It was in the May of 1680 that Mr. William Wycherley went into the
country to marry the famed heiress, Mistress Araminta Vining, as he had
previously settled with her father, and found her to his vast relief a
very personable girl. She had in consequence a host of admirers,
pre-eminent among whom was young Robert Minifie of Milanor. Mr.
Wycherley, a noted stickler for etiquette, decorously made bold to
question Mr. Minifie's taste in a dispute concerning waistcoats. A
duel was decorously arranged and these two met upon the narrow beach of
Teviot Bay.
Theirs was a spirited encounter, lasting for ten energetic minutes.
Then Wycherley pinked Mr. Minifie in the shoulder, just as the
dramatist, a favorite pupil of Gerard's, had planned to do; and the
four gentlemen parted with every imaginable courtesy, since the wounded
man and the two seconds were to return by boat to Mr. Minifie's house
at Milanor.
More lately Wycherley walked in the direction of Ouseley Manor,
whistling _Love's a Toy_. Honor was satisfied, and, happily, as he
reflected, at no expense of life. He was a kindly hearted fop, and
more than once had killed his man with perfectly sincere regret. But
in putting on his coat--it was the black camlet coat with silver
buttons--he had overlooked his sleevelinks; and he did not recognize,
for twenty-four eventful hours, the full importance of his carelessness.
In the heart of Figgis Wood, the incomparable Countess of Drogheda,
aunt to Mr. Wycherley's betrothed, and a noted leader of fashion, had
presently paused at sight of him--laughing a little--and with one tiny
hand had made as though to thrust back the staghound which accompanied
her. "Your humble servant, Mr. Swashbuckler," she said; and then: "But
oh! you have not hurt the lad?" she demanded, with a tincture of
anxiety.
"Nay, after a short but brilliant engagement," Wycherley returned, "Mr.
Minifie was very harmlessly perforated; and in consequence I look to be
married on Thursday, after all."
"Let me die but Cupid never meets with anything save inhospitality in
this gross world!" cried Lady Drogheda. "For the boy is heels over
head in love with Araminta,--oh, a second Almanzor! And my niece does
not precisely hate him either, let me tell you, William, for all your
month's assault of essences and perfumed gloves and apricot paste and
other small artillery of courtship. La, my dear, was it only a month
ago we settled your future over a couple of Naples biscuit and a bottle
of Rhenish?" She walked beside him now, and the progress of these
exquisites was leisurely. There were many trees at hand so huge as to
necessitate a considerable detour.
"Egad, it is a month and three days over," Wycherley retorted, "since
you suggested your respected brother-in-law was ready to pay my debts
in full, upon condition I retaliated by making your adorable niece
Mistress Wycherley. Well, I stand to-day indebted to him for an
advance of L1500 and am no more afraid of bailiffs. We have performed
a very creditable stroke of business; and the day after to-morrow you
will have fairly earned your L500 for arranging the marriage. Faith,
and in earnest of this, I already begin to view you through appropriate
lenses as undoubtedly the most desirable aunt in the universe."
Nor was there any unconscionable stretching of the phrase. Through the
quiet forest, untouched as yet by any fidgeting culture, and much as it
was when John Lackland wooed Hawisa under, its venerable oaks, old even
then, the little widow moved like a light flame. She was clothed
throughout in scarlet, after her high-hearted style of dress, and
carried a tall staff of ebony; and the gold head of it was farther from
the dead leaves than was her mischievous countenance. The big
staghound lounged beside her. She pleased the eye, at least, did this
heartless, merry and selfish Olivia, whom Wycherley had so ruthlessly
depicted in his _Plain Dealer_. To the last detail Wycherley found
her, as he phrased it, "_mignonne et piquante_," and he told her so.
Lady Drogheda observed, "Fiddle-de-dee!" Lady Drogheda continued:
"Yes, I am a fool, of course, but then I still remember Bessington, and
the boy that went mad there----"
"Because of a surfeit of those dreams 'such as the poets know when they
are young.' Sweet chuck, beat not the bones of the buried; when he
breathed he was a likely lad," Mr. Wycherley declared, with signal
gravity.
"Oh, la, la!" she flouted him. "Well, in any event you were the first
gentleman in England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace."
