“Submission to what?” said he. “You were offered food, and refused it. But I have brought you some bread.”
He held out to me a dry crust. I turned from it in anger.
“O, very well!” said he, and was returning it to his pocket.
Then physical need conquered me. I could not face the thought of another day’s starvation. I sat up, and held out my hands.
“If you will be so cruel,” I said. “Let me have it, please.”
He gave it to me at once, stood by with a sort of sombre smile on his face, while I appeased my ravenous first hunger.
“That’s right,” he said. “Are you better? There was room for improvement.”
I did not answer.
“Well, are you quite good now?” said he.
My throat began to swell again.
“You treat me like a child!” I cried.
“Yes,” he said, “because it’s only little girls who quarrel with their bread and butter.”
“Haven’t you punished me enough already?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “But, if more’s wanted, I hope it will be with less smart to myself.”
I laughed through my tears.
“O, I mean nothing sentimental,” said he; “but only that,myroom being next to yours, and the common ladder to both conducting throughyourroom, I’ve been forced by your wilfulness to sleep all night below in a chair. But we’ll remedy that somehow with a screen, and so settle any question of precedence in going to bed.”
I stared at him, half fearfully.
“Why have you brought me here?” I whispered.
“What! again?” he said, shaking a finger at me.
“It seems, for no reason but to humble and abuse me. I was happy with poor Gogo.”
“Damn Gogo!” he said, in such a sudden heat that it brought a cry from me. Then, all in an instant, to my amazement and distress, he had fallen on his knees beside the bed.
“What is Gogo to you, or you to him?” he cried, in a low, intense voice. “Has he ruined himself for you as I have done? Has he risked death, destruction, madness? pined for you in dreams, and plotted to gain you waking, as I have ever since you, a child, took my reason by storm, and bound it to you by golden chains?”
His fervour and passion quite overwhelmed me. I could only cower, trembling, before him.
“What do you mean?” I whispered. “How have you ruined yourself—for my sake?”
He caught at my hands. He was breathing fast and thick.
“O, child, you don’t know!” he cried—“the peril that has dogged you—the love that has foreseen and provided—not for a moment the truth of how my heart bled to hurt you. Now—now! O, will you not come to me and hear?”
“No,” I whispered, in a hurry of emotion. “For pity’s sake leave me! I will come to you presently: I will, indeed.”
He rose to his feet at once, commanding himself. He was all changed—softened and transfigured. I felt swimming on the edge of a whirlpool—fighting giddily against some helpless, rapturous plunge to which I was being urged. I longed only for breathing time—some little space to be alone in.
He went and stood by the trap: “I will wait for you,” he said hoarsely; and so descended, closed it behind him, and was gone.
When, in an hour, I rejoined him, he was pacing the cellar like a caged wolf. He uttered a glad exclamation upon seeing me, and took my hand and led me to a stool. He was himself again, but with a new strange wistfulness in his gaiety.
“You will not mind the ‘sewer’ now?” said he. “And presently you will ask me everything, and I will tell you.”
He drew in our breakfast, by the same method as before; and I could at last enjoy my collops with a free conscience and appetite. Then, our meal over, he drew his stool beside me, and, without offering to smoke, started upon his relation.
“But, first,” said he, kindling, “ask me where you are.”
“Short explanations suit me best,” I said. “Immured in a wall. Is not that enough?”
“Quite, for me,” said he, “since you are here. But whose wall, now?”
I shook my head.
“Why, in Ranger Portlock’s cottage,” said he, “buried, out of all whooping, in the forest. Would you like to be introduced to your host?”
“Yes, if you please,” I said. “Will you call him in?”
He laughed.
“Mahomet will have to go to the mountain. You will understand why, when you see it. Well, for this cottage. Did you mark its position in the dark? Poor little bewildered brain—poor little brain! Harkee!” (He was fondly touching and smoothing the hair on my temples.) “I loved this Diana as a little girl. What a phenomenal brother, to be sure! This cottage you are in, child—did you not observe?—lies snuggled in the shoulder of the hill, warm as a baby in its mother’s arm—as warm and as safe too. Its back wall here” (he turned and tapped the plaster) “is just a windowless buttress, built strong against any chance falling of the soil beyond. This” (he pointed to the inner wall) “terminates the kitchen, and not the house itself, as a body entering the building is meant to suppose. ’Tis a blind, as one might call it, and not discernible from the outside to any but a conjurer.”
“And there?” I said, pointing to the closed door at the end.
“That, madam,” said he, with some momentary return to dryness, “is Bluebeard’s Chamber, if you please, and not at present in the articles of discussion.”
I was surprised—a little startled, perhaps—but said no more; and he went on—
“Well, now: this same cottage is a half-timbered structure, very ancient, and as full of odd little compartments as a bureau. Where we lie is its secret drawers, Diana, a nest of ’em—two below and two over. And how to reach here, miss? Ay, there’s the master stroke you’d never guess. No, ’tis no way by the door yonder.”
“If you please, sir,” says I, “if ’twas left to my innocence to decide, I should e’en choose the way the tray went.”
“Well, come and look,” says he, and made me go and stoop to the hole. To my surprise, it was closed, and black.
“’Twas not so I saw it last night,” I said, rising.
“What!” cried he, “you were prowling, were you? Thank you kindly for the hint”—and he gave a great laugh, but sobered in a moment.
“Did you listen, then?” said he.
“I was going to,” I answered; “but the moment I bent, your chairs moved, and I was frightened, and ran away.”
“That sounds frank,” said he. He sat musing a little. “You’re a child, ’tis true, mutable and thoughtless; but where could be the harm? If the secret were mine only— Well, study for my confidence, and some day, perhaps”—
He broke off with a smile, which I had a difficulty to return. So therewasa mystery in reality. There and then I vowed a Delilah oath to myself to get the better of it.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said; “I had no thought to surprise any secrets. Is that the way through, indeed?”
“Yes,” he said; “fairly, it is. ’Tis pierced under the big copper in the kitchen, which has a detachable grate to be pulled all out in one piece. God knows the original use of this contrivance—this space in the wall—unless ’twere always for the purpose that we”—(he checked himself again). “Anyhow, ’tis utterly inaccessible else, save by way of the skylight which your ladyship knows; and now you’re acquainted with your prison, ask me further what you will.”
“RangerPortlock, did you say?”
“Ay, ranger; once my brother’s keeper (not like Cain, unhappily), and since promoted.”
“You seem to love your brother.”
“I have reason.”
“And this Portlock is still in his service?”
“Yes.”
“And inyourconfidence?”
