TWO OF A RACE
It was Thursday, and three days had passed since the Sunday, the day of
many happenings, which had cleared up the mystery and restored
Henrietta to Mrs. Gilson’s care. The frost still held, the air was
brisk and clear. The Langdale Pikes lifted themselves sharp and
glittering from the line of grey screes that run southward to
Wetherlamb and the Coniston Mountain. A light air blew down the lake,
ruffling the open water, and bedecking the leafless woods on Wray Point
with a fringe of white breakers. The morning was a perfect winter
morning, the sky of that cloudless, but not over-deep blue, which
portends a long and steady frost. Horses’ hoofs rang loud on the road;
and rooks gathered where they had passed. Men who stopped to talk hit
their palms together or swung their arms. The larger and wiser birds
had started betimes for salt water and the mussel preserves on the
Cartmel Sands.
The inquest on the gipsy had been held, but something perfunctorily,
after the fashion of the day. Captain Clyne and the chaplain had told
their stories, and after a few words from the coroner, a verdict of
justifiable homicide had been heartily given, and the jury had resolved
itself into a “free and easy” in the tap-room; while the coroner had
delivered himself of much wisdom, and laid down much law in Mrs.
Gilson’s snuggery.
Henrietta had not been made to appear; for carried upstairs, in a state
as like death as life, on Sunday evening, she had kept her room until
this morning. She would fain have kept it longer, but there were
reasons against that. And now, with the timidity which a retreat from
every-day life breeds—and perhaps with some flutterings of the heart on
another account—she was pausing before her looking-glass, and trying to
gather courage to descend and face the world.
She was still pale; and when she met her own eyes in the mirror, a
quivering smile, a something verging on the piteous in her face, told
of nerves which time had not yet steadied. Possibly, her reluctance to
go down, though the hour was late, and Mrs. Gilson would scold, had a
like origin. None the less, she presently conquered it, opened her door
and descended; as she had done on that morning of her arrival, a few
weeks back, and yet—oh, such a long time back!
Now, as then, when she had threaded the dark passages and come to the
door of Mr. Rogers’s room, she paused faint-hearted, and, with her hand
raised to the latch, listened. She heard no sound, and she opened the
door and went in. The table was laid for one.
She heaved a sigh of relief, and—cut it short midway. For Captain Clyne
came forward from one of the windows at which he had been standing.
“I am glad that you are better,” he said stiffly, and in a constrained
tone, “and able to come down.”
“Oh yes, thank you,” she answered, striving to speak heartily, and
repressing with difficulty that proneness of the lip to quiver. “I
think I am quite well now. Quite well! I am sure, after this long time,
I should be.”
And she turned away and affected to warm her hands at the fire.
He did not look directly at her—he avoided doing so. But he could see
the reflection of her face in the oval-framed mirror, as she stood
upright again. He saw that she had lost for the time the creamy warmth
of complexion that was one of her chief beauties. She was pale and
thin, and looked ill.
“You have been very severely shaken,” he said. “No doubt you feel it
still!”
“Yes,” she answered, “a little. I think I do.”
“Perhaps you had better be alone?”
She did not know what to say to that. Perhaps she did not know what she
wished. Her lip quivered. This was very unlike what she had expected
and what she had dreaded. But it was worse. He seemed to be waiting for
her answer—that he might go. What could she say?
“Just as you like,” she murmured at last.
“Oh, but I wish to do what you like!” he replied, with a little more
warmth; but still awkwardly and with constraint.
“So do I,” she replied.
“I shall stay then,” he answered. And he lifted a small dish from the
hearth and carried it to the table. “I had Mrs. Gilson’s orders to keep
this hot for you,” he said.
“It was very kind of you.”
“I am afraid,” more lightly, “that it was fear of Mrs. Gilson weighed
on me as much as anything.”
He returned to the hearth when he had seen her seated. And she began
her breakfast with her eyes on the table. With the first draught of
coffee a feeling of warmth and courage ran through her; and he,
standing with his elbow on the mantel-piece and his eyes on the mirror,
saw the change in her.
“The boy is better,” he said suddenly. “I think he will do now.”
“Yes?”
“I think so. But he will need great care. He will not be able to leave
his bed for a day or two. We found your brooch pinned inside his
clothes.”
“Yes?”
He turned sharply and for the first time looked directly at her.
“Of course, we knew why you put it there. It was good of you. But
why—don’t you ask after him, Henrietta?” in a different tone.
