“Rat me, my dears,” he said by and by, when the volume of enthusiasm had spent itself; “but your artlessness refreshes me—upon my soul and honour, it refreshes me. This is the very respectable work of a journeyman builder, and as full of holes as poor Tom’s coat.”
“La, Mr. Cibber!” said the sweet Corinna, with a giggle, “I always thought the gentleman was at the top of his trade.”
“‘They say best men are moulded out of faults,’” murmured Mr. Bellingham, with a wink at the heavy mother.
The poet saw the wink, and waxed a little emphatic. It was Dr. Johnson who had once said of his art of conversation that “he had but half to furnish, since one-half was oaths.” But he was after all a good-natured man.
“Then, God judge me,” he cried, straining his voice, which was none of the strongest, “if he hadn’t a title to be called perfection!”
Mrs. Lightfoot, alarmed by his heat, stopped a levity on her lips half-way, and addressed the great man very soberly.
“I prithee, sir,” she said, “to correct our untutored visions, naturally dazzled in their first contemplation of so unaccustomed a sight.”
“Why, my dear,” said the Laureate, mollified at once, “I can quite understand your naïve enthusiasm; but it is a fact that in order to criticise an achievement one must know something of the principles of the art which designed it.”
“No greater architect of his own fortune than King Colley!” cried Mr. Bellingham.
“I thank you, sir,” answered Mr. Cibber stiffly; then added, blazing out again, “You will oblige me by holding your damned tongue!”
The old gentleman, anxious and conciliatory, put in a word:
“Your professional knowledge, sir, must make your comments doubly instructive. Pray inform us to what details of the building you take particular exception.”
“That is a very reasonable demand, sir,” answered the Laureate, daring the offending and rather elated low comedian from the corner of his eye. “I have no doubt that to the uninformed in such matters the magnitude of this conception palliates, or even overpowers, the meretriciousness of its details. But you mistake me on one point. My profession, though it embodies all the arts, specialises in none, and if I claim a dictatorial right in this instance, it is simply because as an actor I represent the trinity in unity of the creative faculty.”
“I see, I see,” said the old gentleman. “It is merely accident which has kept dormant your architectural proclivities.”
“Well, sir,” said the poet, with a smile, “I flatter myself I could have evolved, under compulsion, a more faultless erection than this.”
The stranger nodded with an air of satisfied acquiescence.
“I shall be really grateful to Mr. Cibber,” he said, “if he will help me to the right point of view. To my uninstructed intelligence, I confess, the pile seems to stand well.”
The poet laughed tolerantly.
“A good fortune it owes to its site. O, you must really pardon me, sir! It is in truth a cold, heavy, tasteless affair, imposing in no more than bulk, lacking the inspiration of sacramentality. Bear with me, now bear with me, while I strip off for your edification a little of the monster’s pretence. You will observe its most prominent feature, the dome? Very well, sir; that dome sums up in itself the hollowness of the entire conception. It violates the first principles of the art it professes, with a monstrous impertinence, to crown. Its height bears no relation to the proportions of the structure within, and is fixed thus arbitrarily for no other purpose than effect.”
“But is not the effect good?” ventured the old gentleman.
“Why, stap my vitals, sir!” said Mr. Cibber, “have you the assurance to condone a whited sepulchre? The greater the audacity, the worse the pretence. The cupola proper to this design lies within that external sham like a head under a steel basinet. What we look on is a mere exuberance, supporting nothing but itself. Will you tell me that that is in accordance with the principles of art, which demand that each part should naturally progress in lines of beauty from the parent stock?”
“No,” said the stranger—“no. You teach me much, sir.”
“That pretence,” continued the poet triumphantly, “is not confined to the head, though naturally it finds there its most swollen expression.”
“By the Lord, that’s true,” murmured Mr. Bellingham, and the sweet Corinna choked a little laugh into her handkerchief.
“Those side elevations, for instance,” went on Mr. Cibber, with a doubtful glance askance at the lady, “concealing as they do the buttresses and clerestory windows of the nave, constitute in their upper order a mere mask to the real form and construction of the building. Now, in a perfect design there should be no screening of structural necessities, but an ingenious adaptation of all such to the general conception. These, sir, are a few of the most patent defects, upon which, saving your patience, I could enlarge at pleasure. But I trust I have said enough to correct your point of view to its necessary focus; and if some disenchantment is the result——”
“Well, well, Mr. Cibber,” interrupted the old gentleman—“well, well. But I don’t know that I can quite confess to that.”
“O, very good, sir!” cried the poet ironically. “And according to what impenetrable illusion, if you please, do you persist in your faith?”
“Why,” said the old gentleman—“why, you see, Mr. Cibber, I designed the thing myself.”
“Sir Christopher, Sir Christopher!” cried a breathless gentleman who came hurrying up at the moment. “We had lost you, sir. This was naughty of you to venture up the hill alone.”
Mr. Bellingham, with one look at the rueful Laureate, sat flat down upon the pavement and delivered himself to hysterics.
THE SURGEON OF GOUGH SQUARE
He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor’s bears by daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without. As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land. He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no prospect of release was ever more to be his.
He had started his professional career with high expectations and a confidence born of capital possession. They had all, hopes and confidence and capital, gone to wreck on the shoals of a giant fraud. What solace to him was it that the law had ended by claiming its own? It had been a greater mercy had it remained eternally blind, and left him, one of many victims, to live on content in his fool’s paradise. Though his substance had been dissipated, the interest, regularly paid, had served him for his needs. It had been all the sinews he desired in his wrestle with fortune. Was it not in the bitter irony of things that his high rectitude should be expected to rejoice in that vindication of justice which had left him a pauper?
