A WOMAN SCORNED
Colonel Holles retraced his steps to the City on foot. A hackney-coach,
such as that in which he had driven almost in triumph to the Cockpit,
was no longer for him; nor yet could he submit to the expense of going
by water now that the unexpected was all that stood between himself and
destitution.
And yet the unexpected was not quite all. An alternative existed,
though a very desperate one. There was the rebellion in which Tucker
had sought fruitlessly hitherto to engage him. The thought of it began
to stir in his dejected mind, as leaden-footed he dragged himself
towards Temple Bar through the almost stifling heat which was making
itself felt in London at the end of that month of May. Temptation urged
him now, nourished not only by the circumstance that in rebellion
lay his last hope of escaping starvation, but also by hot resentment
against an inclement and unjust government that drove able soldiers
such as himself into the kennels, whilst befriending the worthless
minions who pandered to the profligacy of a worthless prince. Vice,
he told himself, was the only passport to service in this England of
the restored Stuarts. Tucker and Rathbone were right. At least what
they did was justified and hallowed by the country’s need of salvation
from the moral leprosy that was fastening upon it, a disease more
devastating and deadly than this plague upon which the republicans
counted to arouse the nation to a sense of its position.
He counted the cost of failure; but he counted it derisively. His
life would be claimed. That was the stake he set upon the board. But,
considering that it was the only stake remaining him, why hesitate?
What, after all, was this life of his worth that he should be tender of
setting it upon a last throw with Fortune? Fortune favours boldness.
Perhaps in the past he had not been bold enough.
Deep in his musings he had reached St. Clement Danes, when he was
abruptly aroused by a voice, harsh and warningly commanding.
“Keep your distance, sir!”
Checking, he looked round to the right, whence the order came.
He beheld a man with a pike, who stood before a padlocked door that was
smeared with a red cross a foot in length, above which also in red was
heavily daubed the legend: LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US.
Taken thus by surprise, the Colonel shuddered as at the contact of
something unclean and horrible. Hastily he stepped out into the middle
of the unpaved street, and, pausing there a moment, glanced up at the
closed shutters of the infected house. It was the first that he had
seen; for although he had come this way a week ago, when the plague
was already active in the neighbourhood, yet it was then confined to
Butcher’s Row on the north side of the church and to the mean streets
that issued thence. To find it thus upon the main road between the City
and Whitehall was to be rendered unpleasantly conscious of its spread.
And, as he now pursued his way with instinctively quickened steps, he
found his thoughts thrust more closely than ever upon the uses which
the revolutionaries could make of this dread pestilence. Much brooding
in his disturbed state of mind distorted his mental vision, so that he
came presently to adopt the view that this plague was a visitation from
Heaven upon a city abandoned to ungodliness. Heaven, it followed, must
be on the side of those who laboured to effect a purifying change.
The end of it was that, as he toiled up Ludgate Hill towards Paul’s,
his resolve was taken. That evening he would seek Tucker and throw in
his lot with the republicans.
Coming into Paul’s Yard, he found a considerable crowd assembled
before the western door of the Cathedral. It was composed of people
of all degrees: merchants, shopkeepers, prentices, horseboys,
scavengers, rogues from the alleys that lay behind the Old ’Change,
idlers and sharpers from Paul’s Walk, with a sprinkling of women,
of town-gallants, and of soldiers. And there, upon the steps of the
portico, stood the magnet that had drawn them in the shape of that
black crow of a Jack Presbyter preaching the City’s doom. And his
text--recurring like the refrain of a song--was ever the same:
“Ye have defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your iniquities,
by the iniquity of your traffic.”
And yet, from between the Corinthian pillars which served him for his
background, had been swept away the milliners’ shops that had stood
there during the Commonwealth.
Whether some thought of this in the minds of his audience rendered
his words humorously inapt, or whether it was merely that a spirit of
irresponsible ribaldry was infused into the crowd by a crowd of young
apprentices, loud derision greeted the preacher’s utterance. Unshaken
by the laughter and mocking cries, the prophet of doom presented a
fearless and angry front.
