Mr. Tuke, as a result of his grudging sop to respectability, had
brought about nothing more definite than some unprofitable
temporizing. No doubt this served him well right, and was a lesson to
him to be more particular for the future in his dealings with his own
conscience. For that same usurer will think nothing of charging a
hundred per cent. on the least little matter of “accommodation.”
To choose the lesser of two advantages is thought a virtue by some;
but then to be held kicking one’s heels between them both becomes a
grievous injustice. This hardship our friend thought himself to
suffer, and was very morose and discontented in consequence.
Does any one think meanly of this gentleman that he could fly for
comfort of a legitimate suit gone awry to a humbler breast than it was
his temptation to use and bruise? I can only offer the defence that
pure-hearted Betty thought none the less of him for doing so, and that
to no sweeter Mentor could any foundering soul submit its ethological
perplexities. For the question of “taste”--let _him_ decide who is the
best authority on the right cut of a coat. But passion, I believe, is
not grounded on any conventional knowledge of what is fitting.
Now, for some weeks, the master of “Delsrop” led a very solitary and
rather crabbed life. Debarred, by the simplest honour, from going
whither his heart would have conducted him, he yet resented the
necessity of a self-denial that would probably in the end prove itself
futile. Miss Royston might, he had some ground for believing, favour
his suit eventually, could he submit to her his sufficient
credentials. Yet, though he had committed himself to a rather negative
declaration; though he perceived his most honest and most reasonable
course would be to set himself right in that lady’s eyes; though he
felt no umbrage at her caution, which was certainly under the
circumstances justifiable, he could not altogether whip himself away
from the temptation to solve the problem of an explanation by--doing
nothing at all.
He succeeded in at least scotching that snake. But he dared not let
his thoughts run on Betty, or on the sweetness and innocence that, to
the beast in man, are such lures to brutality. It is only when the
blood runs aged that we can look on any extreme beauty of nature
without wishing to obscure it, so unbearable to our diseased
perceptions is the flawless.
At length he made up his mind to the right course. Christmas was over
and done with--a somewhat dismal hermit-time to him--and early in the
new year Blythewood and his sister were to journey to London. He would
ride with them; would spend a few days in town, and while there, would
endeavour to induce the lawyer Creel to some explanation of that
enigma of his inheritance. Surely, with such an object in view as a
union with a lady of a certain rank and position, he would not be
refused those credentials he desired.
He was further urged to this decision by the fact that his house was
now properly served, and that since that night of his furniture’s
arrival, there had been no evidence but that Mr. Breeds’s unhonoured
guests had withdrawn finally from the neighbourhood. Dennis he would
leave in general charge, with strict orders as to the protection of
the premises during his absence.
So matters were ordered; and about the second week in January the
party set forth. The baronet and his sister posted; but their
neighbour, to whom a saddle was the most _sans souci_ of conveyances,
rode his own horse.
The weather was bitterly cold, with a perpetual menacing look in all
the stony vault of the sky, and the journey, till near its
termination, quite uneventful.
They did not start by way of Stockbridge; but, to Mr. Tuke’s relief,
took cross-tracks for a number of miles, and struck the London road at
Basinstoke, where they dined. He rode at their wheel, or not, as
circumstance permitted, and Angela was gracious or peevish with him
according to her mood.
Perhaps his own varied. After dinner his heart would sing jocundly:
“She unites sense with beauty, and hath a hundred charms of wit and
winsomeness. I am a fool to doubt.”
Then he would murmur: “Am I frighted by the shadow of my own past? I
will carry her in the teeth of it all. None but the brave deserve the
fair.”
And so presently to the reaction--the fall of enthusiasm’s temperature
in the chill of some icy response when digestion needed a stimulus.
“None but the brave deserve immunity from the fair,” thought he.
“These old saws want mending.”
And maybe he was right; for even an axiom will not endure for ever,
but will wear out like a book-block, and come to leave a faint
impression.
They slept at the “White Hart” at Hook--whither an outrider had
preceded them to bespeak beds--and were to make an end of their
journey by the evening of the morrow.
On that following day all went awry. The little baronet had been free
with his bottle overnight, and was, for him, in a very sour and
cross-grained condition. The water they had found frozen in the ewers;
the soap curdled--as it will in very cold weather--in the dishes. The
chimney had, and the venison had been, smoked. The waiters received
vails proportionate with the mood of the party, and showed some
consequent surliness in bidding it on its way.
For half the morning Mr. Tuke jogged in the rear of the chaise,
cursing the ice-bound road and the ringing cold. Angela sat amongst
her furs pink-eyed, like a ferret looking out of straw; and Sir David
nursed his sick head, and exclaimed spasmodically over the infernal
jolting; for the sludgy track--some eighteen inches deep in mud during
the most of the winter--that was the Exeter road, was now petrified
into furrows like those in a bed of larva.