“Ay, is he not! I must tell you I am a proper sportsman, madam, and always more popular with Hardrough’s people than the noble verderer himself. Well, I have taught them something here and there, and put money in their pockets, maybe. Have no fear. Not Portlock nor any other will betray us. I have my merry men of Down, who sink or swim with me. And now I have my Maid Marian. What more? You shall see this Portlock. Bear in mind he was once a thread-paper of a man. I have known him since I was a boy. What else?”
“Can you ask me?” I said low, hanging my head. “The reason—what you hinted up there—why you are ruined and in hiding?”
He ventured to put an arm about me. How could I refuse him, who was my Bayard? Yet, when he told me, it was not all. He never to the end acquainted me of what social dereliction of his had originally delivered him into the earl his brother’s power, and placed him and his remnant fortunes under the hand of that remorseless nobleman to use and crush at his will. He never even admitted but indirectly that stain on his birth, in which a high person was whispered to be implicated, and which was at the root, perhaps, of all the trouble.
“He always hated me,” he said of the Lord Herring; “and never more than when he foresaw my succession in the death of his promising limb, my nephew.”
“What, is he dead?” I asked, astonished.
“No,” he said, “but only rotten. He will never come into the title, believe me.”
“And you,” I said, curiously interested. “How will he keep you out, if the worst should happen to him?”
“Why,” he said, “he would threaten an inquiry, an exposure; and there are those who, rather than suffer it, would countenance his quiet disposal of me—have done so, perhaps, already. And there you come in.”
“Me!” I cried.
“Child,” he responded, “how can I speak it without offence? You have long been marked down by this man, my brother, for his prey. I have known it, trust me, and writhed under the knowledge. But you were in proper hands, and he must bide his opportunity. Believe me, he was no privy to Sophia’s schemes of husbandry. Had he guessed, he would have anticipated the end, so far as you was concerned, by carrying you away by force. When he learned the truth at last, he was mad. But he recovered his sanity on reflection. It was no bad thing to let you ripen in that hell for his purposes—to subdue you by that torture to his will. Then, when reduced, he would exchange your sweet person with Dr. Peel for mine, would sell me to your place in the madhouse, so killing his two birds with one wicked stone. But his plan miscarried. I had a friend in the household—someone, a poor dancer, whom he had used for a day and thrown aside. She revealed all to me, and I fled, leaving him only my bitter curse for legacy. And I came here, into hiding, to mature my plans for revenge—came back to Nature, renouncing my kindred and all the vile social policies of a world I had got to loathe. He had beggared me, and I would fleece the plunderer. He had thought to debauch my love, and I would disappoint him of even that moiety of his bargain. Have I done so? Judge, if he loved me before, how he would spare me now, who have baffled his schemes and stolen his dear! A knowledge of but half the truth has already, in these few weeks, set him turning every stone to discover where I lie; but I am well served by my friends. He would burn the forest if he guessed the whole. As you regard me, as you value yourself, child, concede nothing to chance—not so much as a peep over the roof. Ay, I know your activity. But you must lie close as a hare if you would be safe—through these first days of peril, at least. Later, when the chase less presses, you may venture out, perhaps, by the ladder; but always with infinite caution, as you love me. Little sister, do you agree?”
I buried my face in my hands. My whole heart cried out on the cruel tyranny of a code that could let such monsters as this wreak their passions on the pure and innocent, and yet find absolution. O, that I could find a way, in the lawful junction of our fortunes, to vindicate this dear oppressed creature, and establish him in his rights before the world! I leaned to him, with wet eyes.
“If you lovemeso, brother,” I murmured, “what made you behave so cruel to me?”
He gave a happy, low laugh, and tightened his hold.
“Why, dear,” he said, “are not a woman’s extremes of love all for the man who will beat her, or the man she can cherish and protect? I vow I chose only my natural part.”
“Well,” said I, “I’m glad you stopped short of the beating. It would only have stiffened me, like cream.”
“Whipt cream is very good with cherries,” said he, and bent to my lips.
But I started from him gaily, and leapt to my feet.
“Come,” I said; “I’m waiting to be introduced to Mr. Portlock.”
He laughed, and stretched himself, and, rising, stooped to the hole in the wall and scratched with his finger, like a rat gnawing, on the iron stop therein. In a little something was withdrawn, and a weak wash of light flowed through.
“Now,” said he, “I will go first, and do you follow, little mouse.”
He dropped on his hands and knees, and crawled in, and disappeared. It was an attitude that lacked romance, and I was glad there was none behind to witness my passing. But the journey was so short that I was hardly in before my head was free on the farther side; and in a moment George had helped me to my feet, and I saw our host.
I saw nothing else, indeed. There were, I believe, the open range, and herb-hung rafters, and settle and dresser of the ordinary cottager’s kitchen. The huge creature before me absorbed three-fourths of the field of my vision. I understood at once why Mahomet must come to the mountain.
He had an enormous tallowy face, had this person, with an expression so excessively melting that it might have been said to be no expression at all. He could have had no more intimacy with his own skeleton than a hippopotamus. Ages ago he must have left it buried within himself as useless, and turned his wits to balancing on the twin globes of fat that were his legs. His eyes were slits, his nose a wart, his mouth the mere orifice of a blow-pipe. If his neck by any possibility had been broken, one might have stretched it till his head touched the ceiling.
I was conscious of George standing by watching me, and instinctively I dropped a curtsey. Immediately the mountain rumbled, and dusted a chair for my reception. It swung in his vast hand like a signboard from an inn. Relatively, I had some fear of sitting on it; it looked for a moment so like a doll’s.
“Mr. Portlock,” I murmured, casting down my eyes, “I—I am your humble servant, sir.”
He bowed—bagged, would be the better expression. The whole weight of his chin was against his recovery; but he managed it, with an effort.
“You—you are very good to give me shelter,” said I. “I’m afraid we—we shall crowd you dreadfully, sir.”
A low gale vibrated in him somewhere. I seemed to be able to detach certain indistinct utterances from it, of which “welcome: what can do: Maid Marian” were the clearest.
I made an effort to respond fitly—struggled, and was dumb. Then, in a moment—I saw George with his hand to his mouth—the demon exploded in me.
“Were you—were you always like that?” I shrieked, and fell across my chair-back, half hysteric.
The poor fellow may have laughed himself—there was no guessing what emotions that curtain of flesh concealed—but he looked, if anything, more abashed than offended.
“Hush!” said George, recovering himself, “or I must drag you back, miss.”
We shook, facing one another with gleaming eyes and teeth.
“Didn’t I tell you,” he gasped, “that he was a thread-paper of a man once?”
He went and clapped a hand on the mountain’s shoulder.
“Come, Johnny, no offence,” said he. “None knows better than her ladyship that your heart’s in the right place.”
I subdued myself by a vast effort, and rose, and went to conciliate the poor creature.
