A JEZEBEL
There was a loud drumming in Henrietta’s ears, and a dimness before her
eyes. In the midst of this a voice, which she would not have known for
her own, cried loudly and clearly, “No!” And again, more violently,
“No!”
“But it is ‘Yes’!” the landlady answered coolly. “Why not? D’you
think”—with rough contempt—“he’s the first man that’s lied to a woman?
or you’re the first woman that’s believed a rascal? She’s his wife
right enough, my girl”—comfortably. “Don’t he ask after his children?
If you’ll turn to the bottom of the second page you’ll see for
yourself! Oh, quite the family man, he is!”
The girl’s hand shook like ash-leaves in a light breeze; the paper
rustled in her grasp. But she had regained command of herself—she came
of a stiff, proud stock, and the very brusqueness of the landlady
helped her; and she read word after word and line after line of the
letter. She passed from the bottom of the second sheet to the head of
the third, and so to the end. But so slowly, so laboriously that it was
plain that her mind was busy reading between the lines—was busy
comparing, sifting, remembering.
To Bishop’s credit be it said, he kept his eyes off the girl. But at
last he spoke.
“I’d that letter from his wife’s hand,” he said. “They are married
right enough—in Hounslow Church, miss. She lives there, two doors from
the ‘George’ posting-house, where folks change horses between London
and Windsor. She was a waiting-maid in the coffee-room, and ’twas a
rise for her. But she’s not seen him for three years—reason, he’s been
in hiding—nor had a penny from him. Now she’s got it he’s taken up with
some woman hereabouts, and she put me on the scent. He’s a fine gift of
the gab, but for all that his father’s naught but a little apothecary,
and as smooth a rogue and as big a Radical, one as the other! I wish to
goodness,” the runner continued, suddenly reminded of his loss, “I’d
took him last night when he came in! But——”
“That’ll do!” Mrs. Gilson said, cutting him short, as if he were a tap
she had turned on for her own purposes. “You can go now!”
“But——”
“Did you hear me, man? Go!” the landlady thundered. And a glance of her
eye was sufficient to bring the runner to heel like a scolded hound.
“Go, and shut the door after you,” she continued, with sharpness. “I’ll
have no eavesdropping in my house, prerogative or no prerogative!”
When he was gone she showed a single spark of mercy. She went to the
fire and proceeded to mend it noisily, as if it were the one thing in
the world to be attended to. She put on wood, and swept the hearth, and
made a to-do with it. True, the respite was short; a minute or two at
most. But when the landlady had done, and turned her attention to the
girl, Henrietta had moved to the window, so that only her back was
visible. Even then, for quite a long minute Mrs. Gilson stood, with
arms akimbo and pursed lips, reading the lines of the girl’s figure and
considering her, as if even her rugged bosom knew pity. And in the end
it was Henrietta who spoke—humbly, alas! now, and in a voice almost
inaudible.
“Will you leave me, please?” she said.
“I will,” Mrs. Gilson answered gruffly. “But on one understanding,
miss—and I’ll have it plain. It must be all over. If you are satisfied
he is a rascal—he has four children—well and good. But I’ll have no
goings on with such in my house, and no making two bites of a cherry!
Here’s a bit of paper I’ll put on the table.”
“I am satisfied,” Henrietta whispered.
Under the woman’s blunt words she shook as under blows.
But Mrs. Gilson seemed to pay little heed to her feelings.
“Very good, very good!” she answered. “But I’ll leave the paper all the
same. It’s but a bit of a handbill that fool of a runner brought with
him, but ’twill show you what kind of a poor thing your Joe was. Just a
spouter, that got drunk on his own words and shot a poor inoffensive
gentleman in a shop! Shame on him for a little dirty murder, if ever
there was one.”
“Oh, please go! please go!” Henrietta wailed.
“Very well. But there’s the paper. And do you begin to think”—removing
with housewifely hand a half-eaten dish of eggs from the table, and
deftly poising on the same arm a large ham—“do you begin to think like
a grown, sensible woman what you’d best do. The shortest folly’s
soonest over! That’s my opinion.”
And with that she opened the door, and, heavily laden, made her way
downstairs.
The girl turned and stood looking at the room, and her face was wofully
changed. It was white and pinched, and full of strained wonder, as if
she asked herself if she were indeed herself, and if it could really be
to her that this thing had happened. She looked older by years, she
looked almost plain. But in her eyes was a latent fierceness. An
observer might have guessed that her pride suffered more sharply than
her heart. Possibly she had never loved the man with half the fervour
with which she now hated him.
