“You said--what did you say was in it?”
“What but a show of venison, miss--piled to the roof, one might say.
He must ’a made a ryle living out o’ deer-stealing, by your leave.”
He had--and that was the whole truth of the secret he had withheld
from me! All the time I had been torturing my fears into madness, he
had been abroad in the midnight woods, murdering, not men, but deer;
in league with an ignoble crew for a paltry gain. This romance of a
social ostracism revenging itself on a social hypocrisy: savage,
melancholy, yielding to love only the troubled sweetness of its
soul--what did it confess itself at last? O, glorious, to be first
consul to a little republic of poachers! To vindicate one’s
independence by picking the pockets of the king! It was all explained
now--the whisperings, the draggings, the creaking carts--in that
butchers’ shambles, the secret store of a gang of deer-stealers. He
was no better than a cutpurse. In my bitter mortification, I could
have wept tears of shame. “I am justified of my act,” I cried to
myself. “Better that he should think me a traitor now, than live to
curse me for withholding my hand when there was time and opportunity
to save him!”
Nevertheless, when they led him forth presently bound and quiet, I
could not face his eyes, but cowered before the unspoken reproach and
sorrow in them. He came up quite close to me.
“It was your own fault,” I muttered in my hair. “Why would you never
tell me?”
“I was wrong,” he said, quite simply. “You must forgive me for what I
have taken from you, Diana. If it is any comfort to you to know, the
poor little unrealised bond between us reconciles me to this--and all
that is to come.”
I felt as if my heart broke then and there. I was conscious of the red
earl watching us. The other turned to him, with a laugh like death’s.
“Take your reversion, brother,” said he. “As for me, I am for the
madhouse, I suppose.”
At a grinding word, two of the men helped him to mount, and moved away
with him. I never saw him again. The other two entered the cottage, to
fetch and escort Mr. Portlock to his doom. I was left alone with his
lordship.
My heart was broken. I left it scattered on the turf, with all the
fragments of the past.
“Now, papa devil,” I said, with a shriek of laughter, “what about your
dutiful daughter?”
XXI.
I AM METAMORPHOSED
I had loved, and lost, and buried my dream of yesterday. It lay
fathoms deep in the green forest. From the moment of my resurrection I
knew myself for a changeling--a fairy creature quite other than the
soft, emotional child who had cried herself to sleep on last night’s
hearth. George was in his house of discipline; Portlock, with others,
transported; my past was broken for me beyond repair. Facing me
instead were the battlements and pinnacles of a new dominion, with
what infinite potentialities behind its walls! Conscience makes no
conquests. With my rebirth had come the lust to supply the
deficiencies of the old. I laid my love in its grave with tears and
kisses, and turned intrepid to the assault.
Memory, my friend, makes men good critics, but bad romancers. I was
too indulgent of my kind to be the first: beauty invited me: I would
forget. Remorse is, indeed, of all self-indulgences the most useless.
It reconciles an offended Heaven to us no more than do tearful sighs
win a wife her husband’s condonation of an ill-cooked dinner. An
inch-narrow of reformation is better than an ell-broad of apology. Let
our sweetness of to-day, rather, be our experience of yesterday. The
gods find no entertainment in regrets. They shower their benefits on
the unminding; and in the gifts of the present we are justified of our
past actions. It is only when we are rich that we can afford to put up
tablets to our memories; whence follows that we cannot more honour the
dead than by taking our profit of the living. Well, once I had lived
_for_ others; now I would live _on_ them--a word of distinction and a
world of difference.
His lordship took me straight to London, and gave me a little suite of
rooms in his fine house in Berkeley Square, where I was to remain
during the next three years, until, in fact, I was come legally of
age. He had decided, on reflection, that I was to be his niece. He was
a very great man, and this gift was only one of many in his disposal.
It was no business of mine how he accounted to the world for my title.
_My_ interest was only to justify it, with a view to my position in
life when I was become marriageable. Wherefore I would consent to give
him none of my duty until he had drawn up a settlement in my favour,
to date from my majority. I had had enough of unprofitable bargains.