"And you were the first person of quality to eat cheesecakes in Spring
Garden," he not half so mirthfully retorted. "So we have not entirely
failed in life, it may be, after all."
She made of him a quite irrelevant demand: "D'ye fancy Esau was
contented, William?"
"I fancy he was fond of pottage, madam; and that, as I remember, he got
his pottage. Come, now, a tangible bowl of pottage, piping hot, is not
to be despised in such a hazardous world as ours is."
She was silent for a lengthy while. "Lord, Lord, how musty all that
brave, sweet nonsense seems!" she said, and almost sighed. "Eh, well!
_le vin est tiré, et il faut le boire_."
"My adorable aunt! Let us put it a thought less dumpishly; and render
thanks because our pottage smokes upon the table, and we are blessed
with excellent appetites."
"So that in a month we will be back again in the playhouses and Hyde
Park and Mulberry Garden, or nodding to each other in the New
Exchange,--you with your debts paid, and I with my L500----?" She
paused to pat the staghound's head. "Lord Remon came this afternoon,"
said Lady Drogheda, and with averted eyes.
"I do not approve of Remon," he announced. "Nay, madam, even a Siren
ought to spare her kin and show some mercy toward the more
stagnant-blooded fish."
And Lady Drogheda shrugged. "He is very wealthy, and I am lamentably
poor. One must not seek noon at fourteen o'clock or clamor for better
bread than was ever made from wheat."
Mr. Wycherley laughed, after a pregnant silence.
"By heavens, madam, you are in the right! So I shall walk no more in
Figgis Wood, for its old magic breeds too many day-dreams. Besides, we
have been serious for half-an-hour. Now, then, let us discuss
theology, dear aunt, or millinery, or metaphysics, or the King's new
statue at Windsor, or, if you will, the last Spring Garden scandal. Or
let us count the leaves upon this tree; and afterward I will enumerate
my reasons for believing yonder crescent moon to be the paring of the
Angel Gabriel's left thumb-nail."
She was a woman of eloquent silences when there was any need of them;
and thus the fop and the coquette traversed the remainder of that
solemn wood without any further speech. Modish people would have
esteemed them unwontedly glum.
Wycherley discovered in a while the absence of his sleeve-links, and
was properly vexed by the loss of these not unhandsome trinkets, the
gifts of Lady Castlemaine in the old days when Mr. Wycherley was the
King's successful rival for her favors. But Wycherley knew the tide
filled Teviot Bay and wondering fishes were at liberty to muzzle the
toys, by this, and merely shrugged at his mishap, midcourse in toilet.
Mr. Wycherley, upon mature deliberation, wore the green suit with
yellow ribbons, since there was a ball that night in honor of his
nearing marriage, and a confluence of gentry to attend it. Miss Vining
and he walked through a minuet to some applause; the two were heartily
acclaimed a striking couple, and congratulations beat about their ears
as thick as sugar-plums in a carnival. And at nine you might have
found the handsome dramatist alone upon the East Terrace of Ouseley,
pacing to and fro in the moonlight, and complacently reflecting upon
his quite indisputable and, past doubt, unmerited good fortune.
There was never any night in June which nature planned the more
adroitly. Soft and warm and windless, lit by a vainglorious moon and
every star that ever shone, the beauty of this world caressed and
heartened its beholder like a gallant music. Our universe, Mr.
Wycherley conceded willingly, was excellent and kindly, and the Arbiter
of it too generous; for here was he, the wastrel, like the third prince
at the end of a fairy-tale, the master of a handsome wife, and a fine
house and fortune. Somewhere, he knew, young Minifie, with his arm in
a sling, was pleading with Mistress Araminta for the last time; and
this reflection did not greatly trouble Mr. Wycherley, since
incommunicably it tickled his vanity. He was chuckling when he came to
the open window.
Within a woman was singing, to the tinkling accompaniment of a spinet,
for the delectation of Lord Remon. She was not uncomely, and the hard,
lean, stingy countenance of the attendant nobleman was almost genial.
Wycherley understood with a great rending shock, as though the thought
were novel, that Olivia, Lady Drogheda, designed to marry this man, who
grinned within finger's reach--or, rather, to ally herself with Remon's
inordinate wealth,--and without any heralding a brutal rage and hatred
of all created things possessed the involuntary eavesdropper.