And that was true, though the change was sudden; ay, and though
Henrietta did not know it, nor would have admitted it. She suffered
notwithstanding, and horribly. For, besides pride, there were other
things that lay wounded and bleeding: her happy-go-lucky nature that
had trusted lightly, and would be slow to trust again; her girlish
hopes and dreams; and the foolish fancy that had passed for love, and
in a single day, an hour, a minute, might have become love. And one
other thing—the bloom of her innocence. For though she had escaped, she
had come too near the fire not to fear it henceforth, and bear with her
the smell of singeing.
As she thought of that, of her peril and her narrow escape, and
reflected how near she had come to utter shipwreck, her face lost its
piteous look, and grew harder, and sharper, and sterner; so that the
wealth of bright hair, that was her glory, crowned it only too
brilliantly, only too youthfully. She saw how he had fooled her to the
top of her bent; how he had played on her romantic tastes and her silly
desire for secrecy. A low-born creature, an agitator, hiding from the
consequences of a cowardly crime, he had happened upon her in his
twilight walks, desired her—for an amusement, turned her head with
inflated phrases, dazzled her inexperience with hints of the world and
his greatness in it. And she—she had thought herself wiser than all
about her, as she had thought him preferable to the legitimate lover
assigned to her by her family. And she had brought herself to this!
This was the end!
Or no, not the end. The game, for what it was worth, was over. But the
candle-money remained to be paid. Goldsmith’s stanzas had still their
vogue; mothers quoted them to their daughters. Henrietta knew that when
lovely woman stoops to folly, even to folly of a lighter dye—when she
learns, though not too late, that men betray, there is a penalty to be
paid. The world is censorious, was censorious then, and apt to draw
from very small evidence a very dark inference. Henrietta’s face,
flaming suddenly from brow to neck, proved her vivid remembrance of
this. Had she not called herself—the words burned her—“his wife in the
sight of Heaven”? And now she must go back—if they would receive her—go
back and face those whom she had left so lightly, face the lover whom
she had flouted and betrayed, meet the smirks of the men and the sneers
of the women, and the thoughts of both! Go back to blush before the
servants, and hear from the lips of that grim prude, her sister-in-law,
many things, both true and untrue!
The loss of the tender future, of the rosy anticipations in which she
had lived for weeks as in a fairy palace—she could bear this! And the
rough awakening from the maiden dream which she had taken for love—she
must bear that too, though it left her world cold as the sheet of grey
water before her, and repellent as the bald, rugged screes that frowned
above it. She would bear the heartsickness, the loneliness, the pain
that treachery inflicts on innocence; but the shame of the
home-coming—if they would receive her, which she doubted—the coarse
taunts and stinging innuendoes, the nods, the shrugs, the winks—these
she could not face. Anything, anything were better, if anything she
could find—deserted, flung aside, homeless as she was.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Mrs. Gilson, descending with a sour face, had come upon a
couple of maids listening at the foot of the stairs. She had made sharp
work of them, sending them packing with fleas in their ears. But they
proved to be only the _avant-couriers_ of scandal. Below were the
Troutbeck apothecary and a dozen gossips, whom the news had brought
over the hill; and hangers-on without number. All, however, had no
better fate with Mrs. Gilson; not the parish constable of Bowness,
whose staff went for little, nor even Mr. Bishop, that great man out of
doors, at whose slightest nod ostlers ran and helpers bowed; he smiled
superior, indeed, but he had the wisdom to withdraw. In two minutes, in
truth, there remained of the buzzing crowd only the old curate of
Troutbeck supping small beer with a toast in it. And he, it was said,
knew better than any the length of the landlady’s foot.
But this was merely to move the centre of ferment to the inn-yard. Here
the news that the house had sheltered a man for whose capture the
Government offered six hundred guineas, bred wild excitement. He had
vanished, it was true, like a child of the mist. But he might be found
again. Meantime the rustics gaped on the runner with saucer eyes, or
flew hither and thither at his beck. And Radicals being at a discount
in the Lowther country, and six hundred guineas a sum for which old
Hinkson the miser would have bartered his soul, some spat on their
hands and swore what they would do if they met the devil; while others,
who were not apt at thinking, retired into corners and with knitted
brows and hands plunged into breeches pockets conjured up a map of the
world about Windermere.
It should be borne in mind that at this time police were
unknown—outside London. There were parish constables; but where these
were not cobblers, which was strangely often the case, they were men
past work, appointed to save the rates. If a man’s pocket were picked,
therefore, or his stack fired, his daughter abducted, or his mare
stolen, he had only himself and his friends to look to. He must follow
the offender, confront him, seize him, carry him to the gaol. He must
do all himself. Naturally, if he were a timid man or unpopular, the
rogue went free; and sometimes went free again and again until he
became the terror of the country-side. A fact which enables us to
understand the terrors of lonely houses in those days, and explains the
repugnance to life in solitary places which is traditional in some
parts of England.