“Haven’t I reason to?” I said. “And—and I put my faith in you, sir; and—and faith moves mountains”—and I was near off again.
He shifted, and flushed faintly, and delivered himself once more.
“’Tis the wittles—have done it.”
“He means,” said George, “that he’s made up for lost time and opportunities, since his promotion.”
“Ay, ’twas the nerves,” went on the oracle—“kep’ me down—once. Shook, I did—hear thunder. Walk a mile round—avoid row. When the crows holloa’d—see funeral pass—turned blood water. ’Twas lack ballast—that was it.”
“Of course,” said George, “that was it. What a coward you was, Johnny, in your thin time. D’you remember the day we shot the home covers, with a great person for company, and the sky came raining cobwebs, so that we were near stifled with ’em; and you stuck your head in a bush, till we gave you with our ramrods something better than cobwebs to roar about?”
“Ay, I do,” said the mountain, and rumbled again. “Not much cobweb—’bout me now.”
Well, I told him that one couldn’t have too much of a good thing; and very soon we were fast friends. But that morning George haled me back into shelter before much was said; and afterwards our acquaintance ripened by fits and starts. The very immobility of the creature was our and his salvation. There was no conscious expression to betray itself on that vast desert of a countenance. Periodically, he was visited by the steward; fitfully, by units of the hunt which his lordship sought to lay on his vanished brother’s trail. He was never, so far as I knew, suspected; and with the deepening of winter the chase slackened.
And, in the meantime, what was I doing there, buried alive like a recreant novice in the wall? Wilt thou believe, Alcide, that I, with all my free aspirations, could have remained at peace in the little prison for a day? Well, with rare excursions beyond, and those not till I had been long immured, I lived there for more than a year, and was near all the time as happy as a swallow under the eaves. It is love makes the dimensions of our estate.
Itwas not till early in the second spring of my idyll that the clouds began to darken, and my conscience to stir uneasily in those gloomy last hours before the final waking. Many things had contributed to this state, some cardinal, but most, no doubt, indifferent—mere little tributary streams which had come to swell the volume of my disenchantment. Misunderstanding, alas! does not walk to challenge us on the highway. It spies from behind hedges, and listens at keyholes; and when at length its tally of grievances is made, we wonder at the weight of the evidence it has accumulated.
Late in the previous year I had been very ill. During the worst of my disorder an unconscionable old hag, some withered afreet of the forest, who was in the secret of our retreat, had been brought in to attend me. She disappeared soon, thank God, in a whisk of sulphur; and thereafter George nursed me devotedly. But, strangely enough, as I grew convalescent I developed an odd impatience of him, which rose by degrees to a real intolerance and dislike. That feeling abated as I grew strong, but never to such degree as to make us again quite the friends we had been. He made some study to propitiate me, even to the extent of renouncing those ridiculous principles of “Nature,” which he had affected to exchange for the whole sum of social accommodations. It was a relief, though an aggravation, to have him refine himself again out of a savage, since I no longer could find the entertainment I once had in the dearposeur. Orson, in truth, was never so little attractive as when, for the sake of tired love’s favour, he confessed his ruggedness a humbug. His recantation, though welcome enough in one way, only disillusioned me in another. So long as he had been consistent, he was absolute; now his weakness had made me so. I remembered the times when I had pleaded with him, and had found him only more covetable in his inaccessibility to my arguments.
“We can’t return to Nature, in the sense of rudeness,” I had often said to him, “any more than we can recover our childhood. We have grown out of it, and there’s an end. A man playing the child is only sorry make-believe; or, if it isn’t, the man’s an idiot. Nature herself, you see, isn’t stationary: she’s always refining on her first conceptions.”
“What!” he would protest, grumbling; “is all that hypocrisy of ‘breeding,’ that highgoût, which is so fastidious in its appetite for crawling meats, and rotten policies, and bruised virtues, Nature?”
“Yes, to be sure,” I would answer: “’tishumannature—the fruits of her desire to hasten her social apotheosis by a union with the sons of God.”
“Ay,” would growl my Timon—“the fruits of incontinence.”
“I don’t see it,” I would cry. “I can’t see but that a knife and fork are in the right succession to a beak. We may use our fingers, you will say. Would you wish me, sir, to fondle my love with the same hands I tear my meat withal? No, you wouldn’t—except for the sake of argument,—and therefore I protest I am the truer child of that little liaison.Vive la Nature!say I; the Nature who is my mother, and the God who is my father. They have taught me between them to study, in studying myself, to make the gift of prettiness to my neighbours.”
“And I swear you are a dutiful child,” he would answer, with the readiness that made me love him.
“O, believe me, sir!” I would cry; “there is nothing artificial about the civilisation you have professed to renounce—as if that were responsible for your downfall. On its main lines it always makes for beauty”—
“Which is truth, I suppose,” he would interrupt with a sneer.
“Which is truth, as much as anything is,” I would reply. “Truth is only a cant word for what we don’t understand; and, if we could get to, there would be an end of all fun in the world.”
“O, upon my word, you are a very learned minx!” he would crow; but I would continue, not minding him—
“If we had to start again from the beginning, don’t tell me but that we should develop the very same conventions as now, or at least near ’em. Why, sir, not to lean our elbows on the table, for instance, while we sup our tea, isn’t a tyrannous edict of society. ’Tis a natural recognition of the unhandsome; a natural effort to qualify ourselves for the better company we all look to some day. Don’t we all feel that we are only rehearsing here for a greater piece? Well, for my part, I don’t want to be damned in it. But you—you cry, like a poor actor, ‘Leave me alone to my pipe and beer. I shall be all right on the night itself!’”
Then he would laugh bravo; and, pulling out his tobacco, silence me with a kiss.
But now—well, he had abdicated, and I ruled, that was the difference.
There had been a time when I would have consolidated the understanding between us by taking, on the first dawn of liberty, our friendship to church. In those days, indeed, I even hinted as much to him, touching upon the duty he owed me so to establish my innocence with the world. Then he would fall back upon his cant of Nature; of vows dishonoured in her sight; of laws that crossed the plainest mandate that ever she had given to earth. And I must be content at the time, because we were helpless outcasts together, because he was kind to me, because he flattered me with a thousand attentions which made me forget the equivocalness of my position.
But now, at the last, it was he must sue and I be cold. For, under our altered relations, I had come to recognise, though late, how wrong was this continued communion, however platonic, between us. It was not that I loved my brother less, but that I respected myself more. I had been blinded by all the novelty and glamour. He was pagan at heart, I saw, and I was at heart religious. My thoughts turned with affection to the quiet nunnery at Wellcot. I longed to see my kind again, to recover something of the world I had lost. I had no real faith in his protestations, no real belief that, should it ever chance to him to recover his rights—which, in truth, seemed impossible—he would claim me to my legitimate share in them. And I found no room in my world for a paradise of sinful loves.
