“Diane,” whispered my father in my ear, “go and tell the duke in a
pretty speech that I send my love to him.”
I flicked up my skirts, and went off immediately among the fruit and
decanters. My progress was a triumph. The women clapped in artificial
enthusiasm, and the men stopped me to kiss my little shoes. And
presently down that long lane I saw the duke’s smiling face awaiting
me. It was not a temperate face, it is true; its thirty-four years
were traced upon it in very crooked hieroglyphics. But then--_c’est la
dernière touche qu’informe_--the royal star of the garter glittering
on the apricot coat beneath made everything handsome. By his side sat
the lady his duchess, _née_ Luttrell, as brand-new as I to her
exaltation. But it was the difference between Hebe and Thais. For all
my innocence I felt that, and did not fear her rivalry. I dropped a
little curtsey amongst the grapes and melons.
“Monsieur,” I said, “my papa wishes to make you a pretty gift, and
sends you his love.”
He applauded, laughing, as did all the table, and lifted me down to
his lap.
“What price for the love?” he cried. “See, I return him a dozen
kisses.”
He kept me, however, plying me with bonbons, while madam tittered and
fanned herself vexedly.
“You will make the little ape sick, Enrico,” she said. “Put her down;
for shame!”
“I know where to stop,” I retorted; and “By God, you do!” said the
duke, with a great laugh, and held me tight.
I had a thimbleful of liqueur from his hand by and by, which made me
think of the duck-stone. I was the little queen of the evening, and a
delight to my father and all.
“Faith!” said a merry Irish _rapparee_, a bit of a courtier captain,
“man has been vainly trying to fit woman into the moral scheme ever
since she made herself out of his ninth rib, and the fashions out of a
fig-leaf; and here, in the eighteenth century Anno Domini, is the
result.”
I was carried on to the Steine presently by my father, my little brain
whirling. The whole of the Castle Tavern, and every house and shop
adjacent, were illuminated; and the lights and crowds of people quite
intoxicated me. There were sports enacting on all sides, and I
screamed with laughter to see a jingling match, played for a laced
coat and hat, in which the jingler, hung with bells, dodged and eluded
and dropped between the legs of the blindfolded who sought to capture
him. Then there was a foot-race, run by young women for a Holland
smock; and I jeered at their self-conscious antics with all my little
might, as they went giggling into place, coy and hobbledehoy, and
pushed and quarrelled secretly, and stopped the starter to do up their
greasy tresses, and then, all but the winner, snivelled over the
result, pronouncing it unfair.
Presently I was taken to see an ox roasted whole; and it was here,
while we were looking on at the lurid tumult, occurred a rencontre
which was to alter the whole current of my life. A fat, drunken sweep
in his war-paint jostled my father, who, himself in the fury of wine,
turned and felled the beast to the ground. We were isolated from our
friends at the moment, and a ring was immediately formed, and the
sweep called upon to stand up and pay his interest like a man. He
rose, nothing loth, it seemed, and faced my father, who was forced to
engage.
“My little ’orse and cart to a red-un that I whop ye!” cried the
sweep.
“Done!” answered my father, and they fell to.
I was sure of the result, and stood by quite self-possessed and eager
while they fought. A round or two settled it, and there sat the sweep,
unable to rise again, with a white tooth dropped on his coat-front.
When my father came away, I clung to him and kissed him in ecstasy. He
was quite cool, and only a little breathed; and when, for the honour
of sport, he had settled for the sweep’s trap to be driven round to
his door in the morning, intending to put it up to auction, he
shouldered me laughing, and carried me away amidst cheers.
It was near midnight by then, and, happening upon a royal servant, he
gave me into the man’s charge, and, in spite of my remonstrances, bade
him convey me home. I sulked all the way, and was in no mood, after my
excitement, to sympathise with my mother’s agitated reception of her
truant. She had been near distracted all these hours, thinking me
drowned or kidnapped, and could not control a gust of temper upon
hearing how I had been employed.
“O, my _maman_,” I said saucily, “you must understand I have never
been in a convent, and so know how to take care of myself.”
It was wicked; but it was my governess speaking, not I.
II.
I AM ABDUCTED
My mamma questioned me again in the morning about my adventures. She
was very hollow-eyed and nervous, which offended me; for for her to
appear ill in body or ill at ease in mind seemed to make my own young
sanity something that it was wrong or selfish in me to enjoy. I was
inconsiderate, no doubt; yet tell me, my Alcide, is it, on the other
hand, considerate of dyspepsia to be always wet-blanketing health and
contentment? Is not the human the only animal permitted of right to
inflict his sickness on his fellows, while in every other community
the invalid is “out of the law” of nature? It is thus, undoubtedly,
that deterioration is provided against. To be attracted to the sweet
and wholesome, and repelled by distemper, is _that_ selfishness? If it
is not, then am I content to be misunderstood by all others, so long
as Heaven will recognise the real love of humankind which inspires my
wish to secure its untainted image in myself. There must be a divine
virtue in health, seeing how disease is the heir of sin. Is not to
sympathise, then, with depression, to condone evil?
I leave the answer to profounder moralists than I, content, in
default, to admit that the misery which now befell me was the direct
consequence of my wickedness.