She looked up into Remon's face and, laughing with such bright and
elfin mirth as never any other woman showed, thought Wycherley, she
broke into another song. She would have spared Mr. Wycherley that had
she but known him to be within earshot. . . . Oh, it was only Lady
Drogheda who sang, he knew,--the seasoned gamester and coquette, the
veteran of London and of Cheltenham,--but the woman had no right to
charm this haggler with a voice that was not hers. For it was the
voice of another Olivia, who was not a fine and urban lady, and who
lived nowhere any longer; it was the voice of a soft-handed, tender,
jeering girl, whom he alone remembered; and a sick, illimitable rage
grilled in each vein of him as liltingly she sang, for Remon, the old
and foolish song which Wycherley had made in her praise very long ago,
and of which he might not ever forget the most trivial word.
Men, even beaux, are strangely constituted; and so it needed only
this--the sudden stark brute jealousy of one male animal for another.
That was the clumsy hand which now unlocked the dyke; and like a flood,
tall and resistless, came the recollection of their far-off past and of
its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and absurdities and
splendors of their common youth, and found him in its path, a painted
fellow, a spendthrift king of the mode, a most notable authority upon
the set of a peruke, a penniless, spent connoisseur of stockings,
essences and cosmetics.
He got but little rest this night.
There were too many plaintive memories which tediously plucked him
back, with feeble and innumerable hands, as often as he trod upon the
threshold of sleep. Then too, there were so many dreams, half-waking,
and not only of Olivia Chichele, naive and frank in divers rural
circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda, that perfect piece
of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and volatile in every
movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the tips of her
polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about this
world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and tiny
bird of the tropics!
But presently parochial birds were wrangling underneath the dramatist's
window, while he tossed and assured himself that he was sleepier than
any saint who ever snored in Ephesus; and presently one hand of
Moncrieff was drawing the bed-curtains, while the other carefully
balanced a mug of shaving-water.
Wycherley did not see her all that morning, for Lady Drogheda was
fatigued, or so a lackey informed him, and as yet kept her chamber.
His Araminta he found deplorably sullen. So the dramatist devoted the
better part of this day to a refitting of his wedding-suit, just come
from London; for Moncrieff, an invaluable man, had adjudged the pockets
to be placed too high; and, be the punishment deserved or no, Mr.
Wycherley had never heard that any victim of law appeared the more
admirable upon his scaffold for being slovenly in his attire.
Thus it was as late as five in the afternoon that, wearing the
peach-colored suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon, and a new French
beaver, the exquisite came upon Lady Drogheda walking in the gardens
with only an appropriate peacock for company. She was so beautiful and
brilliant and so little--so like a famous gem too suddenly disclosed,
and therefore oddly disparate in all these qualities, that his decorous
pleasant voice might quite permissibly have shaken a trifle (as indeed
it did), when Mr. Wycherley implored Lady Drogheda to walk with him to
Teviot Bay, on the off-chance of recovering his sleeve-links.
And there they did find one of the trinkets, but the tide had swept
away the other, or else the sand had buried it. So they rested there
upon the rocks, after an unavailing search, and talked of many trifles,
amid surroundings oddly incongruous.
For this Teviot Bay is a primeval place, a deep-cut, narrow notch in
the tip of Carnrick, and is walled by cliffs so high and so precipitous
that they exclude a view of anything except the ocean. The bay opens
due west; and its white barriers were now developing a violet tinge,
for this was on a sullen afternoon, and the sea was ruffled by spiteful
gusts. Wycherley could find no color anywhere save in this glowing,
tiny and exquisite woman; and everywhere was a gigantic peace, vexed
only when high overhead a sea-fowl jeered at these modish persons, as
he flapped toward an impregnable nest.
"And by this hour to-morrow," thought Mr. Wycherley, "I shall be
chained to that good, strapping, wholesome Juno of a girl!"
So he fell presently into a silence, staring at the vacant west, which
was like a huge and sickly pearl, not thinking of anything at all, but
longing poignantly for something which was very beautiful and strange
and quite unattainable, with precisely that anguish he had sometimes
known in awaking from a dream of which he could remember nothing save
its piercing loveliness.