He sighed much, and was very pathetic, poor fellow, over my changed attitude, and wearied me to death. Then he took to verse, and depressed me more. He had a strange faculty for a sort of big-sounding line, which he would invent and declaim in his odd moments while engaged over mending his snares or sewing buttons on his gaiters. It was quite impressive in its place, but was not exhilarating when applied toles amours.
“This world” (he declared once) “is but the weed-heap of the spheres,Whereon we rot and fester, torn from the skies,And are consumed in fire, to manureAnd quicken old fields of heaven with new love.O, sweet! wind with me on the damnéd pile,So of our mingled dust shall blossom heaven”—
“This world” (he declared once) “is but the weed-heap of the spheres,Whereon we rot and fester, torn from the skies,And are consumed in fire, to manureAnd quicken old fields of heaven with new love.O, sweet! wind with me on the damnéd pile,So of our mingled dust shall blossom heaven”—
“This world” (he declared once) “is but the weed-heap of the spheres,
Whereon we rot and fester, torn from the skies,
And are consumed in fire, to manure
And quicken old fields of heaven with new love.
O, sweet! wind with me on the damnéd pile,
So of our mingled dust shall blossom heaven”—
A romantic use to put your poor little Diana to, eh, my friend? But, indeed, I would have none of it. I hate that fashion of decrying the flesh, because your poet has a stomachache. My body is the only certain God I know in the midst of these shadows. I cling to it, worshipping it with all the pretty gifts I can think. When it goes, where shall I be? Seeking and crying for it again through space. I will not have it abused to such uses, my sweet body that I love so.
Well, it had all vastly interested me once: the fond, comical incongruity; the unexpected soul of my Nimrod revealing itself through suffering. He did not, dear simpleton, in the least understand his own inconsistency: how, loving all birds and beasts, as he professed to do, and so claiming affinity with Nature, he could use and approve the latest engines of civilisation for their slaughter. He called the red deer “the spirit of the antlered tree,” and went to shoot it with a gun. He made me a pretty waistcoat of squirrel skins (I went sweetly befurred, indeed, throughout the cold winters), and dwelt lovingly on the primeval romance of woodlands, meaning, in fact, that rapture of flight and pursuit of visible things which alone appeals to the unredeemed barbarian. In the end, to speak truth, his mad rhapsodies came to remind me, only too uncomfortably, of the dead astrologer; and I looked askance on what seemed a common derivation from a crazy stock.
But now, lest it appear that I attach too much importance to these minor discords, let me relate of the much darker and more formidable shadow which had arisen between us, and which, as the months but added to its density, grew at last to be the insuperable barrier to our reconciliation.
It was thesecretdividing us—the secret which I had once half surprised, and to the existence of which he had virtually confessed, only, it seemed, to torture me by withholding it. This much alone I knew: that he went somehow practising, in his banishment, to be revenged on the society which he held responsible for it. Often, at first, I tried to coax the truth from him. He was not, for all his love, to be beguiled. There were others concerned, he said, who by no means shared his faith in my discretion; with whom, in fact, he had come to open dispute on the subject of my continued sojourn in the cottage, and whom, in the end, he had had to propitiate—seeing his safety lay in their hands—by a vow to reveal nothing to me.
I had no doubt, in my heart, but that these unknown were the “merry men” of his boasting—woodmen, verderers, perhaps, who—treacherous to the earl their master—were aiding and abetting the exile in those very malpractices he concealed from me. I was right as to that, it appeared; but what I could never understand was the nature of my reputation with them: how they had so learned to misapprehend my character for faith and loyalty. However, mistaken as they were, they had nothing to complain of their leader’s constancy to his oath—a constancy, alas! which I can only not commend because of its miserable sequel. If he had only had the strength to trust me, neither would he have lost his liberty, nor I been condemned to the torments of a quite unmerited remorse. At this date of time, I can insist, with a clear but sorrowful conscience, that the poor infatuated fool brought what happened upon his own head.
When I recognised at last that he was adamant to my pleadings, I waived the subject, but not by any means my private concern in it. The secret, I was naturally enough convinced, lay to be revealed behind the locked door of that Bluebeard Chamber; and one night—after my friend had gone out—I took a taper and my courage in hand, and descended softly through the trap to investigate.
After he had gone out, I say; and therein lay the key to my growing apprehensions. For not many days had I been in hiding before I discovered that my comrade was a night-walker. He would wait, soft-shut into his room, until he fancied I was drowned in sleep, then list-footed creep out and by the screen—which he had put up to protect me—and either descend by way of the trap, or, less often, mounting the ladder which communicated with the hidden gully, disappear, and pull his means of exit after him. Then I would wait, shivering and wondering through the whole gamut of formless fears, till stupor overtook me, or perhaps by and by, after long hours, a terrified half-consciousness of his stealthy return.
Where did he thus nightly go? To what dark business or witches’ frolic? I tormented my brain for the solution, and of my love and loyalty could find none. But the poison of a yet-unrealised fear was working in me early.
Now, on this night, waking out of tormented dreams, I was on the instant desperate to solve the mystery. But hardly had I crossed the little cellar when a warning rumble from Portlock, seated in the room beyond, told me that I was discovered. So this vast creature was in the conspiracy! Quite panic-struck, I fled, and, mounting to my room—found George there. He had returned, descending by the ladder, during the minute of my absence.
He made no allusion whatever to my escapade; but just laughed softly, and took my cold hand in his, as I stood trembling and aghast before him.
“Poor little maid,” he said; “she has been dreaming”—and he led me to my bed, and tucked me in warm, and left me with a kiss.
I never thought it necessary to confess; but always after that, as I came to learn, he descended by the trap andbolted it behind him.
That did not assuage my fears, though it was some comfort henceforth to be spared the pretence of blindness to his flittings—a comfort, I think, to him as well as to me, though his silence on the main point was not to be broken. Ah! if he had only had the courage to set my mind at rest, before its fears grew to a frenzy beyond my control!
Now, as time went on, my hearing grew morbidly acute—during the dark hours of his nightly absences, when I was fastened lonely and frightened into my attic, and sleep refused to come to me—to certain shufflings and whisperings—sounds scarce to be distinguished from the wind and the rain—which filtered to me from the depths below. Sometimes it would seem a sough of blown voices; sometimes a suggestion ofdragging; sometimes the low rumble of a cart on the turf, which set my pulses knocking in my ears. Then when, succeeding an ominous silence, George’s step would come mounting stealthily by the trap, on tiptoe thence to his room, I would shudder in the thought of dreadful footprints going by my screen, and would feign the deep-breathing of slumber, lest he should be moved to stop and call to me softly in the voice I had not yet learned to resist.