He recalled, in a sudden impotent fury, the occasion, or the suspected occasion, which had marked him down for ruin. His capital had been all invested in Bank of England stock, and the securities had been deposited with Fauntleroy, the now notorious banker of Berners Street. It had been this villain’s practice to forge powers of attorney enabling him to dispose of his clients’ property, and the man’s cool audacity had even, it was said, carried him so far as to the occasional appending of a customer’s name to a fraudulent deed in the customer’s own presence, and the then sending it, with its ink still wet, as though from the visitor’s hand, into the clerks’ department.
Such, he fully believed, had been the case with him during a business call he had made one day upon the head of the house. He remembered, cursing the memory, the sleek, plausible figure in its black tights and broadcloth, the spotless frill at its bosom, the smile on its prosperous face, the pen travelling in its plump fingers while the voice went on, even, polite, and interested. To be signing away so inhumanly the fortune, the happiness, the soul of a fellow-creature, and never all the while to flush or falter. Damn him!
Well, he was damned maybe. A glutton, a sybarite, a voluptuary, he had come to the end of his feasting, and only for Lazarus remained the scraps and dregs of the banquet.
A rap at the door broke in upon his miserable reverie, and a small servant entered the room. Two gentlemen, she said, desired particularly to see him. Who were they? She did not know, they would give no name. Where were they? In the surgery, which opened on the back. They had brought something with them, something on a hand-cart, and then other men, who had deposited the something, had left. She was used to the traffic, or had been, and showed no agitation or alarm.
Resurrection-men! He had no desire to pay their price, and, if he had, no means. The very house in which he lived, an inheritance, was already under treaty for sale. Frowning and compressing his lips, he descended to the room below. The something, stark and obvious under a black cloth, was laid already on the dissecting-table. Two gentlemen turned to greet him.
They were both grave, formal, unconvincing; yet perfectly refined in manner. One, who constituted himself the spokesman, began to address him at once in a low voice:
“You will please to pardon, sir, on the ground of extreme urgency, this unceremonious visit. I must say at once that we do not wish to state our names, and I will admit unhesitatingly that we are disguised. This”—he signified the silent shape—“is the subject of our visit. We desire your acceptance of it in the interests of science. No return is required, and no condition made, save that you undertake to convince yourself, beyond the possibility of a doubt, and before proceeding to extremities, that no flicker of life survives to it.”
Professionally self-possessed, the young doctor had yet to rally all his nerve-power to meet so amazing a charge. He delayed to answer for some moments.
“And if it did?” he said.
“Then you will have no reason to regret your caution,” answered the gentleman.
“I cannot pretend to understand you.”
“I must urge upon you the necessity of a quick decision,” said the stranger. “Will it satisfy you to be told that the subject”—he again pointed to the hidden form—“expressly desired that this task should be deputed to you?”
“Are you mad?” said the young surgeon, “or am I, or do you think me so? What task—and who desired it?”
“The task,” said the gentleman, “of ascertaining, in the first instance, that life is indisputably extinct, and of then devoting the remains, at your complete discretion, to the interests of science. I may tell you”—he seemed to hesitate a moment—“that the subject suffered under a morbid apprehension of premature burial.”
“His apprehensions,” said the surgeon, “could be easily set at rest.”
“I hope so,” answered the stranger.
“But—but,” cried the surgeon in desperation—he made a movement as if clutching at his hair—“you must see, gentlemen, that I cannot possibly undertake the responsibility on these vague premises.”
“Question me, sir, if you will, and I will endeavour to answer to your satisfaction.”
“Tell me then. Who is this man? What was his complaint—presumably mortal? Was he a patient of mine that he selected me for this extraordinary business?”
The gentleman again seemed to hesitate.
“He was,” he said, “—yes, I may call him a patient of yours, inasmuch as you attended him during the course of a distemper or aberration with which he was seized. He considered that he owed you a return for his somewhat cavalier exploitation of your services, and, at the last, these were the only means he could devise for giving some effect to—well, shall we call it his remorse? The sentiment, combined with the fact that his demise, or his assumed demise, occurred in this neighbourhood, decided our choice.”
The young surgeon, forcing all his wits to a focus, fixed his eyes searchingly on the speaker.
“He was murdered,” he said. “Is that it?”
The other shrugged his shoulders, with a scarce perceptible smile.
“O, sir,” he said, “if you take that view! But a moment’s examination will convince you.”
“Let me make it, then.”
The stranger interposed his body, quietly but resolutely.
“After we are gone.”
“Why will you not give me your names?”
“Because, sir, we do not wish to associate ourselves with an act which might prove difficult of explanation, and which, given publicity, must most certainly defeat its own object. You must accept our word for it that we were both close personal friends of the deceased, and that we have undertaken this difficult charge out of pure regard for an intimacy which contains for us many endearing recollections.”
“What was the cause of death? Will you tell me so much?”
“It was the result of a fall.”
The surgeon, wavering between conscience and professional acquisitiveness, gnawed his forefinger in an agitated way.
“But why,” he said—“why should not a post-mortem examination at his own house have sufficed for his apprehensions?”