Often a horse would slip and fall, flinging its stiffened postillion;
and then there would be bitter delay, and the unbuckling of straps
with blue ineffectual hands, and much breathing of oaths and stamping
of deadened feet; while low in the desolate welkin the sun looked on
with dim unconcerned eye, as if it were some senile monarch, conscious
only of private cosiness while gazing through a frosted window on a
little township of suffering.
And so on again presently, crashing and pounding, the boys towelling
their cattle for mere exercise of their own numbed fingers, the
cat-ice splintering in the ruts, the chaise dancing wildly in its
straps.
Fortunately there was no snow; though the sky bore evidence in its
appearance of such garnered stores of it as could, at a nod, sow the
world with winter.
It was an hour past noon when our party drew up, in no very sweet
temper, at the door of the “Catherine Wheel” at Egham, where they were
to stop for dinner.
They thawed a little during the meal, and were even amiable, one with
the other, after a guarded fashion. Sir David was the victim of
nothing more than some physical discomfort; but his two companions
suffered yet under a species of misunderstanding that circumstance
only could put an end to; and in the meanwhile it was inevitable that
their mutual relations should be marked by some coldness and
embarrassment.
The “Regulator” coach, from Exeter to London, clattered up in the
frost and stopped to change horses while they were at table. They
heard the half-dead “outsides” stumping about in the bar and calling
for mulled port and Nantes brandy to warm them on to the next stage;
and had a glimpse, through the lattice, of the vehicle
itself--chocolate in hue and traced all over with gilt lettering like
a Christmas calendar; of a happy-faced young woman who sat, hugging a
little boy in her lap, on the “gammon-board” of the roof; and of a
kit-kat presentment of an arrogant-visaged young gentleman, with a
brown silk handkerchief tied about his head, who leaned out of the
drag window, to the huge discomfort of the other “insides,” and amused
himself by endeavouring to scrape with a tooth-pick the paint off the
bull’s head on the panel of the door.
This latter sight sent Mr. Tuke back in his chair with an involuntary
start--which Miss Royston noticed.
“Do you know the gentleman?” she said, jumping to a conclusion.
“I? Yes--I recognize him, I think.”
“Oh, indeed! And who is he, may I ask?”
“’Tis Dunlone--Lord Dunlone. I have met him. We were in the way of
being friends, in fact.”
He thought to himself: “The fellow goes townwards from his Cornish
place. ’Tis in sort with his cursed parsimony to stage it like a
provident cit.”
“I will excuse you, if you wish to go speak with him,” said Miss
Angela.
“Not in the least. I should poorly requite myself for the loss of your
society.”
She laughed, with a faint insolence of inflection. Only one reason, it
seemed to her, could be for his refusing to act upon the
acquaintanceship he claimed--that he feared to put it to the test.
_Was_ it possible he was the nobleman’s valet? she mused, recalling
that other case.
He sat on, unwitting of her meditations; but he felt a degree of
relief, nevertheless, when the guard of the “Regulator”--a confident,
red-faced young fellow, in a bottle-green coat and with a sprig of
mistletoe in his hat--sounded his horn, disposed his reluctant
passengers, swung himself up over the hind-boot, chucked the rosy
young woman, to the gazer’s high approval, under the chin, and gave
the signal to start; and it was without regret that he saw that
straining vehicle draw away with a rumbling of wheels, and the
unwelcome vision pass from his ken. For he had no mind to recall a
certain phase of his life, from which he could have sworn, years of
reformation bridged him.
By two o’clock they were on their way again, and, as the dusk
gathered, so did their gloom and reserve seem to deepen. Indeed, the
horseman felt it a positive relief when dark shut in upon them still
urging onwards, for so the perils of the road were his sufficient
excuse for keeping himself apart and without the influence of that
depressing atmosphere.
Driving on desperately, in a struggling flurry to escape being
benighted on some impassable waste, they struck the track by and by
across Hounslow Heath, and put on what additional speed they durst
over that open and historic ground.
A crimson spot of light that, upon their first issuing on to the
flats, had seemed the low-down radiance of some far cottage-window,
grew in lustre as they advanced, until it flared before them, a
leaping flame. Thereupon they slackened speed somewhat, moving with
caution; and the horseman dropped a hand towards his holster.
A hundred yards further, and the flame became a fire dancing redly by
the roadside; and there were shadows flitting about it, and, close by,
a looming mass that threw back little spars and runlets of reflection
to the spouting blaze.