“Papa,” said I, tossing my head, “gave me to the beautiful duke, and
he took me in pledge of the love papa bears him. Will he come and
fetch me, do you think, mamma? I shall be glad to belong to one who
does not have headaches whenever the sun shines.”
She went quite white, and broke into a torrent of French invective.
“I do not understand these hard words,” I said. “Is it so they pray in
les Madelonnettes?”
My sauciness took her completely aback. She stared at me for some
moments in silence, and then cried out suddenly, “God forgive you,
Diane, and the vile creature who has instructed you to this, and your
father, who I am going at once to ask that she may be removed!”
And she went out, unconsciously consigning me to my fate; and I never
saw her again, may Heaven pardon her!
I was a little frightened, though still defiant; and I loitered about
the house, singing in my small voice, which, though never an “organ,”
has always been attractive, so people say.
Presently I remembered my duck-stone, and thought I would seek a case
for it. I was alone in the house, for our one maid was gone marketing,
and the governess not yet arrived. I went upstairs, and rummaged in my
mother’s bureaux, and by and by found a tiny silver vinaigrette into
which the stone fitted beautifully. Then I went and sat in our little
front garden which overlooked the road running to the downs, and there
rocked and mused amongst the flowers in a recovered temper. I hoped my
father would fetch me again; I expected he would; and so, smiling and
dreaming, put up the vinaigrette half-consciously, and sniffed at it.
In a moment all sense of my surroundings went from me, and sky and
flowers and the grey downs were blended in a rapture of unreality.
I came to myself amidst an impression of jolting. I thought it was
night, and that I was suffocating in my bedclothes. I threw something
from my face, saw daylight, and cried out incoherently.
Immediately the jerky motion ceased, and a horrible mask looked over
and down at me. It was fat and sooty, with a handkerchief, startlingly
white by contrast, going obliquely across its forehead.
“Stow that, my pigeon!” it said hoarsely and shortly. But at the first
sound of its voice, black inspiration had come upon me in a flood. It
was the sweep of my last night’s adventure, and he was bearing me away
captive in the very little cart he had lost to my father. Whether he
had driven that up, sportingly, to time, or was merely escaping in it,
I never learned. Anyhow, temptation had come to him recognising me
lying there, senseless and unprotected, in the garden, and moved,
perhaps, by some sentiment between cupidity and revenge, he had seized
the opportunity to kidnap me.
He swung his fat legs over the sitting board, and lifted me up from
the midst of the empty bags where he had concealed me. We were in the
thick of a little wood, and the pony was quietly cropping at the
trackside grass. The sense of loss and isolation, the filth of my
condition, the terror of this startled awakening from happy dreams,
wrought a desperation in me that was near madness. I screamed and
reviled and fought. The man opposed to my struggles just his two
hands; but their large persuasive strength, unctuous as they were with
soot, was more deadly than any violence. Alas! how the star that lit
last night’s heaven may be found fallen in the mud to-day, my Alcide!
When I was quiet, he put me up between his knees, and smacked my face
twice, deliberately, on either side--not hard, but in a lustful,
proprietary way.
“Blow for blow,” says he, and lifted the bandage a little from his
eye. It was horribly swollen and discoloured.
“Knew how to handle his morleys,” he said. “D’ee see’t? Now it be my
turn.”
“What are you going to do with me?” I sobbed.
“Make ’ee my climbing boy,” he answered promptly, and with a hideous
grin. “You’re my luck. D’ee see? Say you’re a gurl, and I’ll”-- He
hissed in his breath, and looked at me like a beast of prey.
“There,” he ended; “get under, and so much’s sniff at your peril!”
Some distant sound, perhaps, startled him. He stuffed me into my
former position, and, covering me again with the bags, turned and
clicked up his pony. I lay in a half faint, scarce daring to breathe,
so utterly had this monster succeeded in subduing me. I cried,
incessantly but quietly, hearing hour by hour the wheels grind under
my ear, till the sound and physical exhaustion induced in me a sort of
delirium. All this time, the hope of pursuit and rescue never occurred
to me, I believe. Did they occur to Proserpine having once felt the
inhumanity of her sooty abductor?
But now all of a sudden the anguish grew unendurable. I must move or
die. And at the moment I became conscious of the vinaigrette still
clutched convulsively in my little fist.
Sure never death offered a sweeter release. Very softly I raised it,
and found oblivion. I might have sought to use it on my enemy, and
escape; but, alas! the unsophisticated mind of the child could compass
no such artifice.
We went on all day, as I realised during the intervals of my waking,
by the unfrequented roads, jolting, loitering, sometimes in lonely
places halting to rest the pony. The moral force my master (as I must
now call him) put upon himself to avoid the wayside taverns, is the
most convincing proof of his tenacity.
At last, a thicker darkness descended upon me, lying there in hopeless
apathy, and night and sleep stretched their shroud over my miseries.
I awoke to rough movement and the sound of voices. My master was
carrying me into a little ill-lighted cottage, which stood solitary
upon the edge of a common. Sharp and brilliant, at no great distance,
in a soughing night, sparkled the first lamps of a town.
I was borne into a tiny room, where something, covered with a cloth,
lay stretched upon a rickety table. My master put me to the ground,
and stood back to regard me. Another man, an expressionless sweep like
himself, but gaunt and bent-shouldered, joined silent issue in this
scrutiny.
“Well,” said the latter at length, “they’ll fit right enow; but damn
the exchange!”