“There is no calculating,” answered the stranger, “the lengths to which such diseased imaginativeness will carry a man. Safety, no doubt, to his mind, consisted in nothing short of dismemberment.” He looked at his watch in a hurried way. “Time, sir,” he said, “presses. If our natural scruples shrink, as I say, from association with this business, no such sentiment need apply to you. Gentlemen of your profession, I understand, are not expected to be over-inquisitive as to the material provided for their anatomical studies. You may rest completely satisfied that nothing discreditable to ourselves or harmful to you attaches to this case. Very well. Subjects, I believe, are costly. Here is one to your hand for nothing. But should our friend’s terrors prove actually justified, and this to be a case of suspended animation, in that event, sir, I will answer for it that the patient’s gratitude would take a form upon which you would have plentiful reason to congratulate yourself. And in the meantime every wasted minute is a reproach to us. Answer, sir, will you accept the conditions or not?”
“You will not tell me your name?”
“No.”
“Nor his there?”
“I must not, indeed.”
“Nor where to communicate with you, in case——?”
“No purpose would be served thereby. We have done what he desired of us, and there our duty to him ends. The rest lies between you and him.”
The surgeon, with a gesture which might have implied resignation or repudiation, turned his back. When he looked round again he was alone.
He made a movement towards the door, as if in a pretence to himself to recall his visitors, but stopped on the instant, biting his lip.
“I will not be such a hypocrite,” he muttered. He knew perfectly well, indeed, what was at the bottom of his heart—hope; a vague, indefinable feeling that all here was not as intimated; that out of the very strangeness and mystery of the affair might come profit and perhaps salvation to himself, a desperate man.
With a somewhat haggard face he moved on tiptoe to lock both the surgery door and that leading into the yard at the back. Then, feeling awed against his will, he turned to the hidden form.
It was still early morning, but the fog made a thick, dingy twilight in the room. Not a sound broke the dead stillness; nothing moved.
Yes, something—the thing under the cloth!
Was he overwrought—victim to some wild delusion? He could have sworn it; and yet the motion had been so slight, so hardly perceptible, it might have been the mere contraction or dilation of a shadow.
Again!
With a gasp of horror he leaped to the table, tore away the cloth, and revealed the face, blotched and livid, of Fauntleroy the forger.
The truth rushed upon him as he stood there, pallid and staring, and with it an understanding of each one of his visitor’s studied ambiguities. The great criminal, he remembered now, was to have been executed that morning. Where had he heard it—that whisper, that incredible rumour, hinting of a hangman extravagantly bribed by friends of the criminal, and of a silver tube to be passed into the condemned gullet? A thing impracticable—preposterous—he had dismissed it as a canard; yet, somehow, it appeared, accomplished. Either that way or another—what did it matter? The man had been hanged, patently on the evidences before him, and as patently he still lived—only as yet the merest flicker of vitality, expressed in the pulsing of the purple œdematous swelling about the throat. A little either way, and the spark were coaxed into flame or quenched for ever.
Which way, then? He stood for minutes, quite rigid, battling with his emotions. His wrongs; his diabolical opportunity; his perfect immunity from detection; his justification, inasmuch as this life was already forfeit to the law. Hyde roared in him, and Jekyll pleaded. The very clothes of the thing, unaltered in their black neatness, sleekness, hypocrisy, filled him with an indescribable loathing. He stepped forward, his fingers crooked.
At that moment the laugh of a baby sounded in the yard outside. He paused, and stood listening. Suddenly his face lightened:
“Not guilty!” he cried, “not guilty, little one!” and hurried to the succour of his enemy.
THE PRIOR OF ST. COME
A cadaverous, hump-shouldered man paced a walk of the Louvre garden. He would have been pronounced old, though, in fact, his years were no more than fifty. In form and expression he was the typical miser, lean and grey from abstinence, morose from suspicion, bent from persistent crouching over insufficient embers. His face was tallow grey; the whites of his eyes and the orifices of his long, pinched nose were tinged with red. He was dressed in a short, waistless jerkin, once black, and trimmed at the hem with mangy fur, once brown. Black, ill-gartered hose covered to the hips a couple of legs like hurdle-stakes, and his stooped head was cased in a greasy calotte, surmounted by that form of cap known as the cap of maintenance, the brim of which, peaking to the front and raised behind, supported a number of little cheap leaden figures of saints. In contradiction to all this ostentatious shabbiness, a collar of gold shells and costly jewels hung about his neck.
As he paced deliberately, his hands clasped behind his back, his lips perpetually working without sound, he would glance up with a stealthy leer from time to time at a figure that walked beside him. This figure, sufficiently jocund and prosperous for contrast, was that of a healthy priest in cape and cassock, with a crisp, golden beard and blue eyes, a certain craft in which rather belied their conscious merriment. An odd broadness of the skull above the ears, which were gross and misshapen, betokened in this person a development of what Spurzheim would have called an “affective propensity to acquisitiveness.” He was, however, a notoriously holy man, and one of the King’s chaplains to boot. The other was the King himself, Louis XI.
Presently the latter, pausing beside a pedestal on which stood a statuette, none too unsuggestive, of the Paphian Venus, looked up in an abstracted way.
“Still vacant, still vacant?” he said, lisping a little between his toothless gums. “That was what you remarked, was it not, Père Bonaventure?”
“Not in so many words, son Louis,” answered the chaplain. “But in very truth the Priory of St. Come remains to this day a body without a head. The severance, moreover, hath endured so long that I doubt if any reunion of the parts, were that conceivable, could restore its healthy circulation to the community. The good prior and his monks have become estranged in this dull interval. His authority is out of date. Were he yet to return—a wild hypothesis—he would think to take them up where he left them, and, being disillusioned, chaos would result.”
