I think that I had spent a week, or it might be more, in this
situation of mingled ease and torment, when on coming down one morning
after a hag-ridden night I heard a stir in the hall; and, going that
way to learn what it meant, met the servants returning in a crowd from
the front, and talking low about something. Martin, who was foremost,
cried, "Ha, you are too late!" And then drawing me aside, into a
little den he had beside the passage, "They have taken him to the
office," he said. "But, lord's sakes, Mr. Price," he continued,
lifting his eyebrows and pursing up his lips to express his
astonishment, "who would have thought it? Her ladyship will be in a
taking! I hope that there may be no more in it than appears!"
"In what?" said I.
"In this arrest," he answered, eyeing me with meaning, and then softly
closing the door on us. "I hope it may end there. That is all I say!
Between ourselves."
"You forget," I cried with irritation, "that I know nothing about it!
What arrest? And who is arrested?"
"Mr. Bridges's man of business."
"What Mr. Bridges?" I cried.
"Lord, Mr. Price, have you no wits?" he answered, staring at me. "My
lord's mother's husband. The Countess's, to be sure! You must know Mr.
Smith."
It needed no more than that; although, without the name, we might have
gone on at cross purposes for an hour. But the name--the world held
only one Smith for me, and he it seemed was arrested.
He was arrested! It was with the greatest difficulty that I could
control my joy. Fortunately the little cub, where we stood, was
ill-lighted, and Martin, a man too much taken up with his own
consequence to be over-observant of his companions. Still, for a
moment, I was perfectly overcome, the effervescence of my spirits such
that I could do nothing but lean against the wall of the room, my
heart bounding with joy and my head singing a paean of jubilation.
Smith was taken! Smith was in the hands of justice! Smith was arrested
and I was free.
The first rapture past, however, I began to doubt; partly because the
news seemed to be too good to be true, and partly because, though
Martin had continued to babble, I had heard not a word. Wild,
therefore, to have the thing confirmed, I cut him short; and crying,
"But what Smith is it, do you say? Who is he?" I brought him back to
the point at which he had left me.
"Why, Mr. Price," he answered, "I thought everyone knew Mr. Smith. Mr.
Smith, Mr. Bridges's factotum, land-steward, what you will! He married
the Countess's fine madam--madame they call her in the household,
though she is no French thing but Hertfordshire born, as I knew by her
speech when my lord first took up with her. But not everyone knows
that."
"When my lord took up with her?" I said, groping among half-recognised
objects, and beginning--so much light may come through the least
chink--to see day.
Mr. Martin nodded confidentially. "That is how she came to be with my
lady," he said. "And Mr. Smith, too! My lord met her somewhere when he
was young and gay and took up with her, and to please her got the
place for Mr. Smith, who had been her flame before. However, my lord
soon tired of her, for though she was a beauty she had common ways and
was bold as brass; so when he parted from her she went back to her old
love, who had first made her the mode, and married him. I have heard
that my lord was in a pretty taking when he found her planted at the
Countess's. But I have nothing to say against her."
"Does my lord--see her now?" I said with an effort.
"When he does he looks pretty black at her. And I fancy that there is
no love lost on her side."
"What did you say that--they called her?" I asked.
"Madame--Madame Monterey."
I remembered where I had heard the name before and who had borne it;
and saw so much light that I was dazzled. "And my lord's mother--who
married Mr. Bridges. She is a Papist?"
"Hush!" he said. "The less said about such things the better, Mr.
Price."
But I persisted. "It was she who ran off with my Lord Buckingham in
King Charles's time," I cried, "and held his horse while he killed her
husband? And who had Mr. Killigrew stabbed in the street; and----"
In a panic he clapped his hand on my mouth. "God, man!" he cried, "do
you know where you are, or is your head turned? Do you think that this
house is a fit place to give tongue to such things? Lord, you will be
but a short time here, and to the pillory when you go, if you throw
your tongue that way! I have not blabbed as much in twenty years, and
would not for a kingdom! Who are you to talk of such as my lady?"
He was so righteously indignant at the presumption of which I had been
guilty in attacking the family that, though it was his own
indiscretion that had led me to the point, I made haste to mutter an
apology, and doing this with the better grace for the remembrance that
Smith was now powerless and his wicked plans abortive, I contrived
presently to appease him. But the ferment which the discovery I had
made wrought in my spirits moved me to escape as quickly as possible
to my room, there to consider at leisure the miserable position in
which, but for Smith's timely capture, I must have found myself.
A suspicion of the truth I had entertained before; but this certainty
that the man I was to be trepanned into personating was my benefactor,
and that in the plot his own mother was engaged, filled me with as
much horror, when I considered the necessity of complying under which
I might have lain, as thankfulness when I reflected on the escape I
had had. Nor did these two considerations, overwhelming as they may
well appear, account for all the agitation I was experiencing. Mr.
Martin, in speaking of Madame Monterey's origin, had mentioned
Hertfordshire; and the name, bringing together two sets of facts
hitherto so distant in my mind that I had never undertaken to connect
them, had in a flash presented Smith and madame in their true colours.
