“Lord!” he cried, doubling with laughter, “what headaches I’ve
projected into their beer-barrels down there! What poison laid on the
lasses’ lips! I shall have some fine incense of sufferin’ risin’ to me
to-morrow! What, you’re goin’, are you? Down into the fire, hey? A
pretty little faggot to mend its blazin’!” And he kneaded his hands
rapturously between his knees.
I saw the priest had disappeared over the crest, and, half crying,
pursued him. He turned on me angrily as I came up.
“Now,” said he, adjusting his spectacles to glare through them, “if
that old carrion speaks truth, I come to an end with you.” He gripped
my shoulder. “Hold your tongue, d’you hear? Not a word of us till we
find out how the land lies.”
He dropped his hold, on a sudden thought, to my elbow, and, with a
muttered menace, marched me down the hill.
At the bottom, in a little lane, with hedges to screen it from the
view beyond, we came unexpectedly upon a lady gathering wild flowers.
She started violently upon observing my companion, and dropped her
nosegay. He accosted her, with a manner of gruff civility, and here it
was somehow that, as they broke into talk of an urgent nature, we got
separated.
VI.
I AM “PINNED OUT”
The festivities were to celebrate the majority of the Viscount
Salted, only son to Hardrough, fourth Earl of Herring, Baron Rowe of
Shole and Wellcot-Herring, Warden of the Cinque Ports, and official
Verderer of the Forest of Down. The Lady Sophia Rowe, aunt to the
young gentleman, had driven over from Wellcot--her estate in tail
female, and distant from Shole by road seven miles--to lend her
saintly countenance to the gathering, and it was she whom Father Pope,
steering his course erroneously for Shole instead of Wellcot-Herring,
had fortuitously encountered culling wild flowers in her brother’s
lordlier demesne.
The Lady Sophia was, unlike her orthodox kinsman, a convert to the
Catholic from the Established Church, and within her limits, and
because of them, a zealous fanatic. In her one saw acutely
demonstrated the denaturalising power of creed. Gentle as a dove by
temperament, there was no crime but self-destruction which she would
not have gloried in to justify hers. She would have thought the world
well lost to save her own soul, colourless as that dear little article
was. Though she was modesty incarnate, her self-importance in this
respect was amazing. She schemed through all the virtues for the
apotheosis of Lady Sophia, and she called her scheming the vindication
of truth, which she held to be a Romish monopoly. She would have made
me a nun, as part of it, and taken all the credit with Heaven. I can
hardly regret that she was foiled. I love truth as well as any woman,
only, being a woman, _à contre-cœur_, and not a saint, for me it
must be coloured, and in the newest shades. To ask me to love it for
its own sake is to ask me to be a dowd; and, for all my respect for
Lady Sophia, I have never fancied a heaven of dowds.
When we alighted on her, she was by great good chance withdrawn from
her company, and communing with Nature for relaxation. Flowers, to
her, were sanctified of the altar, so bringing her faith and her
inclinations into line. She was terribly agitated over her encounter
with Father Pope, whom she knew, and over his peril, which she
exaggerated. The shock of intolerance was hardly extended to Shole;
but she had heard, by private despatch, of her Dulwich kinsfolk’s
flight, and of the chaplain’s eccentric desertion, and all the day had
tormented herself with fears of the fate which he had invited to
befall him. Now, while they were engaged in earnest discussion,
eschewing for the moment all thought of me, I was driven by curiosity
to steal down the lane, till, through a gap in the hedge, I was able
to observe at close hand the lively scene that was enacting on the
green below.
It had certainly looked prettier from the hill. I saw links of
red-faced oafs sway roaring across the turf, and whip themselves in
mere drunken impulse about any mock-bashful hoyden who stood, feigning
unconsciousness, in their path. I saw blowzed, over-fed women,
dragging squalling babies, struggle vainly to be included in the
amorous capture, and when they failed or were ignored, vindicate their
outraged respectability in coarse recriminations. I saw farmers,
seated under trees, weep fuddled tears because they could hold no
more, and stuffed children, crying for nothing so much as breath. I
had been drawn, as was natural to me, by the bait of gaiety and life,
and this was my reward. The ground between the booths was strewed with
trampled fragments of bread and meat, and sodden with rejected ale. It
was a fair, with all the licence of a day gathered into an hour.