“You are convinced he is dead?”
“Either that, or held by the infidels in a captivity doomed to be perpetual. No reasonable man can doubt it.”
“Pasque-Dieu!” said Louis, “that same reason is a good servant to one’s interests. I myself am never so reasonable as when I cut off a head that annoys me.”
He glanced, rasping his frosted chin, at the chaplain and down. He could gauge this jocund suitor well enough; he knew him to be at heart a libertine and self-seeker; but, inasmuch as his own faith was a conglomeration of hypocrisy and abject superstition, he dreaded always to question the casuistries of its anointed ministers. One could never tell what might befall.
The matter under discussion turned upon the wisdom of appointing a new head to the Priory of St. Come, an important foundation in the southern quarters of the city. Long months past the King had granted a reluctant permission to its aged chief to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the old man had gone and he had not returned. Time went by; no news had ever been received of the wayfarer; by degrees it had come to be concluded that death or captivity had terminated his pious adventure. The young monks of St. Come, freed from his restraining hand, had begun to break bounds; scandals were getting rife; interested observers impressed upon the King the moral certainty of the old prior’s death, and the necessity of his bringing the monastery again under the disciplinary control of a head. Amongst these the most pertinacious, and, as possessing the royal ear, the most hopeful, was the Chaplain Père Bonaventure, who greatly coveted for himself the desirable office. It promised him almost illimitable opportunities for the sort of life he favoured.
“This dream, father, of which you spoke,” said the King, without raising his eyes—“it seemed to have its significance, you would imply—some bearing on the case?”
“I would imply nothing of the sort,” answered the chaplain. “We are expressly warned against attaching a prognostic value to these figments—though, to be sure, we might claim our justification in Holy Writ.”
“Given the seer,” said Louis. “Well, well; relate thy dream.”
“Methought,” said the priest, “that thou and I stood beside a church, in the walls of which hard by appeared a little threatening fissure. And the monks, instead of attending to their office, kept revelry; and always with the sound of their roystering the fissure extended. But thou, while I still urged upon thee the necessity of seeking and amending from within the ever-widening evil, would persist in holding me in converse, saying, ‘Patience yet a little, father, and we will enter.’ And suddenly there came a clap of song surmounting all in blasphemy, and with a roar the breach burst and the tower rocked and the walls sank down upon us both, crushing out our lives.”
He ended, his eyes slewed craftily upon the other. “From Joseph, through the royal succession,” he said, “descends the gift of interpretation. To me it was just a dream.”
The King looked up. “Pasque-Dieu!” he said—“and to us a providence, since it gives us a pretext for disposing of a pest. Go, go, in God’s name”—he paused to raise his hat—“and be Prior of St. Come.”
He was rid at last of an importunity, though he was only to exchange it for a worse.
He was walking in his garden one day weeks later, when there came towards him an old, blanched figure, feverishly paddling with a pilgrim’s crossed staff and mumbling as he approached. It was the aged Prior of St. Come, delayed in his return by cross winds and crosser ailments.
Louis, coming to a stop, stood conning the apparition half-petrified. For a moment, indeed, he fancied it to be a veritable wraith, so whitely emaciated looked the face, set in its cloudy fleece of beard and hair, with the eyes like two black borings.
“Adjuva nos, Domine, adjuva nos!” he muttered, crossing himself.
The old man tottered forward, and cried in a shrill tone: “Restore to me my fold, son Louis—restore to me my fold!”
The voice, and, more than it, the words, broke the spell. The King’s lips tightened, shrewd and caustic. Not on such worldly interests were a spirit bent.
“Welcome, father,” he said—“thou art welcome home.”
“No welcome,” cried the old man. “My children disown me; another sits in my place. I but carried my pitcher to the well, and lo! when I returned with it brimming, the door was locked against me. They feign to know me not; they stand and revile me; let me in to them that I may afford good evidence of my identity.”
He was a spirited ancient, and he shook his staff meaningly.
“That may not be,” said Louis smoothly, “since you are pronounced deceased.”
“By whom?”
“By the King.”
“I am, nevertheless, very much alive.”
“Impossible, when the King himself has ruled you dead. Why else should he have filled your office? As Prior, father, believe us, you are hopelessly defunct; as priest and man you may yet exist on our sufferance. We do not hold it altogether a capital offence, your thus presuming to refute our conclusions by being alive; yet, Pasque-Dieu! the inconvenience you cause us by your inconsiderateness is little less than monstrous. We should have liked to hear some note of apology from you, some hint of regret for your unconscionable survival; but there, it is a self-seeking world.”
The old man stood amazed and speechless; nor was his bewilderment lessened by the kindness with which the King presently took his arm and walked him off up the garden.
“A monarch’s word, father,” said Louis, “is sacred, as much to himself as to another. Anything else that it is in our power to bestow upon you we shall be happy to consider in the light of your palpable deserts. Now we shall place you in the hands of M. de Comines, our Secretary of State, with orders to him to attend to your interests.”
So, with a hundred questions as to the Grand Turk and the pilgrim’s adventures by the way, he led him to the palace and got rid of him.
For good and all, as he supposed; but in that he was very quickly disillusioned. The deposed prior was by no means the man to take his cashiering meekly. Stubborn and masterful by nature, the authority of his late achievement had but consolidated his sense of righteousness. His interview with M. de Comines left him with no delusions. The Secretary bowed him out with a whole bouquet of flowery phrases, which, being cut for decorative purposes, were destined to bear no fruit. Père Bonaventure, lolling in his chair at St. Come, laughed securely. “Rira bien qui rira le dernier!” chanted his predecessor with a bitter grimness.