She felt the colour rise to her cheeks—and she wished it anywhere else.
“I saw him this morning,” she murmured.
“Oh!” he replied in surprise. And he turned to the mirror again. “I
see.”
She began to wish that he would leave her, for his silence made her
horribly nervous. And she dared not start a subject herself, because
she could not trust her voice. The hands of the white-faced clock
jerked slowly on, marking the seconds, and accentuating the silence.
She grew so nervous at last that she could not lift her eyes from her
plate, and she ate though she was scarcely able to swallow, because she
dared not leave off.
It did not occur to her that Anthony Clyne was as ill at ease as she
was; and oppressed, moreover, to a much greater degree by the memory of
certain scenes which had taken place in that room. Her nervousness was
in part the reflection of his constraint. And his constraint arose from
two feelings widely different.
The long silence was becoming painful to both, when he forced himself
to break it.
“I am so very, very deeply beholden to you,” he said, in a constrained
tone, “that—that I must ask you, Henrietta, to listen to me for a few
minutes—even if it be unpleasant to you.”
She laughed awkwardly.
“If it is only,” she answered, “because you are beholden to
me—that—that you feel it necessary to thank me at length, please don’t.
You will only overwhelm me.”
“It is not for that reason only,” he said. And he knew that he spoke,
much against his will, with dreadful solemnity. “No. Naturally we must
have much to say to one another. I, in particular, who owe to you——”
“Please let that be,” she protested.
“But I cannot. I cannot!” he repeated. “You have done me so great a
service, at a risk so great, and under circumstances so—so——”
“So remarkable,” she cried, with something of her old girlish manner,
“that you cannot find words in which to describe them! Then please
don’t.” And then, more seriously: “I did not do what I did to be
thanked.”
“Then why?” he asked quickly. “Why did you do it?”
“Did you think,” she protested, “that I did it to be thanked?”
“No, but—why did you do it, Henrietta?” he asked persistently. “Such a
risk, such men, such circumstances, might have deterred any woman. Nay,
almost any man.”
She toyed with her teaspoon; there had come a faint flush of colour
into her cheeks.
“I think it was—I think it was just to reinstate myself,” she murmured.
“You mean?”
“You gave me to understand,” she explained, “that you thought ill of
me. And I wished you to think well of me; or better of me, I should
say, for I did not expect you to think quite well of me after—you
know!” in some confusion.
“You wished to be reinstated?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “how much you mean by that.”
“I mean what I say,” she answered, looking at him.
“Yes, but do you mean that you—wish to be reinstated altogether?”
She did not remove her eyes from his face, but she blushed to the roots
of her hair.
“I am not sure that I understand,” she said with a slight air of
offence.
“No?” he said. “And perhaps I did not quite mean that. What I did mean,
and do mean, what I am hoping, what I am looking forward to,
Henrietta——” and there he broke off.
He seemed to find it necessary to begin again:
“Perhaps I had better explain,” he said more soberly. “You told me that
morning by the lake some home-truths, you remember? You showed me that
what had happened was not all your fault; was perhaps not at all your
fault. And you showed me this with so much energy and power, that I
went away with the first clear impression of you I had had in my life.
Yes, with the feeling that I had never known you until then.” He
dropped his eyes, and looked thoughtfully at something on the table.
“And one of the things I remember best, and which I shall always
remember, was your saying that I had never paid any court to you.”
“It was true,” she said, in a low voice.
And she too did not look at him, but kept her eyes bent on the spoon
with which she toyed.
“Yes. Well, if you will let the old state of things be so far
reinstated as to—let me begin to pay my court to you now, I am not
confident, I am very far from confident, that I can please you. I am
rather old, for one thing”—with a rueful laugh—“to make love
gracefully, and rather stiff and—political. But owing to the trouble I
have brought upon you in the past——”
“I never said but that we both brought it!” Henrietta objected
suddenly.
“Well, whoever brought it——”
“We both brought it!” she repeated obstinately.
“Very well. I mean only that the trouble——”
“Makes it unlikely that I shall find another husband?” she said. “Pray
be frank with me! That,” rising and going to the window, and then
turning to confront him, “is what you mean, is it not? That is exactly
what you mean, I am sure?”
“Something of that kind, perhaps,” he admitted.
“But you forget Mr. Sutton!” she said—and paused. She took one step
forward, and her eyes shone. “You forget Mr. Sutton, Captain Clyne. The
gentleman to whom you handed me over! To whom you gave so clear a
certainty that I was for the first comer who was willing. He is
willing, quite willing!”