“Repent, ye scoffers!” His voice shrilled to dominate their mirthful
turbulence. “Bethink you of where ye stand! Yet forty days and London
shall be destroyed! The pestilence lays siege unto this city of the
ungodly! Like a raging lion doth it stalk round, seeking where it may
leap upon you. Yet forty days, and....”
An egg flung by the hand of a butcher’s boy smashed full in his face
to crop his period short. He staggered and gasped as the glutinous mass
of yolk and white crept sluggishly down his beard and dripped thence to
spread upon the rusty black of his coat.
“Deriders! Scoffers!” he screamed, and with arms that thrashed the air
in imprecation, he looked like a wind-tossed scarecrow. “Your doom is
at hand. Your....”
A roar of laughter provoked by the spectacle he presented drowned his
frenzied voice, and a shower of offensive missiles pelted him from
every quarter. The last of these was a living cat, which clawed itself
against his breast spitting furiously in its terror.
Overwhelmed, the prophet turned, and fled between the pillars into the
shelter of Paul’s itself, pursued by laughter and insult. But scarcely
had he disappeared than with uncanny suddenness that laughter sank from
a roar to a splutter. To this succeeded a moment of deadly silence.
Then the crowd broke, and parted, its members departing at speed in
every direction with cries in which horror had taken now the place that
was so lately held by mirth.
Colonel Holles, finding himself suddenly alone, and as yet very far
from understanding what had taken place to scatter those men and women
in such panic, advanced a step or two into the suddenly emptied space
before the cathedral steps. There on the roughly cobbled ground he
beheld a writhing man, a well-made, vigorous fellow in the very prime
of life, whose dress was that of a tradesman of some prosperity. His
round hat lay beside him where he had fallen, and he rolled his head
from side to side spasmodically, moaning faintly the while. Of his
eyes nothing was visible but the whites, showing under the line of his
half-closed lids.
As Holles, perceiving here no more than a sick man, continued his
advance, a voice from the retreating crowd shouted a warning to him.
“Have a care, sir! Have a care! He may be stricken with the plague.”
The Colonel checked, involuntarily arrested by the horror that the very
word inspired. And then he beheld a stoutish, elderly man in a heavy
wig, plainly but scrupulously dressed in black, whose round countenance
gathered a singularly owlish expression from a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles, walk calmly forward to the stricken citizen. A moment he
stood beside him looking down; then he turned to beckon a couple of
burly fellows who had the appearance and carried the staves of billmen.
From his pocket the sturdy gentleman in black produced a kerchief upon
which he sprinkled something from a phial. Holding the former to his
nostrils with his left hand, he knelt down beside the sufferer, and
quietly set himself to unfasten the man’s doublet.
Observing him, the Colonel admired his quiet courage, and thence took
shame at his own fear for his utterly worthless life. Resolutely
putting it from him, he went forward to join that little group.
The doctor looked round and up at his approach. But Holles had no eyes
at the moment for any but the patient, whose breast the physician had
laid bare. One of the billmen was pointing out to the other a purplish
tumid patch at the base of the sufferer’s throat. His eyes were round,
his face grave, and his voice came hushed and startled.
“See! The tokens!” he said to his companion.
And now the doctor spoke, addressing Holles.
“You would do well not to approach more closely, sir.”
“Is it ... the plague?” quoth Holles in a quiet voice.
The doctor nodded, pointing to the purple patch. “The tokens are very
plain to see,” he said. “I beg, sir, that you will go.” And on that he
once more held the handkerchief to his mouth and nostrils, and turned
his shoulder upon the Colonel.
Holles withdrew as he was bidden, moving slowly and thoughtfully,
stricken by the first sight of the plague at work upon a
fellow-creature. As he approached the edges of the crowd, which,
keeping its distance, yet stood at gaze as crowds will, he observed
that men shrank back from him as if he were himself already tainted.
A single thing beheld impresses us more deeply than twenty such things
described to us by others. Hitherto these London citizens had treated
lightly this matter of the plague. Not ten minutes ago they had been
deriding and pelting one who had preached repentance and warned them of
the anger of Heaven launched upon them. And then suddenly, like a bolt
from the blue, had come the stroke that laid one of them low, to freeze
their derision and fill their hearts with terror by giving them a sight
of this thing which hitherto they had but heard reported.