He appeared at the next royal levée, and renewed his petition; his Majesty was gentle but expostulatory. He sought to penetrate once more into the Louvre garden, generally open to men of piety, but, being repulsed by the guard, took his station at likely exits, and clamoured when the King went by. His persecution of his monarch became by degrees persistent and intolerable. Louis grew to dread the inevitable apparition with its wail, monotonous and eternal, “Restore to me my fold!” The creature got upon his nerves, and even threatened to spoil his sleep. Then one day, quite suddenly and characteristically, he resolved to rid himself of the incubus. He summoned his provost-marshal, Tristan l’Hermite, and sitting humped in his chair, closed one eye, and focussed the other shrewdly on his favourite.
“Tristan,” he said, “divinity utters itself in the mouths of kings—is it not so?”
The officer, a thick-set, beetle-browed boar of a man, whose body was encased in steel covered by a blue tabard embroidered with fleurs-de-lys, grunted in reply. Louis remained silent.
“Why waste words, gossip?” said Tristan. “Tell me the job and the man.”
His eyes, red and projecting, rolled in their sockets. He gave his flock of coarse hair a contemptuous shake.
“Wherefore,” went on the other, contemplative, “to traverse a royal decision is to commit treason against Heaven—a crime even the more abhorrent in one who professes himself a minister of religion.”
“The man?” repeated Tristan.
“Hast thou heard speak, Tristan,” said the King, “of this troublesome prior of St. Come?”
The Provost-Marshal turned and made for the door.
“Tristan!” cried the King; but without effect. He uncoiled himself with a smile. “Pasque-Dieu,” he said, “what a precipitate fellow! But at least I can sleep to-night with a peaceful conscience.”
And yet, when taking the air the next morning in company of this very confidant, there, slipped in by the relaxed guard, was the familiar, hated figure, pleading and clamouring.
“Hog! Dolt!” cried the King, maddened beyond all subterfuge, turning on his henchman: “Did I not tell thee to rid me of the prior of St. Come?”
“Highty-tighty, gossip!” answered the Provost—“what’s all this to-do? And have I not?”
“The prior, I say—the prior?”
“Fast in a sack, gossip, and lying these ten hours past at the bottom of the Seine.”
“Fool! But I meant this one!”
“Phew! Why didn’t you say so? The prior, quotha. This is not the prior. But rest easy; the mistake is soon amended.”
“No,” said the King, who after all had a sense of humour; “this is Heaven’s hand, and I but the poor tool in it. The prior claim is his”—and he turned to the suppliant. “Go,” he said, “in peace, old man. Return to thy flock. The seat is once more vacant, and thy petition is granted.”
CAPTAIN MACARTNEY
One dark November afternoon in the year 1712 a horseman, riding westwards from Cobham village, in Surrey, pulled up at the junction of the road with the Kingston and Guildford highway, and dismounted in order that he might read the terms of a proclamation pasted upon the signpost there.
“Whereas,” ran the advertisement, “Bernard Macartney, Captain in her Majesty’s forces, stands charged with the wilful murder of James Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, in Hyde Park on the 15th of this present month, a reward of two hundred pounds is hereby offered to any person or persons who shall discover and apprehend, or cause to be discovered or apprehended, the said Captain Bernard Macartney, to be paid by the Lords Commissioners of her Majesty’s Treasury upon his being apprehended and lodged in any one of her Majesty’s gaols.”
The traveller rose from his perusal with a grin.
“And so they bell the cat,” said he. “Now, if I were this Macartney—I say if I were—methinks I should feign to be one of my own pursuers lusting to gain the reward. There’s no disguise for some men like honesty, nor, in certain cases, no self-help like self-sacrifice.”
He remounted and pushed leisurely on his way, cutting across the high-road, and taking the track for Byfleet, which ran herefrom over Cobham Heath, a lonely and near treeless waste. Naturally, as he rode, his mind was busy over the event which had produced the proclamation—the recent fatal duel, that is to say, between the Lords Hamilton and Mohun. The sensation the affair had caused was due as much to the reputed foul play which had characterised it as to the exalted rank of its principals and its tragic termination. The meeting—ostensibly the result of a dispute concerning some family property—had taken place at seven in the morning near the Ring in Hyde Park—that fashionable “dusty mill-horse drive” which lay off Tyburn Lane, about mid-way between the Tyburn and Hyde Park Gate turnpikes—and there were six concerned in it, three of a side. The provocation, given and accepted, had been, it was rumoured rightly or wrongly, a mere blind to a premeditated murder. His Grace of Hamilton—then on the eve of his departure for Paris as the Queen’s Ambassador, and the holder of a watching brief, as it were, on behalf of St. Germains—was notoriously obnoxious to Marlborough and the Whigs, and the quarrel, the whisper went, had been thrust upon him at the hands of a creature of the Duke’s, a discredited brute and libertine, whose challenge, under the circumstances, he might very well have ignored. But his Grace had an invincible spirit, and the desire, perhaps, to rid the world of an intolerable ruffian; and so the meeting had occurred. At its outset, without any feint of punctilio, the two had rushed at one another more like hyenas than men, a world of long-smothered exasperation, no doubt, nerving their hands; and, amidst the rain of stabs and blows that followed, Mohun had been the first to fall. And while he had lain on the ground, gasping out his life, the other, also sorely wounded, leaning above him, Macartney, it was said, had run up behind and, giving the Duke his death-blow, had escaped with his surviving companion in iniquity. The Duke had been helped towards the Cake-house—that little, pretty rustic lodge, with its green trees and pond, whither fashion was used to resort for its syllabubs and “pigeon-pie puff”—but had died on the grass before he could reach it. And so the matter had ended for all but the absconding seconds.