And so at last, out of all this torment of apprehension, out of the sleepless waitings and breathless listenings, had emerged a spectre, real and present in the end, to whose whispered hauntings I had long struggled to close my ears; whose approach I had sought to stay, beating my hands in air; whose name I had not dared to breathe to myself. And it wasmurder.
Yes, murder. So only, and only so, was logically expounded that perverted creed of Nature. Livid, terrifying, his hands stained with blood, I saw him in its ghastly glair; saw him savagely wreaking on the social order the wrongs he had suffered at its hands; saw him reverted to the beast he worshipped, tearing his kind, a common robber and assassin.
I will not say that I was convinced and overwhelmed in a breath. For long the hideous shadow of the phantom was poor proof against the sun of present love; would thin, attenuate to a mere gross mist in the light of kind embraces, and honest laughter, and a manly candour—on all, alas! but the subject that most corroded. Only when that later spectre of our estrangement crept between, did it assume a dreadful complexion, glooming through the other. And so, at last, the appalling confirmation.
It had been for weeks a terror to me to creep by the secret passage into Portlock’s kitchen, on the rare occasions when my brief visits there, for the sake of some small change and play of liberty, were invited. For the hole entered close by the locked door, which had come to figure to me for the seal on all most nameless horrors; and I could not pass it by but with averted head, and nostrils held from breathing, and a sickness like to the death I felt it contained. Rather would I strain a little the chance of capture without; and often now, when George was sleeping—for he lay late after his night excursions—I would put the ladder to the hill, and climb, and wander in the hidden furrow above, sometimes as far as the gravel-pit, and there indulge my misery, daring even at the worst a thought of escape. For at length, so far as we knew, the chase of us had ceased altogether, and Portlock was no longer interrogated for possible information.
Wandering thus, greatly unhappy, my thoughts would often recur for shelter to the peaceful nunnery; to my little loving Patty, the dearest pleader of a sister’s repentance; most, and with a self-humbling remorse, to the faithful, unexacting soul whom I had deserted in the tower. What if I had been misled by specious arguments to wound incurably where I had wrought to cure? Could I ever in that case forgive the false advocate? O, surely there was a greater Nature than she in whose name were perpetrated deeds of violence and reprisal? There was the human, the humorous, the tolerant large philosophy of being which Gogo had revealed in his story of himself.Hismisfortunes had but made him forswear the false goddess in whom weaker men sought to justify their passions. I could never think of him but as the Pan of these later days—the poor limping Pan of our era, beguiled into a hospital, and persuaded to an operation, and shorn of his limp and his legs together. One might meet him begging on a city bridge, and look wondering down for the song of the water in the rushes that were not; one might read his hairy breast into dreams of red dead bracken, and see his eyes, under their matted brows, like little forest pools reflecting glimpses of the sky, and not guess who he was, for he would never whine of better days. He always took fortune like a fallen god, did Gogo. He always smelt sweet, did my monster. And he had not erred in love before he found me.
Could that be said of another? I was never quite able to forget that discarded favourite who had warned a threatened brother and assisted him to escape. Though I had never deigned to give the thought place in my mind, the unacknowledged shadow of it, of what had been her inducement to the act, slept in me, to rise presently and add its quota of darkness to the whole. I was very unhappy—very forlorn and tired and unhappy.
But, on that morning, as it blew bitter cold without, and I longed for the fire that was never ours in that chill cellar but by proxy of the chimney-back, I brought myself to go down, and scratch out the signal to Portlock to let me pass if it were practicable. He responded at once, drawing away the grate; and I crept in and through, and stood up on the farther side. Instantly a grumpy exclamation from him, as instantly clapped back with his great hand on his mouth, took my eyes to my skirt, whereto for a flash I had seen his directed. And there, smearing the pale folds of it, was a long, foul streak of blood.
“Where did this come from?” I cried in a dismayed voice, for the moment too shocked to reflect.
I fancied he shook upon his great gelatinous calves, that the little eyes set in the vast oyster of his face were blinking shiftily, alert to my movements while he turned over the dull masses of his brain for an answer.
“Rabbits—dinner,” at length he rumbled.
But I had realised it all while he stuck fast. Desperate in my heart-sickness, I made a hurried step to pass him; and instantly he moved backwards, and filled the doorway into the little front parlour by way of which I had hoped to escape into the forest.
“Let me pass,” I cried wildly. “I want air.”
He pointed to the copper.
“Not safe. That way.”
“I can’t,” I cried. “It was there I picked this up: you know it was.” Then I quite lost my reason. “You are a murderer!” I shrieked. “You are all murderers here! You rob and kill, and drag the poor bodies through and hide them in the cellar behind the door. Let me pass—I can’t live here—I can bear it no longer!”
I raved and cried; I beat helplessly on that huge drum of flesh. It stood stolid, insensible, completely stopping the aperture.
“Go—ask cap’en,” was all it said.
I fell back from him on the word. The sense of an immediate necessity of self-control was flashed upon my consciousness. Above or below—either way my passage was guarded. I was between the devil and the deep sea; and, in an irrepressible burst of frenzy, I had confessed myself, let slip my tortured demon, and so, perhaps, spoken my own death-sentence. The terror of the thought drove out the lesser loathing. I must temporise—finesse.
“Yes,” I said, “I will. I will not rest now till I know.”
The return by that foul sewer, the fearful issue by the closed door, were experiences as horrible as any in my life. What crawling thread might not be still drawing from the obscure reservoir beyond? What hideous witness not fastening silent to me in the darkness, that it might rise with my rising and shriek to the light for vengeance? But I forced myself, in my mortal fear, to tread softly, and on very panic tiptoe climbed from the hateful pit, and crossed the room above. I paused a moment, on my shuddering way, for assurance ofhissteady breathing; and then with cold deft hands set the ladder in place, and mounted it, and, drawing it after me into the thicket, fled along the passage. I had no thought of what I should do. I only wanted to escape: to put as long a distance as possible between myself and that spectre, confessed in all its blood-guiltiness at last. Half blinded, torn by flint and briar, I broke at length through the farther thicket, and sank, trembling and exhausted, upon the bank of the gravel-pit beyond.
I had sat there I know not how long, my face in my hands, the alarum in my heart deafening me to all outward sounds—the storming trees above; the cold sabre of the wind slashing into the bushes of my refuge, as if it would lay me bare—when suddenly I felt the clinch of a hand on my shoulder, and screamed, and looked up. Three fellows, in a common livery, had descended softly upon me from above, and I was captured without an effort.
