_PROEM.--To Explain Why the Heroine of This Comedy Must Wear Her Best_
I quit pilfering from the writings of Francis Audaine, since in the
happenings which now concern us he plays but a subsidiary part. The Captain
had an utter faith in decorum, and therefore it was, as he records, an
earth-staggering shock when the following day, on the Pantiles, in full
sight of the best company at the Wells, Captain Audaine was apprehended. He
met disaster like an old acquaintance, and hummed a scrap of song--"_O, gin
I were a bonny bird_,"--and shrugged; but when Miss Allonby, with whom he
had been chatting, swayed and fell, the Captain caught her in his arms, and
standing thus, turned angrily upon the emissaries of the law.
"Look you, you rascals," said he, "you have spoiled a lady's afternoon with
your foolish warrant!"
He then relinquished the unconscious girl to her brother's keeping,
tenderly kissed one insensate hand, and afterward strolled off to jail
_en route_ for a perfunctory trial and a subsequent traffic with the
executioner that Audaine did not care to think of.
Tunbridge buzzed like a fly-trap with the ensuing rumors. The Captain
was at the head of a most heinous Jacobitical uprising. The great Duke
of Ormskirk was come hastily from London on the business. Highlanders
were swarming over the Border, ten thousand French troops had landed at
Pevensey, commanded by the Chevalier St. George in person, and twenty
thousand friars and pilgrims from Coruña had sailed for Milford Haven,
under the admiralty of young Henry Stuart. The King was locked in the
Tower; the King had been assassinated that morning by a Spanish monk, with
horse-pistols and a cast in his left eye; and the King and the Countess of
Yarmouth had escaped three days ago, in disguise, and were now on their way
to Hanover.
These were the reports which went about Tunbridge, while Dorothy Allonby
wept a little and presently called for cold water and a powder-puff, and
afterward for a sedan chair.
I
Miss Allonby found my Lord Duke of Ormskirk deep in an infinity of papers.
But at her entrance he rose and with a sign dismissed his secretary.
It appears appropriate here to afford you some notion of Ormskirk's
exterior. I pilfer from Löwe's memoir of him, where Horace Calverley, who
first saw Ormskirk at about this time, is quoted:
"His Grace was in blue-and-silver, which became him, though he is somewhat
stomachy for such conspicuous colors. A handsome man, I would have said,
honest but not particularly intelligent.... Walpole, in a fit of spleen,
once called him 'a porcelain sphinx,' and the phrase sticks; but,
indeed, there is more of the china-doll about him. He possesses the
same too-perfect complexion, his blue eyes have the same spick-and-span
vacuity; and the fact that the right orb is a trifle larger than its fellow
gives his countenance, in repose, much the same expression of placid
astonishment.... Very plump, very sleepy-looking, immaculate as a cat, you
would never have accorded him a second glance: covert whisperings that the
stout gentleman yonder is the great Duke of Ormskirk have, I think, taxed
human belief more than once during these ten years past."
They said of Ormskirk that he manifested a certain excitement on the
day after Culloden, when he had seventy-two prisoners shot _en masse_,
[Footnote: But for all that, when, near Rossinish (see Löwe), he captured
Flora Macdonald and her ostensibly female companion, Ormskirk flatly
declined to recognize Prince Charles. "They may well call you the
Pretender, madam," he observed to "Bettie Burke,"--"since as concerns my
party you are the most desirable Pretender we could possibly imagine." And
thereupon he gave the Prince a pass out of Scotland.] but this was doubted;
and in any event, such _battues_ being comparatively rare, he by ordinary
appeared to regard the universe with a composed and feline indifference.