“And those,” thought the traveller, “can spell out proclamations, no doubt, with the best of their pursuers. I put my money on Macartney.”
He was a spare, small-boned man, with a delicate, invalidish face and an expression on it of impudent temerity. His voice cracked when he raised it, and he was prone to spasms of laughter which hurt his chest. His hat, his heavy surtout, his great jack-boots seemed all too large for him, like a preposterous shell to a very little tortoise; but he rode with spirit, making small account of his trappings and the lonely road and sinister weather. In fact, as with many sickly constitutions, his elasticity and muscular strength were, relatively, abnormal.
The heath, desolation manifest, rolled on before him in brown, wind-shivered billows; the sky was like a slab of grey stone, roofing a dead world. There was a wolfish snarl in the air, a threat of coming snow.
Suddenly, without a note of warning, a burst and ring of hoofs sounded in the road close behind him. Wheeling on the instant, he observed a stranger, the noise of whose approach had evidently fallen deadened on the spongy turf-side by which he had ridden.
“How now!” demanded the traveller, in his quick little voice: “what the devil do you, springing upon me like this?”
“Pardon, pardon,” cried the stranger. He rode up, breathing as if winded. “I am a timid man, sir, and the prospect looked wicked, and, seeing you going before, I ventured to push on to crave your company. This place hath a dreary notorious reputation, I am told, and I am very nervous.”
His jovial face, twinkling, for all the cold, with perspiration, seemed to belie his assertion. It was broad, and flat of surface, with the features in low relief; and its mouth was so wide that, when distended in a smile, all above appeared detachable, like the lid of a comic tobacco-jar. By the tokens of his greasy jasey, with the little soiled round hat on top, and the clerical cut of his coat, he might have been a damaged parson, who had taken the wrong turning and missed his way to paradise.
The other conned him speculatively.
“What made you ride on the grass?” said he.
“Why, I feared to alarm ye,” answered the newcomer, “and so miss the chance of a way-fellow.”
“Gad-so!” exclaimed the traveller. “And whither, by your leave, may your road lead you over this same wicked heath?”
“Sir,” said the stranger, “if the question is scarce pertinent, the candour of my cloth responds. I am riding to seek preferment of the Queen’s own Majesty at Windsor. Is the confidence to be reciprocal?”
“I am escaping from my creditors,” said the small man. “Shall I turn out my pockets, that you may witness to their emptiness?”
The stranger endeavoured to look grave.
“This suspicion,” he said, “is unworthy.”
“Of whom?”
“Of us both, sir. You make me fear I have misplaced my confidence.”
“In the richness of the bone you proposed to pick? Very possibly you have.”
They were slowly pacing their horses all this time side by side. The road was utterly deserted, the prospect of the dreariest. A straggle of withered thorns, running darkly up the slope of a low hill to the left, alone broke the almost treeless desolation.
“Ride on, sir, ride on,” said the stranger in an offended voice. “Better my own fearful company than a comrade so mistrustful.”
He pulled on his rein and fell back. The other did the same.
“Great God!” cried the stranger. “Who’s this?”
Almost without a sound, it seemed, a horseman had broken from the shelter of the thorns, and drawn up in the middle of the track, barring their way. In the same instant, the clerical gentleman, who had fallen again behind, whipped a pistol from his skirt-pocket and shot his companion’s horse dead. The bullet entered behind the shoulder, and the beast, doubling up its forelegs, pitched and collapsed. Its rider, flung over its head, gathered his wits with agility, and sat up to encounter the vision of a couple of rascal faces looking down upon him.
“Do me the justice to attest,” he said to the pseudo-parson, “that I never for a moment believed in you.”
The other beamed over him, his pistol still smoking in his hand.
“And be damned to your scepticism!” said he. “For may I never launch soul on its flight again if I am not what I look, a broken hedge-parson.”
“Enough of that, Tom,” said the second rogue, a most butchering, determined-looking scoundrel. “His Honour’s swollen head calls for some blood-letting. Stand away while I give him t’other barrel.”
“What! are you going to murder me?” cried the victim.
“Aye, we are that,” answered the ruffian. “A dead man’s easier stripped than a live one, and makes less complaint after.”
“I’ll give you a hundred reasons for sparing me?”
“Hold, Jemmy!” said the parson. “The pick of a hundred will do. What reason of reasons, Mr. Bankrupt?”
“Why, the money in my pocket, which, if it’s more than a beggarly five guineas, may I eat my words.”
“That you shall, and well peppered, I warrant you.”
“I’ll give you my bond for fifty, to be paid on personal presentation.”
“‘A bird in the hand,’ mister. Is that your best?”
“You’d never murder a man for five guineas?” cried the traveller, his voice cracking.
“Five guineas!” echoed the parson with an oath: “five testers; five groats; five copper farthings—what life is worth more? Give him the lead, Jemmy.”
“Hold! I’m Captain Macartney!”
“Captain——! Phew—w—w!”