I rose, staggering, to my feet, my face like ashes, my poor hands clasped in entreaty. But not a word could I force from my white lips.
“You must come with us, miss, if you please,” said the man who held me, civilly enough.
“Where?” I made out to whisper.
He pointed with a riding-whip. I followed the direction of his hand; and there, on the rim of the pit above, silhouetted against the sky, sat a single horseman. I had no reason to doubt who it was. Even at that distance, the lank red jaw of him was sign enough of the fox. I was trapped at last, and when I had thought myself securest.
Now, I do not know what desperate resignation came to me all in a moment. As well this way out as another. “Very well,” I said quietly, “I will go with you.”
They were surprised, I could see, by my submission, and all the more alert, on its unexpected account, to hover about my going. But their strong arms were not the less considerate, for that reason, to support me, overwrought as I was, in my passage to the open daylight above; and, almost before I realised it, I was standing before the Earl of Herring.
He sat as stiff and relentless in his saddle as an Attila, his red eyes staring, a very wickedness of foretasted relish grinning in his hungry teeth. A fourth servant in livery stood a little apart, holding his own and the others’ horses.
“So,” said the master, whispering as out of a dream, “you are caught at last, my lady.”
I felt for the first time a little flush come to my cheeks, and answered his gaze resolutely.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘caught,’ my lord,” I said. “These are not the days of King John.”
He rubbed his gloved hand across his chin.
“No, by God!” he said, with a hoarse chuckle. “But they are the days of King Hardrough, by your leave.”
“I have done no wrong.”
“Tell that to my lady,” said he.
“Jealousy has no ears.”
He gave a hyæna laugh.
“Misfortune has not chastened you, I see,” crowed he.
“It has not tried to,” I said, “till this moment. Now you have seen me, will you let me go, and ride back to tell Mrs. de Crespigny that she has nothing more to fear from my rivalry?”
He regarded me with a delighted humour.
“When I go, you come with me.”
“O no!”
“O yes! straight back to Dr. Peel and his whippings.”
“You will not—you will not!” I clasped my hands upon his knee in a frenzy of terror. I was quite broken in a moment. “Don’t send me back to that hell!” I implored.
He lusted over my fear. He could not for long bring himself to ease it.
“What have you got to offer me to stay my hand?” he said at last.
I was silent.
“Harkee!” he said. “I will help you out. Will you give me my bastard brother?”
“He is my brother too; I swear it.”
“Pish!” said he; “will you give up your paramour?”
“Not if you call him by that name.”
“Why, there, I knew,” said he, “you was in hiding together somewhere. Smoke the red earl, if you can. Call him by what name you will, and lead me to him.”
I hung my head, and burst into tears.
“He has deceived me.”
“What did I say?”
“Not that—not that. If I betray him, ’tis only in the hope of his being persuaded to some reformation. You will not work him evil?”
“That I swear. ’Tis only that I want to keep him out of harm’s way.”
I looked up, breathless. This assurance was at least a comfort.
“What will you do with him?”
“Leave that to me. The question is, what has he done with you?”
How could I not answer him? To win my brother from this vileness—was it not worth the sacrifice of myself? With many tears and falterings, I told him the story of my sojourn in the verderer’s cottage; of the secret chambers, and our life therein; finally, with bitter reluctance, of the shadow that had risen to estrange us, and the bloody confirmation of my fears that was to witness even now on my gown.
He grinned horribly over the revelation.
“That Portlock!” he rejoiced to himself; “that Portlock! A good throat for the hangman! But, for your murderings—I warrant ’tis a fatter bone I’ve to pick with our gentleman.”
He fell into a little musing, scowling fit; then, suddenly dismounting, bade me get into his saddle.
“Where are you going to take me?” I said.
“Where,” he answered, “but to your cottage?”
“O no!” I cried; “not back there!”
“What!” he said, grinning; “is Madam Judas yet short of her price?”
“What price have I taken? It is not to be Judas to betray brother to brother for virtue’s sake.”
He bent, in a sawing laugh.
“How apt the jade is! Let me tell you, madam, that virtue is an inner commodity, and spoils when too much on the lips.”
He forced me to mount, signed to his fellows to follow, and, taking the bridle, led me down the hill.
“Now, for your price,” said he, as he walked. “Well, I would have bid more for sound goods; but—what say ye?—you are happy on relations—would you like to be my daughter?”
I hung my head, without replying. It was true he was old enough to be my father. This misery must cast me once more on the world, a prey to all unimaginable evils. What chance else remained to me to protect myself and make my fortune serve my honour?
While I was still quietly weeping, we reached the cottage from the front, and halted. The earl motioned, and his suite gathered round and knocked on the door. In the silence that ensued we could hear the sound as of an unwieldy beast within shuffling to and fro. The verderer had seen us through the window, and knew himself for lost. Presently one put his knee to the panels, whispering for orders.
“Curse it, no,” hissed his master; “he may hear us.”
“If he does, he cannot escape,” I murmured. “I pulled the ladder after me.”
With that he raised his hand, and the door crashed in. I caught one glimpse of Portlock’s face—it was a mere white slab of terror—and turned away.
“Now,” said the earl in my ear; but I shuddered from him.
“I won’t—don’t ask me—it is not in the price!”
He uttered an impatient oath, bade one of his men hastily to my side, and himself, with the other three, strode into the cottage.
I don’t know how long passed; it may have been minutes, and seemed an hour. All the time a low snuffling reached me from the interior. The bitter wind had loosened my hair, and I caught its strands to my ears, to my eyes, and rocked in my saddle, trying to shut out everything. Presently a man came forth, to join the other by my side.
“Garamighty, Job!” muttered he; “his honour be cap’en of the gang, and no mistake. You should see his larder.”
“Ah! what’s in it?” asked the first.
“Ten fat bucks, as I’m a saint,” answered the other. “We know now where the pick o’ the herd’s gone to, eh?”
I sat up, listening.
“What larder?” I asked faintly; for, indeed, I knew of none.
The man touched his hat, half deferential, half impudent.
“’Tis through the secret passage your ladyship, so to speak, opened to us—a locked door in the little cellar beyant.”
I shrunk from him.
“You said—what did you say was in it?”
“What but a show of venison, miss—piled to the roof, one might say. He must ’a made a ryle living out o’ deer-stealing, by your leave.”
He had—and that was the whole truth of the secret he had withheld from me! All the time I had been torturing my fears into madness, he had been abroad in the midnight woods, murdering, not men, but deer; in league with an ignoble crew for a paltry gain. This romance of a social ostracism revenging itself on a social hypocrisy: savage, melancholy, yielding to love only the troubled sweetness of its soul—what did it confess itself at last? O, glorious, to be first consul to a little republic of poachers! To vindicate one’s independence by picking the pockets of the king! It was all explained now—the whisperings, the draggings, the creaking carts—in that butchers’ shambles, the secret store of a gang of deer-stealers. He was no better than a cutpurse. In my bitter mortification, I could have wept tears of shame. “I am justified of my act,” I cried to myself. “Better that he should think me a traitor now, than live to curse me for withholding my hand when there was time and opportunity to save him!”