Clipping indecision with a jerk of his rowels, Mr. Tuke uttered a
shout and rode down upon the group. There was an answering cry; and he
saw a figure or two throw up its hands, dramatically entreating him to
a halt. Something he noticed in time to respond, and pulled up his
horse with so great a suddenness upon the icy road, that the brute
sank upon its haunches and half-tumbled him out of the saddle.
He was on the ground in a moment, and, whipping the frightened animal
to its feet, moved towards the fire and was made way for by those
about it.
He looked down. The body of a man lay uncouthly flung beside the
glow--that had been built up hastily of brushwood and dead sticks in a
hopeless effort to rekindle a late-extinguished spark of life. The
flame painted the waxen face and fallen jaw with a hectic mockery of
vitality, and glinted on a dribbling splash in the forehead where
something had crushed in through the very ring of a cherished
love-lock.
A woman was down upon the grass by the figure--moaning to it,
caressing it, with some piteous shame of the awful publicity of her
conduct; for she would not believe in the impotence of her agony to
rouse that silent shape to any responsive gesture; and, in the
background of her thoughts, was some insane speculation as to how,
when all was right again, she should hold her terror an apology for
her emotion.
Close behind her stood a little crying boy, his fingers in his eyes;
and it was moving to see how, in the youngling’s cap and in the breast
of the kneeling woman, were merry knots of Christmas--earnests of a
thoughtless time.
“The guard?” murmured the new-comer.
He grasped the situation with only too sure an intuition. The glooming
mass in the road was nothing less than that same lusty vehicle they
had seen but an hour or two before rumble away from the inn-door, its
jovial horn answering to the lips of that formless thing by the fire.
“Aye,” grunted the coachman, from the covert of his preposterous
neckcloth. He had come up on the moment, from the task of slowly
manipulating his cut traces.
“That’s the last of Charlie,” he said, with some thickness of fury in
his tone.
“No, no!” moaned up the woman. “Not the last--my God, no!”
“Don’t take on, my dear,” he said. “Charlie done his dooty like a man;
and there’s not a coach vheel ’ll go over that there patch on the road
but ’ll roll up a bloody account agen his murderers.”
She only sighed miserably in answer. The deep apathy of grief was in
her veins like a drug.
“How many?” said Tuke.
“Six, if there was vun, sir. Six cursed ruffians to dance agen the sky
and serve the crows for black pudden, so be there’s any vally in the
fellowship of the road.”
He shook his pillow of an arm aloft--finely, for all the heavy oddity
of his appearance.
“Aye,” he murmured, in response to a gesture--“the man’s wife and his
youngster.”
At the word a woman--one from the huddled group of robbed and
terrified passengers--came out into the glow, and snatching up the
child, forced it whimpering into its mother’s arms. The act was well
conceived. The desolate creature caught at the hope, and held it
convulsively against her breast; and in a moment her burdened heart
found relief.
Mr. Tuke backed silently. “No,” the coachman had growled to him--“_he_
wanted no help. _He_ could get on well enough now. There was nothing
for it but to complete his crippled stage, and as quickly as possible
set the law in motion.”
The chaise, with its occupants, was drawn up at a little distance from
the tragic scene. As the horseman made for it, eager to reassure his
friends that any cause for present alarm was passed, he was aware of a
figure standing by the door and addressing those within in exceedingly
tremulous tones.
“I’ve had enough of it, curse me!” it was saying. “’Twould be a sick
thing to travel with that dead rascal banging on the roof; and the
cursed coachman refuses to go without him. I’ve been robbed of fifty
pound, by God! and I’ll take it exceeding civil of you to give me a
lift over the last stages.”
“Indeed,” said Miss Angela’s clear voice--“we shall be very happy,
Lord Dunlone.”
“Who the deuce told you my name--who, now?”
He could hardly stand still in his fear and excitement; but kept
pulling at the handle of the door in a nervous effort to turn it.
“Who told you?” he said. “Curse it! Can’t some one help me?”
“Go steady at it,” came Sir David’s voice. “We’re not tryin’ to
overreach you, sir. ’Twas a friend--common to both of us, I
understand--Mr. Tuke, who saw you in the coach at Egham.”
“Tuke--Tuke! I don’t know any one of the name. Here--give me a hand,
will you?”
He plunged into the vehicle, and the door snapped on him. The listener
retreated softly into the rearward shadows. He had forgotten that this
undesirable acquaintance was amongst the passengers; and it was some
amelioration of the tragedy to hear that he had been stripped clean.
He waited silent while the chaise kept its place--which it did only a
few minutes before the nobleman’s peevish voice sounded, cursing the
postillions to a move.
Then he went to the help of the coach-driver; and, later, cantered out
the rest of his journey in the tail of that gingerbread conveyance,
that was become a mere hearse of death and sorrow.
“Ah!” he thought--“how, in all her after-days, will she love the
memory of that chin-chuck, poor soul.”