"And thus ends the last day of our bachelorhood!" said Lady Drogheda,
upon a sudden. "You have played long enough--La, William, you have led
the fashion for ten years, you have written four merry comedies, and
you have laughed as much as any man alive, but you have pulled down all
that nature raised in you, I think. Was it worth while?"
"Faith, but nature's monuments are no longer the last cry in
architecture," he replied; "and I believe that _The Plain Dealer_ and
_The Country Wife_ will hold their own."
"And you wrote them when you were just a boy! Ah, yes, you might have
been our English Moliere, my dear. And, instead, you have elected to
become an authority upon cravats and waistcoats."
"Eh, madam"--he smiled--"there was a time when I too was foolishly
intent to divert the leisure hours of posterity. But reflection
assured me that posterity had, thus far, done very little to place me
under that or any other obligation. Ah, no! Youth, health and--though
I say it--a modicum of intelligence are loaned to most of us for a
while, and for a terribly brief while. They are but loans, and Time is
waiting greedily to snatch them from us. For the perturbed usurer
knows that he is lending us, perforce, three priceless possessions, and
that till our lease runs out we are free to dispose of them as we
elect. Now, had I jealously devoted my allotment of these treasures
toward securing for my impressions of the universe a place in yet
unprinted libraries, I would have made an investment from which I could
not possibly have derived any pleasure, and which would have been to
other people of rather dubious benefit. In consequence, I chose a
wiser and devouter course."
This statement Lady Drogheda afforded the commentary of a grimace.
"Why, look you," Wycherley philosophized, "have you never thought what
a vast deal of loving and painstaking labor must have gone to make the
world we inhabit so beautiful and so complete? For it was not enough
to evolve and set a glaring sun in heaven, to marshal the big stars
about the summer sky, but even in the least frequented meadow every
butterfly must have his pinions jeweled, very carefully, and every
lovely blade of grass be fashioned separately. The hand that yesterday
arranged the Himalayas found time to glaze the wings of a midge! Now,
most of us could design a striking Flood, or even a Last judgment,
since the canvas is so big and the colors used so virulent; but to
paint a snuff-box perfectly you must love the labor for its own sake,
and pursue it without even an underthought of the performance's
ultimate appraisement. People do not often consider the simple fact
that it is enough to bait, and quite superfluous to veneer, a trap;
indeed, those generally acclaimed the best of persons insist this world
is but an antechamber, full of gins and pitfalls, which must be
scurried through with shut eyes. And the more fools they, as all we
poets know! for to enjoy a sunset, or a glass of wine, or even to
admire the charms of a handsome woman, is to render the Artificer of
all at least the tribute of appreciation."
But she said, in a sharp voice: "William, William----!" And he saw
that there was no beach now in Teviot Bay except the dwindling crescent
at its farthest indentation on which they sat.
Yet his watch, on consultation, recorded only five o'clock; and
presently Mr. Wycherley laughed, not very loudly. The two had risen,
and her face was a tiny snowdrift where every touch of rouge and
grease-pencils showed crudely.
"Look now," said Wycherley, "upon what trifles our lives hinge! Last
night I heard you singing, and the song brought back so many things
done long ago, and made me so unhappy that--ridiculous conclusion!--I
forgot to wind my watch. Well! the tide is buffeting at either side of
Carnrick; within the hour this place will be submerged; and, in a
phrase, we are as dead as Hannibal or Hector."
She said, very quiet: "Could you not gain the mainland if you stripped
and swam for it?"
"Why, possibly," the beau conceded. "Meanwhile you would have drowned.
Faith, we had as well make the best of it."
Little Lady Drogheda touched his sleeve, and her hand (as the man
noted) did not shake at all, nor did her delicious piping voice shake
either. "You cannot save me. I know it. I am not frightened. I bid
you save yourself."
"Permit me to assist you to that ledge of rock," Mr. Wycherley
answered, "which is a trifle higher than the beach; and I pray you,
Olivia, do not mar the dignity of these last passages by talking
nonsense."
