“If--if I consent, you’ll hold to your part of the bargain?”
“Eh?” he questioned.
“Help me to escape?”
“No fear o’ my forgetting,” he answered. “You may lay to that.”
I knew he meant to betray me in the double sense, and would have given
more than I feigned to barter at that moment for the leave to beguile
him to me, and slip a knife into his lying throat. But I tasted part
of my revenge in the thought of his freezing alone there by and by, in
the rendezvous to which my wits had decoyed him, while I went to my
other undisturbed.
He was jealous of me, and suspicious still of so light a surrender.
But the prize was worth the risking; and in the end he let me go,
gloating over my stealthy retreat, as a cruel schoolmaster might watch
the slinking away of a delinquent whom he had ordered up for
punishment later.
That night fell a harder frost, with glittering stars but no moon.
Early secured in my sanctum, I awaited the great moment in such an
indescribable agony of mind as I have never felt before or since.
Every step near my door was a tread upon a nerve. The stable clock,
when it rang out, clear and sonorous, the last quarter after nine,
seemed to brain me with its every stroke. I stole to the open window,
took intent stock of the quiet, seated myself, poised to spring, on
the sill, and passed my duck-stone at a little distance under my
nostrils. The next instant I had alighted safely on my feet, and
reeling against the wall beneath, stood a minute to recover. The next,
I was round the angle of the house, and sped into the dark
shrubberies, where were safety and concealment.
Going very softly in my stockinged feet, and careful of my knowledge
not to penetrate the thicket until close upon the appointed place, I
reached my goal upon the stroke of the hour.
“Well!” whispered a voice from the starlight. “I could trust you.”
He had been stretched recumbent on the wall top, and now rose
cautiously to my view, no longer the whitened fool, but the true Gogo
of my affections. I looked up at him as from a well; and he swung his
long stilts over, as he sat, so that they rested on the ground
beneath.
“Quick!” he muttered; “without a moment lost--swarm! I can’t bend.”
Heaven knows how I did it--with no better show of grace than Lady
Sophia, I fear. But somehow I scrambled up, until he could reach my
hands, and haul me with a mighty power beside him. Then, once more,
swing went his legs, and there was the ladder for my descent on the
other side.
I clung to him convulsively; I kissed his hands; I could not refrain
from sobbing.
“O, Gogo!” I said; “what you have saved me from--O, Gogo, what!”
His breath caught like a wounded lion’s.
“Not yet,” he whispered. “There is far to go first!”
“Put me down, then,” I answered, alert in the stress of things.
“No,” he said. “On my back--quick!”
“You are going to carry me?”
“There are bloodhounds,” he replied. “There must be no tracks but the
stilts’--no scent for them to follow.”
Then I understood the fulness of his plan; but still I lingered,
amazed.
“I am not a child. What strength, though yours, could bear me so?”
He showed me a long staff that leaned to him against the outer wall.
“There is my third prop,” he said. “When I am driven, I can still seat
you upon a branch, and save the scent. The ground is iron, and”--he
struck his chest--“these ribs. Come, and let me wear my heart upon my
sleeve.”
The next moment we were off. The great creature swayed beneath me like
a tree; but he never staggered or faltered, save periodically to rest
himself and me. The sweet night wind blew upon my face, cold and
colder. I snuggled from it into the vast nape of his neck, which was
like a mat for warmth. I had no idea or care whither he was taking me,
and the knowledge only that it was by roads deserted at this silent
hour. Still he held on, and, when frost and weariness threatened to
numb my brain, could spare a strong hand to imprison both mine lest I
fell. And still the flight endured, and I asked, could ask, no
question, not even when I grew penetrated by a dull consciousness of
ascent--of my comrade straining and toiling beneath me like a stricken
Sisyphus--of the groaning of the giant spirit in him who would not be
subdued. Then, at last, came a pause, and darkness and release; and I
felt myself swung gently down to rest upon a mat of scented leaves,
whose warmth and fragrance wooed me to such a sleep as I had never
known before.
XV.
I BECOME AN INMATE OF “RUPERT’S FOLLY”
I awoke, flushed and happy as a dormouse from its winter bed of
leaves. The world was good again, with all its potentialities of love
and freedom; the sun was somewhere seeking me; there was no ache, but
the sweet ache of memory, in my whole heart and body. Locality, I have
said before, has never influenced my temper. I make the only
reservation now of liberty to change it at my will.