Nevertheless, when they led him forth presently bound and quiet, I could not face his eyes, but cowered before the unspoken reproach and sorrow in them. He came up quite close to me.
“It was your own fault,” I muttered in my hair. “Why would you never tell me?”
“I was wrong,” he said, quite simply. “You must forgive me for what I have taken from you, Diana. If it is any comfort to you to know, the poor little unrealised bond between us reconciles me to this—and all that is to come.”
I felt as if my heart broke then and there. I was conscious of the red earl watching us. The other turned to him, with a laugh like death’s.
“Take your reversion, brother,” said he. “As for me, I am for the madhouse, I suppose.”
At a grinding word, two of the men helped him to mount, and moved away with him. I never saw him again. The other two entered the cottage, to fetch and escort Mr. Portlock to his doom. I was left alone with his lordship.
My heart was broken. I left it scattered on the turf, with all the fragments of the past.
“Now, papa devil,” I said, with a shriek of laughter, “what about your dutiful daughter?”
I hadloved, and lost, and buried my dream of yesterday. It lay fathoms deep in the green forest. From the moment of my resurrection I knew myself for a changeling—a fairy creature quite other than the soft, emotional child who had cried herself to sleep on last night’s hearth. George was in his house of discipline; Portlock, with others, transported; my past was broken for me beyond repair. Facing me instead were the battlements and pinnacles of a new dominion, with what infinite potentialities behind its walls! Conscience makes no conquests. With my rebirth had come the lust to supply the deficiencies of the old. I laid my love in its grave with tears and kisses, and turned intrepid to the assault.
Memory, my friend, makes men good critics, but bad romancers. I was too indulgent of my kind to be the first: beauty invited me: I would forget. Remorse is, indeed, of all self-indulgences the most useless. It reconciles an offended Heaven to us no more than do tearful sighs win a wife her husband’s condonation of an ill-cooked dinner. An inch-narrow of reformation is better than an ell-broad of apology. Let our sweetness of to-day, rather, be our experience of yesterday. The gods find no entertainment in regrets. They shower their benefits on the unminding; and in the gifts of the present we are justified of our past actions. It is only when we are rich that we can afford to put up tablets to our memories; whence follows that we cannot more honour the dead than by taking our profit of the living. Well, once I had livedforothers; now I would liveonthem—a word of distinction and a world of difference.
His lordship took me straight to London, and gave me a little suite of rooms in his fine house in Berkeley Square, where I was to remain during the next three years, until, in fact, I was come legally of age. He had decided, on reflection, that I was to be his niece. He was a very great man, and this gift was only one of many in his disposal. It was no business of mine how he accounted to the world for my title.Myinterest was only to justify it, with a view to my position in life when I was become marriageable. Wherefore I would consent to give him none of my duty until he had drawn up a settlement in my favour, to date from my majority. I had had enough of unprofitable bargains.
Perhaps he would never have consented to this—for, like all covetous pluralists, he was parsimonious—had not the death of the young viscount about this time moved him to seek comfort in an artificial relationship for the real one he had lost. In the hearts of the worst of us, I suppose, such vacancies yearn to be filled; and so the poor childless wretch took his opportunity, and adopted me. I hope I acquitted myself properly for the favour; but, in truth, I could never quite forgive him his treachery to his brother.
In the meantime, I developed rapidly, and had my little court, quite exclusive ofles convenances. The ladies, of course, looked askance at me; but what did I care? I had only to curtsey to my glass to procure the reason. And they made theirmodistestheir deputies in paying me the sincerest flattery. Instead, I experienced the high distinction of a wholeentourageof carpet-knights—captains and parsons and diplomatists unending—who came to ogle their own images in my blue eyes, and, losing their heads like Narcissus from giddiness, tumbled in by the score, until I was stocked as full under each brow as an abbot’s pond. It was a rare sport to throw crumbs of comfort to these gaping creatures, and see them rise and jostle one another for the best pickings. I assure you, my friend, I was a queen in my sphere, and had as much need to practise diplomacy. It was that first attached me to politics—the knowledge of into what good coin for bribery and the traffic of State secrets those pretty orbs might be converted. So soon, sure, as amongst my parliamentary followers I distinguished my favourites, I began to sift my political opinions, and to work for the handsomest. I have traced my measures in both Houses, believe me, my little monsieur: I have pulled some strings, sitting in my boudoir, with results as far-reaching as St. Stephen’s. Ah, well! they were days! But I will be true to myself in not bewailing them. Memory, in my philosophy, is a very lean old pauper, crumbling dried herbs into his broth. I never could abide mint sauce unless plucked from the green.
Chief among my favourites was a madcap young member, whose wit was never so impertinent as when, flitting here and there for an opportunity, it could prick the sides of some great parliamentary bull, and elicit a roar for its pains. He was that Mr. Roper who, indeed, went so far, on somebody’s instigation, as to tease the great Mr. Pitt himself on certain measures introduced for the betterment of the Roman Catholics, and who, in consequence, redeemed himself a little, it was whispered, in the eyes of high personages with whom he had long been in disgrace. His father was Robert Lord Beltower, that deplorable old nobleman who was reported early in life to have staked his honour on some trifling issue, and lost; and who always described himself as living a posthumous life, since he had been carried off by a petticoat in the fifteenth year of his age. Father and second son (the heir to the title, Lord Roper of Loftus, was eminently respectable and pious) were known as Bob Major and Bob Minor; and, indeed, apart or together, could ring the changes on some very pretty tunes. But the minor, who had been a scapegrace page at court and early dismissed, wasmy enfant gâté, as well for his wit and information as for a daring that recked nothing of the deuce itself. He owned to no party, and as to his principles, “Why,” said he, “I throw up my hat to the best shot, and that isn’t always to the heavenly marksman. I have known the devil score some points in charity.”
He never truckled to me, which was perhaps one of the reasons of my favour; but was like a licensed brother—a relationship I had come to regard. Indeed, he most offended me by his outrageous independence of my partialities.
“Hey! Come, rogue, rogue!” sniggered his father to him once, on the occasion of some abominable impertinence; “you go too far. What the devil means this disrespect to our goddess? You’ll be pricked, egad, one of these days, like that fellow Atlas, or Actæon, or what the devil was his name, that was tore for his impudence.”