For he had spied a ledge, not inaccessible, some four feet higher than
the sands, and it offered them at least a respite. And within the
moment they had secured this niggardly concession, intent to die, as
Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a pantry-shelf. The business
smacked of disproportion, he considered, although too well-bred to say
as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth and sea, and
with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose speedier
extinction had been dear at the expense of a shilling's worth of
arsenic!
Then the sun came out, to peep at these trapped, comely people, and
doubtless to get appropriate mirth at the spectacle. He hung low
against the misty sky, a clearly-rounded orb that did not dazzle, but
merely shone with the cold glitter of new snow upon a fair December
day; and for the rest, the rocks, and watery heavens, and all these
treacherous and lapping waves, were very like a crude draught of the
world, dashed off conceivably upon the day before creation.
These arbiters of social London did not speak at all; and the bleak
waters crowded toward them as in a fretful dispute of precedence.
Then the woman said: "Last night Lord Remon asked me to marry him, and
I declined the honor. For this place is too like Bessington--and, I
think, the past month has changed everything----"
"I thought you had forgotten Bessington," he said, "long, long ago."
"I did not ever quite forget--Oh, the garish years," she wailed, "since
then! And how I hated you, William--and yet liked you, too,--because
you were never the boy that I remembered, and people would not let you
be! And how I hated them--the huzzies! For I had to see you almost
every day, and it was never you I saw--Ah, William, come back for just
a little, little while, and be an honest boy for just the moment that
we are dying, and not an elegant fine gentleman!"
"Nay, my dear," the dramatist composedly answered, "an hour of naked
candor is at hand. Life is a masquerade where Death, it would appear,
is master of the ceremonies. Now he sounds his whistle; and we who
went about the world so long as harlequins must unmask, and for all
time put aside our abhorrence of the disheveled. For in sober verity,
this is Death who comes, Olivia,--though I had thought that at his
advent one would be afraid."
Yet apprehension of this gross and unavoidable adventure, so soon to be
endured, thrilled him, and none too lightly. It seemed unfair that
death should draw near thus sensibly, with never a twinge or ache to
herald its arrival. Why, there were fifty years of life in this fine,
nimble body but for any contretemps like that of the deplorable
present! Thus his meditations stumbled.
"Oh, William," Lady Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big--the incurious
west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's youth,--and
we are so little----!"
"Yes," he returned, and took her hand, because their feet were wetted
now; "the trap and its small prey are not commensurate. The stage is
set for a Homeric death-scene, and we two profane an over-ambitious
background. For who are we that Heaven should have rived the world
before time was, to trap us, and should make of the old sea a
fowling-net?" Their eyes encountered, and he said, with a strange gush
of manliness: "Yet Heaven is kind. I am bound even in honor now to
marry Mistress Araminta; and you would marry Remon in the end,
Olivia,--ah, yes! for we are merely moths, my dear, and luxury is a
disastrously brilliant lamp. But here are only you and I and the
master of all ceremony. And yet--I would we were a little worthier,
Olivia!"
"You have written four merry comedies and you were the first gentleman
in England to wear a neckcloth of Flanders lace," she answered, and her
smile was sadder than weeping.
"And you were the first person of quality to eat cheese-cakes in Spring
Garden. There you have our epitaphs, if we in truth have earned an
epitaph who have not ever lived."
"No, we have only laughed--Laugh now, for the last time, and hearten
me, my handsome William! And yet could I but come to God," the woman
said, with a new voice, "and make it clear to Him just how it all fell
out, and beg for one more chance! How heartily I would pray then!"
"And I would cry Amen to all that prayer must of necessity contain," he
answered. "Oh!" said Wycherley, "just for applause and bodily comfort
and the envy of innumerable other fools we two have bartered a great
heritage! I think our corner of the world will lament us for as much
as a week; but I fear lest Heaven may not condescend to set apart the
needful time wherein to frame a suitable chastisement for such poor
imbeciles. Olivia, I have loved you all my life, and I have been
faithful neither to you nor to myself! I love you so that I am not
afraid even now, since you are here, and so entirely that I have
forgotten how to plead my cause convincingly. And I have had practice,
let me tell you. . . . !" Then he shook his head and smiled. "But
candor is not _à la mode_. See, now, to what outmoded and bucolic
frenzies nature brings even us at last."