The Colonel stalked on, reflecting that this event in Paul’s Yard had
done more proselytizing for the cause of the Commonwealth than a score
of advocates could have accomplished. It was very well, he thought. It
was a sign. And if anything had been wanting to clinch his decision to
throw in his lot with Tucker, this supplied it.
But first to quench the prodigious thirst engendered by his long walk
through that sweltering heat, and then on to Cheapside and Tucker to
offer his sword to the revolutionaries. Thus he would assure himself
of the wherewithal to liquidate his score at the Paul’s Head and take
his leave of the amorous Mrs. Quinn, with whom he could not in any case
have afforded now to continue to lodge.
As he entered the common room, she turned from a group of citizens with
whom she was standing to talk to follow him with her eyes, her lips
compressed, as he passed on into his own little parlour, at the back. A
moment later she went after him.
He was flinging off his hat, and loosening his doublet to cool himself,
and he gave her good-morning airily as if yesterday there had not been
an almost tragic scene between them. She found his light-hearted and
really tactful manner highly offensive, and she bridled under it.
“What may be your pleasure, Colonel?” she demanded forbiddingly.
“A draught of ale if I deserve your charity,” quoth he. “I am parched
as an African desert. Phew! The heat!” And he flung himself down on the
window-seat to get what air he could.
She went off in silence, and returned with a tankard, which she placed
upon the table before him. Thirstily he set it to his lips, and as its
cool refreshment began to soothe his throat, he thanked Heaven that in
a world of much evil there was still so good a thing as ale.
Silently she watched him, frowning. As he paused at last in the
enjoyment of his draught, she spoke.
“Ye’ll have made your plans to leave my house to-day as we settled it
last night?” said she between question and assertion.
He nodded, pursing his lips a little. “I’ll remove myself to the Bird
in Hand across the Yard this afternoon,” said he.
“The Bird in Hand!” A slight upward inflection of her voice marked her
disdain of that hostelry, which, indeed, was but a poor sort of tavern.
“Faith, it will go well with your brave coat. Ah, but that’s no affair
of mine. So that ye go, I am content.”
There was something portentous in her utterance. She came forward to
the table, and leaned heavily forward upon it. Her expression and
attitude were calculated to leave him in no doubt that this woman, who
had been so tender to him hitherto, was now his declared enemy. “My
house,” she said, “is a reputable house, and I mean to keep it so. I
want no traitors here, no gallows’ birds and the like.”
He had been on the point of drinking again. But her words arrested him,
the tankard midway to his lips.
“Traitor? Gallows’ bird!” he ejaculated slowly. “I don’t think I take
your meaning, mistress. D’ye apply these terms to me? To me?”
“To you, sir.” Her lips came firmly together.
He stared, frowning, a long moment. Then he shrugged and laughed.
“Ye’re mad,” he said with conviction, and finished his ale at a draught.
“No, I’m not mad, nor a fool neither, master rebel. A man’s to be
known by the company he keeps. Birds of a feather flock together, as
the saying goes. And how should you be other than a traitor that was
friends with traitors, that was close with traitors, here in this house
of mine, as I have seen and can swear to at need, and would if I wanted
to do you a mischief. I’ll spare you that. But you leave my house
to-day, or maybe I’ll change my mind about it.”
He crashed the tankard down upon the board, and came to his feet.
“’Sdeath, woman! Will you tell me what you mean?” he roared, his anger
fanned by uneasiness. “What traitors have I been close with?”
“What traitors, do you say?” She sneered a little. “What of your friend
Danvers, that’s being sought at this moment by the men from Bow Street?”
He was instantly relieved. “Danvers?” he echoed. “My friend Danvers?
Why, I have no such friend. I never even heard his name before.”