“But——”
“And it cannot be said that he did not behave gallantly on Sunday
night! I am told——”
“He behaved admirably.”
“And he is willing!” she flung the word at him—“quite willing to marry
me—disgraced as I am! As you have always, always hinted I am! And not
out of pity, Captain Clyne. Let us be frank with one another. You were
very frank with me once—more than frank.” She held out her wrist, which
was still faintly discoloured. “When a man does that to a woman,” she
said, “she either loves him, sir, or hates him.”
“Yes,” he said slowly—very slowly. “I see. Your mind is made up,
then——”
“That I will not accept your kind offer to—pay your court to me?” she
answered, with derision. “Certainly. I have no mind to be wooed by
you!” Again she held out her wrist. “You know the stale proverb: ‘He
that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay!’” And she
made him a little bow, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks bright.
He turned his back on her, and stood for a moment looking from the
window which was the nearer to the fire—the one looking over the lake.
The words of her proverb—stale enough in truth—ran very sorrowfully in
his ears. “He that will not when he may! He that will not when he may!”
No, he might have known that she was not one to forget. He might have
known that the words he had said, and the things that he had done,
would rankle. And that she who had not hesitated to elope—to punish him
for his neglect of her—would not hesitate to punish him for worse than
neglect. He stood a long minute watching the tiny waves burst into
white lines at the foot of Hayes Woods. No, she could not forget—nor
forgive. But she could act, she had acted, as if she had done both. She
had saved his child. She had risked her life for it. And if she had
done that with this resentment, this feeling in her heart, if she had
done it, moved only by the desire to show him that he had misjudged
her—in a sense it was the nobler act, and one like—ay, he owned it
sorrowfully—like herself! At any rate, it did not become him to cast a
word of reproach at her. She had saved his child.
He turned at length, and looked at her. He saw that her figure had lost
its elation, and her cheeks their colour. She was leaning against the
side of the window, and looked tired and ill, and almost as she had
looked when she came into the room. His heart melted.
“I would like you to know one thing,” he said, “before I go. Your
triumph is greater, Henrietta, than you think, and your revenge more
complete. It is no question of pity with me, but of love.” He paused,
and laughed awry. “The worse for me, you will say, and the better for
you. _Vae victis!_ Still, even if you hate me——”
“I did not say that I hated you!”
“You said——”
“I did not! I did not!” she repeated, with a queer little laugh. And
she sat down on the window seat, and turned quickly with a pettish
movement, so that he could only see the side of her face. “I said
nothing of the kind.”
“But——”
“I said something very different!”
“You said——”
“I said that when a man pinches a girl’s wrist black and blue, and
swears at her—yes, Captain Clyne,” firmly, “you swore at me, and called
me——”
“Don’t!” he said.
[Illustration: ] She was leaning against the side of the window ...
“I only said,” she continued breathlessly, “that when a man does that,
the woman either loves him or hates him!”
“Henrietta!”
“Captain Clyne!”
After a long pause, “I think I understand you,” he said slowly, “but if
you—if there were any feeling, the least feeling of that kind on your
part, you would not have forbidden me to—to think of seeking you for my
wife.”
“I didn’t!” she answered. “I told you that you should not pay your
court to me. And you shall not! You cannot,” half laughing and half
crying, “woo what’s won, can you? If you still think it is worth the
winning! Only,” stopping him by a gesture as he came towards her, “you
are not to give me over to Mr. Sutton again, whatever I do! You must
promise me that.”
“I won’t!” he said.
“You are quite sure, sir? However I behave? And even if I run away from
you?”
“Quite sure!”
And a few minutes later, “Poor Sutton!” he said. “We must try to make
it up to him.”
She laughed.
“It is a good thing you did not set out to woo me,” she answered. “For
you would not have shone at it. Make it up to him indeed! Make it up to
him! What a thing, sir, to say to—me!”
* * * * *
It was not made up to Mr. Sutton; though the best living that could be
procured by an exchange with the Bishop of Durham—and there were fat
livings in Durham in those days, and small blame if a man held two of
them—was found for the chaplain. He married, too, a lady of the decayed
house of Conyers of Sockburn, beside which the Damers and the Clynes
were upstairs. And so both in his fortune and his wife’s family he did
as well—almost—as he had hoped to do. But though he accepted his
patron’s gift, he came seldom to Clyne Old Hall; and some held him
ungrateful. Moreover, a little later, when to be a radical was not
counted quite so dreadful a thing, he turned radical in all but the
white hat. And Clyne was disappointed, but not surprised. Henrietta,
however, understood. Though children running about her knees had tamed
her wildness and caged her pride, she was still a woman, and the memory
of a past conquest was not ungrateful. She had no desire to see the
pale replica of Mr. Pitt, but she sometimes thought of him, and always
kindly and with gratitude.