The son bowed to the sire, quoting Slender’s words to Shallow: “‘I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet Heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another: I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt; but if you say “Marry her,” I will marry her, that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.’”
“Why, you villain,” said his lordship, with a grin, “if you’re the devil quoting Scripture, I’m done with you.”
“Nay, sir,” said the other, “you flatter yourself. I quote no better than my father.”
“No better, you dog! And how?”
“Why, sir, wasn’t it you taught me that the more one sees of a woman the less one respects her?”
“I?”
“’Twasà proposthe Chudleigh, sir, you may remember, whom you met at Ranelagh—in ’49, I think it was—undressed as Iphigenia. She came clothed in little but her virtue, and caught a bad cold a-consequence. You may have forgot the moral of your sermon, sir, but I, as a dutiful son, have stored it.”
“Hang you, Bob! What moral?”
“Why, sir, that a woman dreads exposure in nothing but her weakness to stand the test of it. If she’s a peculiar fineness anywhere, she’ll take some means to let you know.”
“Then, sir,” cried I, with a flaming face, “I pride myself on nothing so much as my hand!”—and I brought it down stingingly on his ear.
“But I don’t want your hand,” he cried, stamping about, while his father roared, “Didn’t I tell you as much?”
Nevertheless, we were fast comrades, and together in some captivating peccancies, of which I only learned to rue the publicity when they led to my undoing.
Mr. Roper, as I have said, found a particular delight in galling—on somebody’s instigation—the sides of the promoters of the new pro-Papish Bills. Well, I will ask you, what did I owe to that Church? Was it likely that my treatment at its hands had left any love between us, or that I should wish its disabilities removed, who had suffered so much from it muzzled? I had been educated, under its shadow, to a full understanding of its juggleries and impostures. Now was the time, the country being still in a ferment over its heir-apparent’s alleged marriage with the Fitzherbert, to relate my experiences.
There was at that date published in London a little fashionable scapegrace of a paper called theWorld, the property of a Major Topham, who made it the vehicle for such achronique scandaleuseas the town had never yet known; and in this paper I began (by preconcert with my political ally) to disclose, over the signature “Angélique,” the true story and circumstances of a certain beautiful young lady, who had been practised upon, and in the very heart of Protestant England, by a worse than Spanish Inquisition. The series, cautiously as I began by handling it, made an immediate sensation, and was, you may be sure, deftly engineered in the House by Mr. Roper for the Opposition. Moreover, “Angélique”—which delighted me as much—gave her sweet and melancholy name to a mourning gauze, which was so pretty that I had to kill an aunt to give me a title to wear it. At the same time her instant popularity made me tremble for my incognito, which, nevertheless, I knew to be the major’s very best asset in a profitable bargain. Still, not even his tact could altogether explain away the association of ideas implied in Mr. Roper’s common friendship with me and with that poor persecuted anonymity; and that I had made myself by no means so secure as Junius was a fact disagreeably impressed upon me on a certain evening.
I had been entertaining late that night, when his lordship entered unexpected. He came from St. James’s and from playing backgammon with the king, and wore his orders on a pearl-silk coat and, for contrast, a mighty scowling face over. I took no heed of him as he walked up the room towards me, humping his shoulders, and acknowledging wintrily the salutations of my little court, but went on laughing and rallying a dear little ensign Percy, with whom I was in love just then,pour faire passer le temps. However, the boy could not stand the inquisition of the red eyes, and joked himself into other company, with a blush and a bow to the ogre; at which I laughed, lolling back in my chair.
“Well, madam,” said Hardrough, knuckling his snuff-box softly, “when you can vouchsafe me a moment of your attention.”
I recognised the compelling tone in his voice, and rose, with a little show of indolence.
“O!” I said, yawning, “what sin has found me out now? I vow it can never be so ugly as it looks.”
He gave me his arm, mighty ceremonious, and, conducting me into an antechamber, shut the door.
“That is for you to prove,” he said, taking snuff, and stood glaring into my soul. “So, madam,” he said, “you are for setting your little teeth into the hands that have warmed you?”
I sat down, fluttering my fan, and pretty pale, I daresay. But I was not surprised. My conscience had pricked me at the first sight of his face. He pulled from his pocket a copy of the damning sheet, and “Tell me,” says he, “if His Majesty was justified in asking me if this did not refer to some member of my family?”
I did not answer, and he threw the paper on the floor.
“Well, you are condemned,” he said drily; and at that I found my wits.
“Condemned?” I cried. “By whom? Why, my lord, how can you, being of the Court party and in Opposition, condemn an anti-papish tract?”
“That is all very well,” he said acridly; “but the stone once set rolling against a house, who knows who may be included in the ruin?”
I knew very well, of course, to what he referred; for had he not been subsidised by his sister (and during the time, too, when he had figured hottest against Catholic emancipation) into overlooking the establishment by her, in the very heart of his estate, of that community of Sisters whose complicity in my abduction I was bent upon exposing? And was I not aware, too, that the appointment he coveted to a vacant garter trembled at the moment in the balance of such revelations? O, I held some strings, my friend, you may believe! though at present I had the opposite to any inducement to pull this particular one.
“Why, Nunky!” I cried, “is not this, your succour and protection of madam’s poor victim, the best proof of your orthodoxy?”
He regarded me grimly, but with some shadow of returning good-humour.
“That’s true enough,” he said, “so long as you useme, if at all, for no worse than to point the moral ofherdamnation.”
“Why should I not? ’Tis my interest to, at least.”
“Ha!” he said; “there you speak. And stap me if I love you the less for it.”
He took a turn or two, and came back grinning.
“They’re damn clever, Di: there, I’ll admit they’re damn clever! But ’tis a perilous game you play, my girl; and you’ll do well to take care you play it to none but your own interests.”
He went off again, and returned.
“Harkee!” he said; “there’s Beltower’s whelp, and—and I don’t care a fig for your predilections. Work your oracle as you will; only be faithful to me, and you won’t suffer for’t in the end.”
He finished in such spirits that he was moved to show me a letter he had received from his sister but a few days before. In it she upbraided him for his treachery,—of which she only recently had certain information—in converting his capture of me to such infamous account; and called upon him, as he valued his soul, to turn his Jezebel adrift again to her merited deserts.
“Enfin,” I said, handing him back the effusion, “for a respectable lady she shows a vigorous vocabulary. She writes in London, I see.”
He chuckled like a demon.
“She writes in hell, and bites the more viciously for her roasting. ’Tis that fellow has led her here, dancing after some new fancy of his; and, by God, she’s paid for her stubbornness, and must vent her spite on someone.”
“Well,” I said, “tell her so from me; and that, for my part, I’d rather be Jezebel than what came to lap her blood.”
At which he neighed, vowing he’d take me at my word.