“Indeed!” She was terribly derisive now. “And maybe you’ve never heard
the names of his lieutenants neither--of Tucker and of Rathbone, that
was in here with you no later than yesterday as I can swear. And what
was they doing with you? What had you to do with them? That’s what you
can perhaps explain to the satisfaction of the Justices. They’ll want
to know how you came to be so close with they two traitors that was
arrested this morning, along of a dozen others, for conspiring to bring
back the Commonwealth. Oh, a scoundrelly plot--to murder the King,
seize the Tower, and burn the City, no less.”
It was like a blow between the eyes. “Arrested!” he gasped, his jaw
fallen, his eyes startled. “Tucker and Rathbone arrested, do you say?
Woman, you rave!” But in his heart already he knew that she did not.
For unless her tale were true how could she have come by her knowledge
of their conspiring.
“Do I?” She laughed again, evilly mocking. “Step out into Paul’s Yard,
and ask the first man you meet of the arrest made in Cheapside just
afore noon, and of the hunt that is going on this minute for Danvers,
their leader, and for others who was mixed up in this wicked plot. And
I don’t want them to come a-hunting here. I don’t want my house named
for a meeting-place of traitors, as you’ve made it, taking advantage
of me that haven’t a man to protect me, and all the while deceiving
me with your smooth pleasantness. If it wasn’t for that, I’d inform
the Justices myself at once. You may be thankful that I want to keep
the good name of my house, if I can. And that’s the only reason for my
silence. But you’ll go to-day or maybe I’ll think better of it yet.”
She picked up the empty tankard, and reached the door before he could
find words in his numbed brain to answer her. On the threshold she
paused.
“I’ll bring you your score presently,” she said. “When you’ve settled
that, you may pack and quit.” She went out, slamming the door.
The score! It was a small thing compared with that terrible menace of
gaol and gallows. It mattered little that--save in intent--he was still
completely innocent of any complicity in the rash republican plot which
had been discovered. Let him be denounced for association with Tucker
and Rathbone, and there would be no mercy for the son of Randal Holles
the Regicide. His parentage and antecedents would supply the crowning
evidence against him. That was plain to him. And yet the score, whilst
a comparatively negligible evil, was the more immediate, and therefore
gave him at the moment the greater preoccupation.
He knew that it would be heavy, and he knew that the balance of his
resources was utterly inadequate to meet it. Yet unless it were met
he could be assured that Mrs. Quinn would show him no mercy; and this
fresh trick of Fate’s, in bringing him into association with Tucker on
the very eve of that conspirator’s arrest, placed him in the power of
Mrs. Quinn to an extent that did not bear considering.
It was, of course, he reflected bitterly, the sort of thing that must
be for ever happening to him. And then he addressed his exasperated
mind to the discovery of means to pay his debt. Like many another
in his case, it but remained for him to realize such effects as he
possessed. Cursing his confident extravagance of the morning, he set
about it.
And so you behold him presently, arrayed once more in the shabby
garments that he had thought to have discarded for ever, emerging from
the Paul’s Head carrying a bundle that contained his finery, and making
his way back to those shops in Paternoster Row where it had been so
lately and so jubilantly acquired.
Here he discovered that there is a world of difference between the
treatment offered to a seller and to a buyer. He further discovered
that the main value of a suit of clothes would appear to be the mere
bloom upon it. Once this has been a little rubbed, the garments
become, apparently, next-door to worthless. The fact is that he was a
soldier who understood soldiering, and they were traders who understood
trade. And the whole art of successful trading, in whatsoever degree,
lies in a quick perception of the necessities of others and a bowelless
readiness to take advantage of them.
Ten pounds was all that he could raise on gear for which a few hours
ago he had paid close upon thirty. Perforce, however ill-humoured, he
must sell. He was abusive over the negotiations; at one moment he was
almost threatening. But the merchant with whom he made his traffic was
not at all disturbed. Insults were nothing to him, so that he made his
profit.
Back to the Paul’s Head went Colonel Holles to find his hostess
awaiting him with the score. And the sight of the latter turned him
almost sick. It was the culminating blow of a day of evil fortune. He
studied the items carefully, endeavouring to keep the dismay from his
countenance, for Mrs. Quinn was observing him with those hard blue
eyes, her lips compressed into a tight, ominous line.
