen’s.
When he went down to the flaming hearth which justified the landlord’s boast, he sat long by it.
He, who had hitherto lived apart in a world of books, found his mind obsessed by the thought of the frightful passions of humanity as they had this night played themselves out before him.
The whole scene reproduced itself in his tired brain with the colours of life; Lord Sanquhar’s sardonic, pale, haughty face, the rich vividness, the unblessed allurement, the cruel beauty of the unfaithful wife; the Spaniard’s agony; the irredeemable tragedy of that picture of the father with the child; then the dead face.
“Heaven strike their bad hearts!” had cried Pamela in her honest revulsion. Could God ever forgive those who had sent forth the soul of their victim so charged with fury and despair that even death could bring no peace to his brow?
And then he thought of Pamela’s face as he had last seen it—pale, tear-stained, but with the old luminous innocence. And, after all, he thought, there had come good out of the evil.
“The providence of God is over us all,” he thought with gratitude, as he rose stiffly to seek that feather bed,where there was small likelihood of sleep that night for him.
He heard the call of a coach horn beyond, in the night, and immediately afterwards the mighty clatter of the four sets of hoofs and the rush of the wheels in the streets. He went to his window, opened it, and looked out.
The up coach from Dover, pausing only to drop a single passenger. Stay, to take up a passenger, too. Sir Everard recognised the swing of the shoulders, the tall, alert frame, the indefinable swagger, even though muffled in the many-caped travelling coat.
Young Bellairs was not going to Paris with a fair companion!
“Thank Heaven!” said Sir Everard.