Perhaps he would never have consented to this--for, like all covetous
pluralists, he was parsimonious--had not the death of the young
viscount about this time moved him to seek comfort in an artificial
relationship for the real one he had lost. In the hearts of the worst
of us, I suppose, such vacancies yearn to be filled; and so the poor
childless wretch took his opportunity, and adopted me. I hope I
acquitted myself properly for the favour; but, in truth, I could never
quite forgive him his treachery to his brother.
In the meantime, I developed rapidly, and had my little court, quite
exclusive of _les convenances_. The ladies, of course, looked askance
at me; but what did I care? I had only to curtsey to my glass to
procure the reason. And they made their _modistes_ their deputies in
paying me the sincerest flattery. Instead, I experienced the high
distinction of a whole _entourage_ of carpet-knights--captains and
parsons and diplomatists unending--who came to ogle their own images
in my blue eyes, and, losing their heads like Narcissus from
giddiness, tumbled in by the score, until I was stocked as full under
each brow as an abbot’s pond. It was a rare sport to throw crumbs of
comfort to these gaping creatures, and see them rise and jostle one
another for the best pickings. I assure you, my friend, I was a queen
in my sphere, and had as much need to practise diplomacy. It was that
first attached me to politics--the knowledge of into what good coin
for bribery and the traffic of State secrets those pretty orbs might
be converted. So soon, sure, as amongst my parliamentary followers I
distinguished my favourites, I began to sift my political opinions,
and to work for the handsomest. I have traced my measures in both
Houses, believe me, my little monsieur: I have pulled some strings,
sitting in my boudoir, with results as far-reaching as St. Stephen’s.
Ah, well! they were days! But I will be true to myself in not
bewailing them. Memory, in my philosophy, is a very lean old pauper,
crumbling dried herbs into his broth. I never could abide mint sauce
unless plucked from the green.
Chief among my favourites was a madcap young member, whose wit was
never so impertinent as when, flitting here and there for an
opportunity, it could prick the sides of some great parliamentary
bull, and elicit a roar for its pains. He was that Mr. Roper who,
indeed, went so far, on somebody’s instigation, as to tease the great
Mr. Pitt himself on certain measures introduced for the betterment of
the Roman Catholics, and who, in consequence, redeemed himself a
little, it was whispered, in the eyes of high personages with whom he
had long been in disgrace. His father was Robert Lord Beltower, that
deplorable old nobleman who was reported early in life to have staked
his honour on some trifling issue, and lost; and who always described
himself as living a posthumous life, since he had been carried off by
a petticoat in the fifteenth year of his age. Father and second son
(the heir to the title, Lord Roper of Loftus, was eminently
respectable and pious) were known as Bob Major and Bob Minor; and,
indeed, apart or together, could ring the changes on some very pretty
tunes. But the minor, who had been a scapegrace page at court and
early dismissed, was _my enfant gâté_, as well for his wit and
information as for a daring that recked nothing of the deuce itself.
He owned to no party, and as to his principles, “Why,” said he, “I
throw up my hat to the best shot, and that isn’t always to the
heavenly marksman. I have known the devil score some points in
charity.”
He never truckled to me, which was perhaps one of the reasons of my
favour; but was like a licensed brother--a relationship I had come to
regard. Indeed, he most offended me by his outrageous independence of
my partialities.
“Hey! Come, rogue, rogue!” sniggered his father to him once, on the
occasion of some abominable impertinence; “you go too far. What the
devil means this disrespect to our goddess? You’ll be pricked, egad,
one of these days, like that fellow Atlas, or Actæon, or what the
devil was his name, that was tore for his impudence.”
The son bowed to the sire, quoting Slender’s words to Shallow: “‘I
will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in
the beginning, yet Heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance,
when we are married and have more occasion to know one another: I
hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt; but if you say “Marry
her,” I will marry her, that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.’”
“Why, you villain,” said his lordship, with a grin, “if you’re the
devil quoting Scripture, I’m done with you.”
“Nay, sir,” said the other, “you flatter yourself. I quote no better
than my father.”
“No better, you dog! And how?”