He marvelled at the prodigious amount of Canary and ale that he had
consumed during those weeks. Irrelevantly he fell to considering that
this very costly thirst of his was the result of a long sojourn in the
Netherlands, where the habit of copious drinking is a commonplace.
Then he came back to the main consideration, which was that the total
exceeded twenty pounds. It was a prodigious sum. He had expected
a heavy score; but hardly so heavy a score as this. He conceived
that perhaps Mrs. Quinn had included in it the wound to her tender
susceptibilities, and he almost wondered whether marriage with her,
after all, were not the only remaining refuge, assuming that she would
still consider marriage. Short of that, he did not see how he was to
pay.
He raised eyes that, despite him, were haggard and betraying from
those terrifying figures, and met that baleful glance of the lady who,
because she could not be his wife, was now his relentless enemy. Her
glance scared him more than her total. He lowered his eyes again to the
lesser evil and cleared his throat.
“This is a very heavy bill,” he said.
“It is,” she agreed. “You have drunk heavily and otherwise received
good entertainment. I hope you’ll fare as well at the Bird in Hand.”
“Mrs. Quinn, I will be frank. My affairs have gone awry through no
fault of my own. His Grace of Albemarle, upon whom I had every reason
to depend, has failed me. At the moment I am a man ... hard-pressed. I
am almost without resources.”
“That nowise troubled you whiles you ate and drank of the best my house
could offer. Yours is a tale that has been told afore by many a pitiful
rogue....”
“Mrs. Quinn!” he thundered.
But she went on, undaunted, joying to deal a wound to the pride of this
man who had lacerated her own pride so terribly.
“ ... and there’s a way to deal wi’ rogues. You think that, perhaps
because I am a woman, I am soft and tender; and so perhaps I am with
them as deserves it. But I think I know your sort, Colonel Holles--if
so be that you be a colonel. You’re not new to a house like mine; but
I’ve never yet been bested by any out-at-elbow ruffler, and I’ll see to
it as how you don’t best me now. I’ll say no more, though I could. I
could say a deal. But I’ll say only this: if you gives me trouble I’ll
ha’ the constable to you, and maybe there’ll be more than a matter of
this score to settle then. You know what I mean, my man. You know what
I could say an’ I would. So my advice to you is that you pay your bill
without whimperings that won’t move me no more than they’ll move that
wooden table.”
Scorched with shame, he stood before her, curbing himself with
difficulty, for he could be very violent when provoked, though thanks
to an indolent disposition he did not permit himself to be provoked
very easily. He suppressed his fury now, realizing that to loose it
would be to have it recoil upon him and precipitate his ruin.
“Mrs. Quinn,” he answered as steadily as he could, “I have sold my gear
that I might pay my debt to you. Yet even so this debt exceeds the
amount of my resources.”
“Sold your gear, have you?” She uttered a laugh that was like a
cough. “Sold the fine clothes you’d bought to impose upon them at
Whitehall, you mean. But you’ve not sold everything. There’s that jewel
a-flaunting in your ear that alone would pay my score twice over.”
He started, and put a hand to the ear-ring--that ruby given to him as
a keepsake by the lovely, unknown royalist boy whose life he had saved
on the night after Worcester fight some fifteen years ago. The old
superstitions that his fancy had woven about it had placed it outside
his realizable assets. Even now, in this desperate pass, when reminded
of its value, the notion of selling it was repugnant to him. And yet
perhaps it was against this very dreadful need, perhaps it was that he
might save his neck--for she made it clear to him that nothing less was
now at stake--that in all these years he had hugged that jewel against
every blow of fortune.
His head drooped. “I had forgot,” he said.
“Forgot?” she echoed in tones that plainly called him a liar and a
cheat. “Ah, well, ye’re reminded of it now.”
“I thank you for the reminder. It ... it shall be sold at once. Your
score shall be paid to-day. I ... I am sorry that, that.... Oh, no
matter.”
He flung out upon the business of finding a Jew who practised the
transmutation of jewels into gold.