A moment’s intense silence followed. The two amazed ruffians looked at one another with eyes into which a gleeful cupidity was slowly born. “Captain!” Their gaze was transferred to the sitting figure. Jemmy lowered his pistol. The parson was all one ineffable smile.
“It fits, by God!” said he. “Why did it never occur to me? Two hundred pound, Jemmy, my boy! There’s Sir Townley Shore handy. We must risk it. Up with him before you. You’ve given us the best reason the last, Captain, my love. And you prefer the gallows to a bullet? Well, that’s just a matter of taste.”
They bound his arms behind him, and Jemmy set him before him on the big Flanders mare that he rode; and so they carried their prize, choosing the obscure ways in preference, to the house of Sir Townley Shore, the great county magistrate and magnate of Stoke d’Abernon, which lay a couple of miles the other side of Cobham.
There was a fine excitement in the Court when it was known that the notorious Captain was apprehended. Sir Townley, who was just come in and sitting down to his dinner, ordered in his staff, with a stout ranger or two for extra support, and sent for the prisoner and his guard. But the moment he clapped eyes on the former: “Why, Jack,” cried he in astonishment, “what the plague do you in this company?”
The two rogues, at that cry, stiffened aghast; but their captive advanced with a grin.
“I’ll tell you, Townley,” said he. “I’d not left you and the White Lion Inn a quarter of an hour, when, going on my way, these two gentlemen shot my horse, and, falling upon me, would have murdered me too had I not thought of the expedient of calling myself Macartney; whereby I not only incited them, hoping for the reward, to carry me into a place of safety, but I have the pleasure of presenting you with a couple of very complete gallows-birds for your trussing.”
He turned on the paralysed ex-cleric with a little gasp of laughter.
“You have come the right road for preferment, parson,” said he. “You are going to be exalted like Haman.”
THE DUC DE GUISE
The Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, was giving a ball, characteristically insolent in its conception, at the royal palace of the Louvre. All the principal ladies of the Court were invited to attend it, and each was to be accompanied by her cavaliere-servente, wearing her mistress’s livery.
“I beg you, madam, to excuse yourself,” said the Duc de Guise to his wife. “It is a censorious age, and your condescensions might be misconstrued.”
He was a tall, well-figured man, with a somewhat supercilious expression, emphasised by a prominent underlip. The cut of his face, cold and aquiline, against his ruff, suggested a cameo in high relief. His beard, of a bright brown, was “stilettoed”; a scar defaced his left cheek near the eye, and, in its fading or flushing, betrayed the degree of his emotions. It was curiously in evidence now, though his voice and manner kept their measured quiet.
“Condescensions—to whom, mon chéri?” asked the Duchess, whisking round as she sat under the hands of her tire-woman. She was a beauty, once a princess of Cleves, and as saucy and wilful as she was bewitching. Her husband, with a wave of his hand, dismissed the attendant.
“To M. Saint-Mesgrin, madam,” he said.
She laughed. “Thou hast named my chosen cavalier, Henri. What an odd chance!”
Saint-Mesgrin was one of the King’s mignons, and his name and the lovely Duchess’s were too often associated of late for the Guise’s tolerance.
“Is it not?” he said. “I cannot imagine what suggested it.”
He took a sweetmeat from a little gold box, in shape like a shell, that he carried, and put it between his lips.
“I could not believe,” said the lady, pouting and in an aggrieved voice, “that the Duc de Guise would condescend to jealousy.”
“Nor does he, madam,” answered the Duke. “It is his honour for which he is concerned.”
She flounced a shoulder on him.
“O, very well, monsieur! You know best what is worth your consideration. But, if I were a man, I should not, I think, consign my honour to the keeping of a despised wife. Will you be pleased to call back my maid?”
“You persist, then, in going?”
“Will you call Celestine?”
“Your mere presence there, and in such company, will be construed, you must understand, into a justification for all the calumnies and slanders which have pursued your name of late.”
“What matter, if you do not so construe it? You are not jealous, grâce à Dieu. And as to that great matter of your honour, I will put it for safe custody into the hands of Saint-Mesgrin, and you can ask him for an account of it when you please.”
“To be sure I shall, and very soon perhaps. You will go to the ball, then, madam?”
“You know I must not disappoint the Queen-Mother,” she said hotly; but a certain trepidation was beginning to flutter her heart.
“You are resolved?”
“Will you stop me?”
“By no means.”
She laughed defiantly.
“O, most certainly I shall go then!”
The Duke rose, and bowed very gravely.
“I wish you a good night, madam,” he said. “Go, and enjoy yourself while you may.”
She bit her lip as he left the room. For a moment she was half resolved to yield her pride to the panic fear that had seized her; but the perverse demon prevailed, and she called back her woman.
She went to the questionable ball, and the night passed for her in a sort of conscious delirium peopled with shapes of gaudy terror. The King, the Queen-Mother, even Saint-Mesgrin himself, seemed forms of demoniac malice, luring her on to her damnation. She longed, and yet feared, to fly the unreal pandemonium. Her own peaceful bed figured to her as something pathetic beyond words—a haven of dear refuge which she had forfeited for ever.
At length, at five o’clock in the morning, the ball broke up, and she hurried home with what feverish haste the crowd would permit her. At bed, in the Hôtel de Guise, she cowered beneath the coverlets, and, the attendants dismissed, lay shivering like a mouse in a trap. She hardly dared to breathe, for fear of evoking some menacing echo. She could have thought that something horrible, like a monstrous cat, crouched outside her door.