Why I had not before associated the Smith I now knew with that Templar
Smith whom I darkly remembered as Jennie's accomplice in my early
trouble; why I had not recognised in the woman's coarsely handsome
features the charms that thirteen years before had fired my boy's
blood and brought me to the foot of the gallows, is not more difficult
to explain than why this one mention of Hertfordshire sufficed to
raise the curtain; ay, and not only to raise it, but to set the whole
drama so plainly before me that I could be no wiser had I followed
every scene in madame's life, and, a witness of her shameful _debut_
under Smith's protection, her seduction of my lord and her period of
splendour, had attended her in her final declension when, a discarded
mistress, she saw no better alternative than a marriage with her
former protector.
How greatly this identification of the two conspirators increased, as
well as the loathing in which I held their schemes, as my relief upon
the reflection that those schemes were now futile, I will not say.
Suffice it that the knowledge that, but for Smith's arrest, I must
have chosen between playing the basest part in the world and running a
risk whereat I shuddered, filled me with thankfulness immeasurable, a
thankfulness which I did not fail to pour out on my knees, and which
was in no degree lessened by a shuddering consciousness that in that
dilemma, had Providence not averted it, I might have--ay, should
have--played the baser part!
No wonder that a hundred harrowing recollections crowded on my mind,
or that under the pressure of these the tumult of my spirits became so
powerful that I presently seized my hat, and hastily escaping from the
house, sought in rapid movement some relief from the unpleasant
retrospect. Crossing the Green Park, I chose a field path that led by
the Pimlico marshes to Fulham; and gradually the songs of the larks
and the spring sunshine--for the day was calm and serene--leading my
mind into a more cheerful groove, I began to dwell rather on the fact
of my escape than on the crime from which I had escaped, and
contemplating the secure career that now lay in view before me, I was
not long in seeing that thankfulness should be my strongest feeling.
Turning my back on Smith and his like, I began to build my house
again; saw a smiling wife and babes, and days spent between my home
and my lord's papers; and then a green old age and slippered feet
tottering through the quiet shades of a library. Before I turned I had
roofed the house with an honourable headstone, and felt the tears rise
in generous sympathy with the village assembled to do the old man
honour.
In a word, tasting the full relief of emancipation, I became so gay
and lightsome that even the smoke and din of London, when I re-entered
it, failed to subdue the unusual humour. I could have sung, I could
have laughed aloud. Let the dead past bury its dead! For Ferguson,
Smith, the Monterey--a fig! Who had come off best after all? And of
their fine plottings and contrivings what had been the upshot? They
had failed and I had triumphed; they were prisoners, I was free and
safe.
Near the garden-wall of Buckingham House there was a bear dancing, and
a press of people round it. I stayed to watch, and in my mood, found
the fun so much to my taste that I threw the man a penny and went on
laughing. A little further, by the edge of the lake, was a man with a
barrow and dice--then a novelty, though now so prevalent that at the
last sessions, I am told, the thing was presented for a nuisance. I
stood here and saw a man lose, and in the exaltation of my spirits,
pushed him aside and laid down a shilling, and won, and won again--and
again; whether the cog failed or the truckster who owned the barrow
thought me a good bait. Either way I took up my winnings with an air
and hectored away as good a bully as another; placed for the moment so
far above myself and common modesty, that I wondered whether I should
ever sink back into the timid citizen, or feel my eyes drop before a
bravo's.
Alas, in a moment, _quantum mutatus ab illo!_ At the corner of the
Cockpit, towards Sion House, I met Matthew Smith.
I had no doubt. I knew all in an instant, and turned sick. He was
free, alone, walking with his head high and an easy gait. Worse, he
saw me; saw how I cowered and shrank into myself, and became another
man at sight of him!
Slackening his pace as he came up, he halted before me, with that
quiet devil's grin on his face. "Well," he said, "how are you, Mr.
Price? I was looking for you."
"For me?" I muttered. "I thought--I heard--that you were arrested."
"A mistake!" he answered, continuing to smile. "A mistake! Some other
Smith."
"And you were not arrested?" I whispered.
"Oh, I was arrested!" he answered jauntily. "And taken to the
Secretary. And of course released. There! you have it all."
I uttered an exclamation; two words wrung from me by despair.
Thereat, and pretending to misunderstand me. "You thank God? Very kind
of you, Mr. Price," said he grinning. "Like master, like man, I see.
The Duke was kindness itself. But I must be going." And then,
arresting himself in the act of leaving me, "You have heard," he
continued, "that the poor devil Charnock stands his trial to-morrow?
Porter is an evidence, and by Monday the parson will swing. It should
be a warning to us," he continued, shaking his head with a smile that
chilled the marrow in my bones, "what company we keep. A rascal like
Porter might see you or me in the street--and swear to us. Ha! Ha! It
sounds monstrous odd, but so it might be. But by-by, Mr. Price. I must
not keep you."