I don’t know how long I had been standing, absorbed in contemplation
of this Gehenna, and of the stately mansion across the green, on whose
terraces a gay company, gathered to see the beasts feed, was clearly
distinguishable, when a sound of hoofs coming up the lane behind me
brought me to myself; and almost immediately three horsemen, with very
flushed faces, rode into view, and, perceiving me, halted. One was a
fox-featured gentleman, in fulvous cloth; one, good-humoured and
quiet, wore a grey coat; and the third was resplendent all over, and
as drunk as Chloe. He, at the first sight of me, tumbled rather than
dismounted from his horse, and, forsaking the reins, which the grey
gentleman caught, came staggering upon me.
“Hey, my vitals!” he lisped, “whom the devil have we here?”
He was quite young, and like a pretty toy, with a spangled coat in the
Maccaroni Club style, a great bow at his neck, and ribbons to his
knees. But he frightened me with the stare in his glazed eyes; and as
he advanced, I backed into the hedge.
“I was only looking,” I fluttered. “I didn’t mean any harm. Please let
me go.”
“Harm!” he exclaimed, with a tipsy crow. “O, but you’re trespassing,
missy, and must give an hic-count of yourself. Come ’long, now, before
my lord.”
I saw the eldest of the three regarding us from his saddle with a sort
of mordant humour, and the sudden recognition of his state made my
heart leap. Red, and lank-jawed, and vicious, he sat watching us as a
fox might watch his cub negotiating the helpless struggles of a lamb.
He always had a fine appetite for such occasions, and could sin very
sweetly by proxy, could Hardrough.
“Wounds, my lord!” cried the boy, “is this a larsh surprise for me
you’ve ’ranged? Besh preshent of all the day. Come cock-horse, child,
and we’ll kiss a-riding.”
He put an arm about me. For all my distress, the musky contact of him,
so precious after my long degradation, seemed half to drug me from
resistance. I struggled feebly to push him away.
“Get on with your gallophic,” said he, addressing his companions
knowingly. “I’ll follerer by-m-by.”
“Come, Salted,” cried the grey gentleman suddenly, in a laughing,
half-vexed way. “Remember what’s due to your guests, child, now and to
be. Come along and ride yourself sober, as you engaged.”
“Shober, nunky! shober, you cake!” sputtered the fool. “Shober ’nough
yourself to wa’t me go on and break my neck--hey, my lord?”
He leered tipsily to the earl his father, who grinned, and blinked his
red eyes.
“Let him be, George,” said the nobleman. “Damme, the boy’s not fit to
ride a broomstick. You’re precious anxious for the gipsy, brother. I’d
as lief you was concerned for your nephew.”
“And so I am,” says the other hotly. “’Tis foul so to take advantage
of a stranger and a child. Call your cub off, sir,” says he, “if I’m
not to take a whip to him.”
He gathered his reins in, and twitched his heels. He was bronzed and
comely, a man of thirty or so, younger by ten years than the earl. He,
the latter, had turned quite white. A frost seemed to have pinched his
cheeks. In another moment, I believe, he would have drawn his
riding-switch across the handsome face, but in that moment I was aware
of a lady hurrying up, and I broke from my captor, and fled to meet
her.
“Help me!” I cried. “Don’t let him hurt me!”
She received me very kindly. She was a tall and colourless figure,
gentle in mien but with a bad complexion--the lady, in short, in whose
company I had left Father Pope.
“Hardwick! George!” she whispered, in an outraged voice.
The earl pushed up to her, with a snigger.
“There, Sophy,” said he. “What are you doin’ here? But I’m glad you’ve
come. Is this here your protégée? Well, take the little baggage
away, that was near bringing us to words about her.”
“Words!” she said. “This child!”
“O,” he exclaimed, “that’s all one! Come, boy!”
She detained him some minutes, murmuring to him as he bent down. At
the end he rose, grinning at me.
“What!” says he--“the sly old crow! Be sure the little sweep wasn’t
fathered by a black cassock before you adopt her.”
She started back, flushing scarlet.
“Hardrough!” she said; “I ask you to go on.”
“Well, I will,” said he, with a little breathless laugh, “and carry
your secret, sister, safe in my keepin’.”
He half wheeled, and in an ironic voice summoned the young viscount.
The boy got to his horse as sulky as sin. In another minute the three
gentlemen were ridden out of sight.
The moment they had disappeared the lady turned to me.
“Why didn’t you keep by your friend?” she asked, rather sharply. “From
what he tells me, you are in need of one.”