All of a sudden her heart seemed to stop. Quick, soft steps were coming down the corridor, and the next moment her door opened, and the Duke, followed by a servitor bearing a bowl of broth on a salver, entered the room.
She uttered a little stifled cry. There was something even horrible and suggestive in the choice of the attendant, who was a small, vacant-faced deaf-mute much employed by her husband on secret services. She sat up in her dishevelled beauty, white and panting.
“O, Henri, mon ami,” she whispered, “you have frightened me so!”
He locked the door behind him and came forward, his eyes brilliant, his lips smiling.
“That is a sad result of my consideration,” he said. “I foresaw very well that your heated blood would prevent you from sleeping, and that a counter caloric would be necessary for your rest. Thank my foresight, madam, and drink down this broth.”
“No, Henri—no, no!”
“Peste! this is a peevish return, ma mie. Are you such a child to cry at your draught, and when it comes in so pleasant a disguise? Why, it needs no physician to see the excited wakefulness in your eyes. Down with it, and you will sleep—take my word for it.”
“Henri, before God I have done no harm!”
“What resistance—out of all proportion with the act! Who said you had done harm—or, if he thought it, would dream of retaliating with such kindness. Come, shut your eyes and gulp.”
“I will not indeed.”
Desperate to run, she put a foot over the bedside. He held her back with a force gentle but irresistible.
“Henri!” she cried in agony, “I was wretched all the evening—O, believe me!”
“Ah! I thought you did a mistaken thing in going. What a pity you rejected my advice!”
She shrank from him, her throat gulping, her eyes clouded with horror.
“Your voice is cold,” she whispered—“cold, cold as your eyes, as your heart. O, Death! Will you have no mercy? Henri!”
“Why, you are overwrought, lady. This is foolish. Come, the broth is cooling.”
“Must I drink it?”
“To please me.”
“My confessor first—only for five minutes.”
“What! for a dose of medicine? You speak as though it were poison—the morceau italianizé! And even were it, what could lie to confess in so clear a conscience?”
“You never loved me. Give me the bowl.”
“I will hold it to your lips.”
“No, no, you cannot, you will not.”
“You make me obstinate, madam. I am not wont to be disobeyed.”
“O, horror!”
“I never loved you, you say. Do you love me?”
“Before God, yes!”
“A little thing to refuse your love. Come now, it must be done!”
A shudder convulsed her whole frame; and then suddenly she stiffened, white as ashes.
“I will drink it,” she said, “and then perhaps you will believe in me.”
With a hand as steady as a rock he held the bowl to her lips. Her teeth chattered on its rim a moment, and then she drank, and stopped.
“To the dregs,” he said quietly.
She took the cup from his hand, and, looking him straight in the eyes, drained it, threw it from her, and closing her lids, lay back.
One moment he stood gazing down, then, beckoning to his attendant, very softly left the room, locking the door behind him.
She never moved, she never opened her eyes. Still, as though death had already seized her, she lay there, a creeping rigor seeming to paralyse her limbs. Only her brain was busy, deliriously, unceasingly, gnawing like a rat in an empty house. What conscious reason it possessed was absorbed exclusively in the coming horror of her passing. She was stunned beyond any thought of eternity, or of the part her sinful soul must play in it. Love—the love of earth, of man, of power—was a thing shrunk to insignificance, a dreary, discredited enchantment. The thought of the poison that possessed her absorbed her whole being. She had nothing left in common with that sweet, fantastic conceit, a desirable woman. She was gold turned grey and acrid from contact with mercury—a thing preposterous and contaminated. How was the bane about to act, to assert its hideous mastery? Already strange stings and tremors were apparent in her veins. Was she to be drugged into a merciful oblivion, or wrenched and distorted out of all semblance to humanity? Fearful memories of tales she had heard whispered thronged into her mind. He would not have spared her the worst; why should he, a vengeance revealed so soulless, so calculatingly diabolic?
She felt the poison creeping up her veins. When it reached her heart, it would seize on there, she knew, and tear her to death with its red-hot fangs. A mortal terror throttled her; she was dying, helpless, abandoned, alone to all eternity. With a supreme effort she struggled momentarily out of the shadows, and uttered a choking scream.
The key turned in the lock and her husband entered.
“What is it, ma mie?” he said, and hurried to her side.
She turned a grey and ghastly face to him.
“The poison—O, the poison!”
“What poison?”
“The broth!”
“Foolish! It was just broth, no more. I swear it on my honour.”
“Henri!” Her hands began to tremble. He caught them in his own.
“I had hoped it would cure thy fever,” he said.
“It is cured,” she answered, and burst into overwhelming tears.
He took her into his arms. “Hush!” he said. “We have passed some unhappy hours, mignonne, each for the other’s sake. Now shall we call quits?”
[The End]
NOTE
These sketches, with a single exception, appeared originally, under the covering title “Historical Vignettes,” in Truth, to whose Editor the author’s thanks, for most kind permission to reprint, are given.
The fancy entitled “Fouquier-Tinville” was first published in the English Review, and is here included with due acknowledgments to the Editor.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
The author produced two books titled Historical Vignettes: one in 1910 (T. Fisher Unwin, London), and the other in 1912 (Sidgwick & Jackson, London). Being the former, “1st Series” has been appended to the title to distinguish it from the later (i.e. “2nd Series”).
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. bascinet/basinet, mountain-crag/mountain crag, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
[Title Page]
Add “1st Series” to the book title. (See above).
[End of text]