There was a third lover, of whom she never thought without unhappiness.
“You will never tell the children? You will never tell the children?”
was her prayer to her husband when Walterson was in question.
And though he answered with gravity, “Not unless you do it again, my
dear,” the sting of remembrance did not cease to rankle.
Walterson was traced to Leith—and thence to Holland. There the trail
was lost, and it is believed that he did not live to return to England.
Whether he did return or not—and Bow Street, and Mr. Bishop in
particular, kept watch for him long—he never re-entered Henrietta’s
life. As the memory of the French Revolution faded from men’s minds,
the struggle for reform fell into more reputable and less violent
hands. Silly and turbulent men of the type of him who had turned the
girl’s young head no longer counted; or, rising to the top at moments
of public excitement, vanished as quickly, and no man knew whither.
Giles and Lunt were not taken on that Sunday night. They escaped, it
was supposed, to Scotland, by way of Patterdale and the Moors. Less
fortunate, however, than Walterson, they returned to London and fell in
again with Thistlewood. They yielded to the fascination of that
remarkable and unhappy man, took part in his schemes, and were taken
with him in the loft over the stable in Cato Street, when the attempt
to murder the cabinet at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square
miscarried. He and they got a fair trial, but little pity. And it is
not to be supposed that upon the scaffold in the Old Bailey, they
thought much of the lonely house in the hollow at Troutbeck, or of the
helpless woman whom they had terrorised. To their credit, be it said,
they died more worthily than they had lived; and with them came to a
close the movement which sought to reach reform by the road of
violence, and to that end held no instruments too cheap or vile.
Tyson came out of the adventure a wiser and perhaps a better man. For
on his return from the north he found it hard to free himself from the
charge of complicity in the acts of those who had used his house; nor
did he succeed until he had lain some weeks in Appleby gaol. He would
fain have avenged himself on Bess, but for reasons to be stated, he
could not enjoy this satisfaction. And his neighbours sent him to
Coventry. Had he been a strong man he might have defied them and public
opinion. But he was only a braggart, and that which must have
embittered many, tamed him. He turned to his wife for comfort, sought
his home more than before, and gradually settled down into a tolerable
citizen and a high Tory.
Bess saved herself by her own wit and courage. The Monday’s light saw
her dragged to Kendal prison, where they were not so gentle with her as
they had been with Henrietta. Her story went with her, and, “They say
you stole a child,” the little girl murmured, standing at her knee and
staring at her, “and ’ll be hanged at the March fair.”
“Not I,” said Bess. “It’s almost a pity, too, ain’t it? There’d be a
fine crowd to see!”
The child’s eyes sparkled.
“Yes,” she said. “There’d be a crowd, too.”
But Bess played a fine stroke. She sent for her rival on the Friday,
and Henrietta, twenty-four hours betrothed, and very far from unhappy,
took that road once more, and went to her.
“I saved you,” said Bess, with coolness. “Yes, I did. Don’t deny it!
Now do you save me.”
And Henrietta moved heaven and earth and Anthony Clyne to save her. She
succeeded. Bess went abroad—to join Walterson, it was rumoured. If so,
she returned without him, for on the old miser’s death she appeared on
Windermere, sold Starvecrow Farm and all its belongings, and removed to
the south, but to what part is not known, nor are any particulars of
her later fortunes within reach. Some said that she played a part in
the great riots at Bristol twelve years later, but the evidence is
inconclusive, and dark women possessing a strain of gipsy blood are not
uncommon.
Nor are women with a sharp tongue and a warm heart. Yet when Mrs.
Gilson died in the year of those very riots, and at a good age, there
was a gathering to bury her in Troutbeck graveyard as great as if she
had been a Lowther. The procession, horse and foot, was a mile long.
And when those who knew her least wondered whence all these moist eyes
and this flocking to do honour to a woman who had been quick of temper
and rough of tongue—ay, were it to Squire Bolton of Storrs, or the rich
Mr. Rogers himself—there was one who came a great distance to the
burying who could have solved the riddle.
It was Henrietta.
THE END