On the other hand, where the crime was known and outrageous, it became
every man’s business. It was every man’s duty to join the hue and cry:
if he did not take part in it he was a bad neighbour. Mr. Bishop,
therefore, did not lack helpers. On the first discovery of Walterson’s
flight, which the officer had made a little after daybreak, he had sent
horsemen to Whitehaven, Keswick, and Kendal, and a boat to Newby
Bridge. The nearer shore and the woods on the point below the bishop’s
house—some called it Landoff House—were well beaten, and the alarm was
given in Bowness on the one hand and in Ambleside on the other. The
general voice had it that the man had got away early in the night to
Whitehaven. But some stated that a pedlar had met him, on foot and
alone, crossing the Kirkstone Pass at daybreak; and others, that he had
been viewed skulking under a haystack near Troutbeck Bridge. That a
beautiful girl, his companion, had been seized, and was under lock and
key in the house, was whispered by some, but denied by more.
Nevertheless, the report won its way, so that there were few moments
when the chatterers who buzzed about the runner had not an eye on the
upper windows and a voice ready to proclaim their discoveries.
Even those who believed the story, however, were far from having a true
picture of poor Henrietta. With some she passed for a London Jezebel;
locked up, it was whispered, with a bottle of gin to keep her quiet
until the chaise was ready to take her to gaol. Others pictured her as
the frenzied leader of one of the women’s clubs which had lately sprung
up in Lancashire, and of which the principal aim, according to the
Tories, was to copy the French fish-fags and march one day to Windsor
to drag the old king, blind and mad as he was, to the scaffold. Others
spoke of a casual light-o’-love picked up at Lancaster, but a rare
piece of goods for looks; which seemed a pity, and one of those
tragedies of the law that were beginning to prick men’s
consciences—since there was little doubt that the baggage, poor lass,
would hang with her tempter.
A word or two of these whisperings reached Mrs. Gilson’s ears. But she
only sniffed her contempt, or, showing herself for a moment at the
door, chilled by the coldness of her eye the general enthusiasm. Then,
woe betide the servant whom she chanced to espy among the idlers. If a
man, he was glad to hide himself in the stable; if a woman, she was
very likely to go back to her work with a smarting cheek. Even the
Troutbeck apothecary, a roistering blade who was making a day of it,
kept a wary eye on the door, and, if he could, slipped round the corner
when she appeared.
But Juno herself had her moments of failure, and no mortals are exempt
from them. About four in the afternoon Mrs. Gilson got a shock. Modest
Ann, her face redder than usual, came to her and whispered in her ear.
In five seconds the landlady’s face was also redder than usual, and her
frown was something to see. She rose.
“I don’t believe it!” she answered. “You are daft, woman, to think of
such a thing!”
“It’s true, missus, as I stand here!” Ann declared.
“To Kendal gaol? To-night!”
“That very thing! And her”—with angry fervour—“scarce more than a
child, as you may say!”
“Old enough to make a fool of herself!” Mrs. Gilson retorted
spitefully. “But I don’t believe it!” she added. “You’ve heard amiss,
my girl!”
“Well, you’ll see,” the woman answered. “’Twill be soon settled. The
justice is crossing the road now, and that Bishop with him; and that
little wizened chap of a clerk that makes up the Salutation books. And
the man that keeps the gaol at Appleby: they’ve been waiting for
him—he’s to take her. And there’s a chaise ordered to be ready if it’s
wanted. It’s true, as I stand here!”
Mrs. Gilson’s form swelled until it was a wonder the whalebone stood.
But in those days things were of good British make.
“A chaise?” she said.
“Yes.”
“There’s no chaise,” the landlady answered firmly, “goes from here on
that errand!”
Modest Ann knew that when her mistress spoke in that tone the thing was
as good as done. But the waiting-maid, whose heart, for all her temper,
was softer than her features, at which Jim the ostler was supposed to
boggle, was not greatly comforted.
“They’ll only send to the Salutation,” she said despondently.
“Let them send!” the landlady replied. And taking off her apron, she
prepared to face the enemy. “They’ll talk to me before they do!”
But Ann, great as was her belief in her mistress, shook her head.
“What can you do against the law?” she muttered. “I wish that Bishop
may never eat another morsel of hot victuals as long as he lives! Gravy
with the joint? Never while I am serving!”