Next morning Captain Audaine was closeted with Mr. Vanringham in the
latter's apartments at the _Three Gudgeons_. I abridge the Captain's
relation of their interview, and merely tell you that it ended in the
actor's looking up, with a puzzled face, from a certain document.
"You might have let me have a whiff of this," Mr. Vanringham began. "You
might have breathed, say, a syllable or two last night--"
"I had my instructions, sir, but yesterday," replied the Captain; "and
surely, Mr. Vanringham, to have presumed last night upon my possession of
this paper, so far as to have demanded any favor of you, were unreasonable,
even had it not savored of cowardice. For, as it has been very finely
observed, it is the nicest part of commerce in the world, that of doing and
receiving benefits. O Lord, sir! there are so many thousand circumstances,
with respect to time, person, and place, which either heighten or allay the
value of the obligation--"
"I take your point," said the other, with some haste, "and concede that you
are, beyond any reasonable doubt, in the right. Within the hour I am off."
"Then all is well," said Captain Audaine.
But he was wrong in this opinion, so wrong that I confute him by subjoining
his own account of what befell, somewhat later in the day.
I
'Twas hard upon ten in the evening (the Captain estimates) when I left
Lady Culcheth's, [Footnote: Sir Henry Muskerry's daughter, of whom I have
already spoken, and by common consent an estimable lady and a person of
fine wit; but my infatuation for Lady Betty had by this time, after three
nights with her, been puffed out; and this fortunate extinction, through
the affair of the broken snuffbox, had left me now entirely indifferent to
all her raptures, panegyrics, and premeditated artlessnesses.--F. A.] and I
protest that at the time there was not a happier man in all Tunbridge than
Francis Audaine.
"You haven't the king?" Miss Allonby was saying, as I made my adieus to the
company. "Then I play queen, knave, and ace, which gives me the game, Lord
Humphrey."
And afterward she shuffled the cards and flashed across the room a glance
whose brilliance shamed the tawdry candles about her, and, as you can
readily conceive, roused a prodigious trepidation in my adoring breast.
"Dorothy!--O Dorothy!" I said over and over again when I had reached the
street; and so went homeward with constant repetitions of her dear name.
I suppose it was an idiotic piece of business; but you are to remember
that I loved her with an entire heart, and that, as yet, I could scarcely
believe the confession of a reciprocal attachment, which I had wrung from
her overnight, to the accompaniment of Gerald's snoring, had been other
than an unusually delectable and audacious dream upon the part of Frank
Audaine.
I found it, then, as I went homeward, a heady joy to ponder on her
loveliness. Oh, the wonder of her voice, that is a love-song! cried my
heart. Oh, the candid eyes of her, more beautiful than the June heavens,
more blue than the very bluest speedwell-flower! Oh, the tilt of her tiny
chin, and the incredible gold of her hair, and the quite unbelievable
pink-and-white of her little flower-soft face! And, oh, the scrap of
crimson that is her mouth.
In a word, my pulses throbbed with a sort of divine insanity, and Frank
Audaine was as much out of his senses as any madman now in Bedlam, and as
deliriously perturbed as any lover is by ordinary when he meditates upon
the object of his affections.
But there was other work than sonneting afoot that night, and shortly I
set about it. Yet such was my felicity that I went to my nocturnal labors
singing. Yes, it rang in my ears, somehow, that silly old Scotch song, and
under my breath I hummed odd snatches of it as I went about the night's
business.
Sang I:
"Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?
Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?
King James the Seventh had ae daughter,
And he gave her to an Oranger.
"Ken ye how he requited him?
Ken ye how he requited him?
The dog has into England come,
And ta'en the crown in spite of him!
"The rogue he salna keep it lang,
To budge we'll make him fain again;
We'll hang him high upon a tree,
And King James shall hae his ain again!"