I remained some time, with my hands beneath my head, taking stock
motionlessly of my new surroundings. They were odd enough. I lay near
the wall, it seemed, of a sort of circular ground chamber or cellar,
roofed in at an inexplicable height above me. Twice, at intervals
between, projecting corbels appeared to show the one-time existence of
upper floors, which, having either rotted away or been removed, had
left the chamber of a height quite disproportionate with its ground
dimensions. In lieu of stairs, a make-shift ladder went up into the
roof at a crazy angle, and disappeared through a trap; but it started
from the ground so close to a rude fireplace in the wall, that its
butt was scorched, and more than one of the lower rungs snapped in its
socket.
Over the floor itself were scattered tokens of some late or present
occupation--a common table, a rush chair or two, battered saucepans, a
greasy gridiron, and, hanging on the walls, a frowzy account of
clothes. A line, stretched across a segment of the room, had once held
suspended a litter of foul-washed clouts; but the string had broken,
and its filthy load been kicked aside or trodden into the floor, half
brick half muck, which paved the apartment.
There were no windows, but, at irregular intervals, narrow loops such
as one sees in old castles; and the single ground opening was a
doorway, which let in just such a smear of daylight as served to
emphasise the uncleanness.
Recognising in all this the reverse of familiar, I let my wondering
eyes travel round to the parts more contiguous to my bed, and so gave
a little pleased start and smile. There, like guardian posts to my
slumber, were the long stilts leaned against the wall, their straps
hanging loose; and pendent from a nail close by was the very clown’s
dress of my memory. I could have drawn it to me and kissed it; but,
contenting myself with conceding to it a sigh of affection, I sank
back and closed my eyes. Lying thus deliciously, half-submerged in a
very nest of dry fern, and with a heavy cloak for blanket over me, I
would delay luxuriously the moment of revelation; but it was very
evident, I thought, that Gogo had brought me to some wrecked and
deserted mill.
Suddenly, unable to rest longer, I peeped. He was going softly about
the hearth, preparing something at a little fire, whose every thicker
waft of smoke he would jealously dissipate with his hands. He still
feared observation, then! Watching him silently, my heart welled up
with a gush of love for the dear, patient, faithful monster. “Gogo!” I
said softly.
He started, looked across, and came to me at once, stumping over the
floor in a rapture of response. He took a stool, and, sitting on it by
me, gazed eagerly into my face, his own--animal, sinful, and
divine--looking from a very burning bush of stubble.
Smiling, in a drowsy warmth, I put out a hand, and let him imprison it
in his own. Ah, foolish little bird, so to commit thyself to the snare
of the fowler! I thought he would have killed it, and tore it back
fluttering and wounded.
“O, how could you?” I cried. “I was so happy; and you have hurt me!”
He leaned in a hoarse agony to me; his breath groaned in his chest.
“O, come to me!” he implored, “while I make one mouthful of you!”
Then, all in an instant, he was sobbing, and tearing at his short
hair, and crying incoherently--
“What have I done?--to wound my dear! Ride me, flog me, use me, but
trust me no more. Bitter, bitter are the gods, who make a man
stiff-kneed for their sport! Not love or penance for me, never, never.
Never to kneel--to lie prone only for a show! O, child! it seems a
little thing not to kneel, but--ah, to see others pray and love,
yourself forbidden--what pity, what pity! I am the Olympian fool; I am
the ass and clown. Behold my livery!”
He pointed to the dress on the wall, and hung his head and arms in a
very grief of despondency. But by now my hurt and little fright were
gone, and my heart touched again to softness.
“Gogo,” I said, “give it me down, please.” And he looked up wondering,
and stirred and obeyed.
“This, and this, and this,” I said, “in pledge of our one-day contract
before Jove, or Jehovah, when the maimed shall be made whole.”
My tears dropped on it, as I kissed it three times and gave it back to
him. He received it wonderingly first, then sadly, and held it
drooping over his knees.
“Whole!” he muttered. “Ay, I don’t question I shall find my legs in
Avalon; but can even Jove restore the rifled flower its honey?”
Suddenly he cast himself down beside me, groaning like a bull.
“O, little maid, little maid! I am a beggar, I am a beggar; but I want
no reversion of a used estate. Though my own goes lame, I am proud.
Give me new-minted money, that no man has worn in his pocket, or none
at all.”
For a moment the great human urgency of the creature made me falter. I
owed him so much! could the devotion of my life more than repay him?
But, alas! it needed but a little reflection to see the fond
ridiculous picture the caricature it was. Had I the right even to risk
a new generation of Gogos? I saw myself in imagination walking abroad,
the proud convoyer of an uncountable number of little shock-headed
Dutch tumblers. Perhaps if our Sovereign King had received that
Carpenters’ Petition, and brought wooden legs into fashion, I might
have been tempted; but it was still the vogue to walk on one’s own
feet.