“Why, sir, wasn’t it you taught me that the more one sees of a woman
the less one respects her?”
“I?”
“’Twas _à propos_ the Chudleigh, sir, you may remember, whom you met
at Ranelagh--in ’49, I think it was--undressed as Iphigenia. She came
clothed in little but her virtue, and caught a bad cold a-consequence.
You may have forgot the moral of your sermon, sir, but I, as a dutiful
son, have stored it.”
“Hang you, Bob! What moral?”
“Why, sir, that a woman dreads exposure in nothing but her weakness to
stand the test of it. If she’s a peculiar fineness anywhere, she’ll
take some means to let you know.”
“Then, sir,” cried I, with a flaming face, “I pride myself on nothing
so much as my hand!”--and I brought it down stingingly on his ear.
“But I don’t want your hand,” he cried, stamping about, while his
father roared, “Didn’t I tell you as much?”
Nevertheless, we were fast comrades, and together in some captivating
peccancies, of which I only learned to rue the publicity when they led
to my undoing.
Mr. Roper, as I have said, found a particular delight in galling--_on
somebody’s instigation_--the sides of the promoters of the new
pro-Papish Bills. Well, I will ask you, what did I owe to that Church?
Was it likely that my treatment at its hands had left any love between
us, or that I should wish its disabilities removed, who had suffered
so much from it muzzled? I had been educated, under its shadow, to a
full understanding of its juggleries and impostures. Now was the time,
the country being still in a ferment over its heir-apparent’s alleged
marriage with the Fitzherbert, to relate my experiences.
There was at that date published in London a little fashionable
scapegrace of a paper called the _World_, the property of a Major
Topham, who made it the vehicle for such a _chronique scandaleuse_ as
the town had never yet known; and in this paper I began (by preconcert
with my political ally) to disclose, over the signature “Angélique,”
the true story and circumstances of a certain beautiful young lady,
who had been practised upon, and in the very heart of Protestant
England, by a worse than Spanish Inquisition. The series, cautiously
as I began by handling it, made an immediate sensation, and was, you
may be sure, deftly engineered in the House by Mr. Roper for the
Opposition. Moreover, “Angélique”--which delighted me as much--gave
her sweet and melancholy name to a mourning gauze, which was so pretty
that I had to kill an aunt to give me a title to wear it. At the same
time her instant popularity made me tremble for my incognito, which,
nevertheless, I knew to be the major’s very best asset in a profitable
bargain. Still, not even his tact could altogether explain away the
association of ideas implied in Mr. Roper’s common friendship with me
and with that poor persecuted anonymity; and that I had made myself by
no means so secure as Junius was a fact disagreeably impressed upon me
on a certain evening.
I had been entertaining late that night, when his lordship entered
unexpected. He came from St. James’s and from playing backgammon with
the king, and wore his orders on a pearl-silk coat and, for contrast,
a mighty scowling face over. I took no heed of him as he walked up the
room towards me, humping his shoulders, and acknowledging wintrily the
salutations of my little court, but went on laughing and rallying a
dear little ensign Percy, with whom I was in love just then, _pour
faire passer le temps_. However, the boy could not stand the
inquisition of the red eyes, and joked himself into other company,
with a blush and a bow to the ogre; at which I laughed, lolling back
in my chair.
“Well, madam,” said Hardrough, knuckling his snuff-box softly, “when
you can vouchsafe me a moment of your attention.”
I recognised the compelling tone in his voice, and rose, with a little
show of indolence.
“O!” I said, yawning, “what sin has found me out now? I vow it can
never be so ugly as it looks.”
He gave me his arm, mighty ceremonious, and, conducting me into an
antechamber, shut the door.
“That is for you to prove,” he said, taking snuff, and stood glaring
into my soul. “So, madam,” he said, “you are for setting your little
teeth into the hands that have warmed you?”
I sat down, fluttering my fan, and pretty pale, I daresay. But I was
not surprised. My conscience had pricked me at the first sight of his
face. He pulled from his pocket a copy of the damning sheet, and “Tell
me,” says he, “if His Majesty was justified in asking me if this did
not refer to some member of my family?”