but fire my blood. She is high mettled, but I have dealt with
termagants before--and brought them down, by God!--and brought them
down! There is a way to tame a woman--and I know it. Begin with a light
soft hand and a melting eye--all's fair in love; and the spoils are to
the victor. When I come back from Gloucestershire with my lock of raven
hair"--he lifted a goblet of wine and tossed it off at a draught--"I
shall leave her as such beauties should be left--on her knees." And
his laugh rang forth like a chime of silver. Roxholm sprang up with a
smothered oath.
"Come!" he said to Warbeck. "Come away, in God's name."
Warbeck had been his fellow-soldier abroad and knew well the dangerous
spirit which hid itself beneath his calm. He had seen him roused to
fury once before ('twas when in Flanders after a skirmish he found some
drunken soldiers stripping a poor struggling peasant woman of her
garments, while her husband shrieked curses at them from the tree where
he was tied)--and on that occasion he had told himself 'twould be safer
to trifle with a mine of powder than with this man's anger. He rose
hurriedly and followed him outside. In the street he could scarce keep
pace with his great stride, and the curses that broke from him brought
back hot days of battle.
"I would not enter into a pot-house brawl with a braggart boy," he
cried. "The blackguard, dastard knave! Drag me away, Hal, lest I rush
back like a fool and run him through! I have lost my wits. 'Tis the
fashion for dandies to pour forth their bestial braggings, but never
hath a man made my blood so boil and me so mad to strike him."
"'Tis not like thee so to lose thy wits, Roxholm," Warbeck said, his
hand on his arm, "but thou hast lost them this once surely. 'Tis no
work for the sword of a gentleman pinking foul-mouthed boasters in a
coffee-house. Know you who he is?"
"Damnation, _No!_" thundered Roxholm, striding on more fiercely still.
"'Tis the new dandy, Sir John Oxon," said Warbeck. "And the beauty he
makes his boast on is the Gloucestershire Wildairs handsome madcap--the
one they call Mistress Clo."
_CHAPTER X_
_My Lord Marquess rides to Camylott_.
When he went home my lord sate late over his books before he went to
his chamber, yet he read but little, finding his mood disturbed by
thoughts which passed through it in his despite. His blood had grown
hot at the coffee-house, and though 'twas by no means the first time it
had heated when he heard the heartless and coarse talk of woman which
it was the habit of most men of the day to indulge in, he realised that
it had never so boiled as when he listened to the brutal and
significant swagger of Sir John Oxon. His youth and beauty and cruel,
confident air had made it seem devilish in its suggestion of what his
past almost boyish years might have held of pitiless pleasures and
pitiless indifference to the consequences, which, while they were added
triumphs to him, were ruin and despair to their victims.
"The laugh in his blue eye was damnable," Roxholm murmured. "'Twas as
if there was no help for her or any other poor creature whom he chose
to pursue. The base unfairness of it! He is equipped with the whole
armament--of lures, of lies, of knowledge, and devilish skill. There
are women, 'tis true, who are his equals; but those who are not--those
who are ignorant and whose hearts he wins, as 'twould be easy for him
to win any woman's who believed his wooing face and voice--Nay, 'twould
be as dastardly as if an impregnable fortress should open all its
batteries upon a little child who played before it. And he stands
laughing among his mocking crew--triumphing, boasting--in cold
blood--of what he plans to do months to come. Fate grant he may not
come near me often. Some day I should break his devil's neck."
He found himself striding about the room. He was burning with rage
against the unfairness of it all, as he had burned when, a mere child,
he pondered on the story of Wildairs. To-day he was a man, yet his
passion of rebellion was curiously similar in its nature to his young
fury. Now, as then, there was naught to be done to help what seemed
like Fate. In a world made up of men all more or less hunters of the
weak, ready to accept the theory that all things defenceless and lovely
are fair game for the stronger, a man whose view was fairer was an
abnormality.
"I do not belong to my time," he said, flinging himself into his chair
again and speaking grimly. "I am too early--or too late--for it, and
must be content to seem a fool."
"There is a Fate," he said a little later, having sat a space gazing at
the floor and deep in thought--"there is a Fate which seems to link me
to the fortunes of these people. My first knowledge of their
wretchedness was a thing which sank deep. There are things a human
being perhaps remembers his whole life through--and strangely enough
they are often small incidents. I do not think there will ever pass
from me my memory of the way the rain swept over the park lands and
bare trees the day I stood with my Lord Dunstanwolde at the Long
Gallery window, and he told me of the new-born child dragged shrieking
from beneath its dead mother's body."
Some days later he went to Camylott to pass a few weeks in the country
with his parents, who were about to set forth upon a journey to Italy,
where they were to visit in state a palace of a Roman noble who had
been a friend of his Grace's youth, they having met and become
companions when the Duke first visited Rome in making the grand tour.
'Twas a visit long promised to the Roman gentleman who had more than
once been a guest of their household in England; and but for affairs of
his Grace of Marlborough, which Roxholm had bound himself to keep eye
on, he also would have been of the party. As matters stood, honour
held him on English soil, for which reason he went to Camylott to spend
the last weeks with those he loved, amid the country loveliness.
When my lord Marquess journeyed to the country he took no great
cavalcade with him, but only a couple of servants to attend him, while
Mr. Fox rode at his side. The English June weather was heavenly fair,
and the country a bower of green, the sun shining with soft warmth and
the birds singing in the hedgerows and upon the leafy boughs. To ride a
fine horse over country roads, by wood and moor and sea, is a pleasant
thing when a man is young and hale and full of joy in Nature's
loveliness, and above all is riding to a home which seems more
beautiful to him than any place on earth. One who has lived
twenty-eight years, having no desire unfulfilled, and taking his part
of every pleasure that wealth, high birth, and a splendid body can give
him, may well ride gaily over a good white road and have leisure to
throw back his head to hearken to a skylark soaring in the high blue
heavens above him, to smile at a sitting bird's bright eyes peeping
timidly at him from under the thick leafage of a hazel hedge, or at the
sight of a family of rabbits scurrying over the cropped woodland grass
at the sound of his horse's feet, their short white tails marking their
leaps as they dart from one fern shelter to the other; and to slacken
his horse's pace as he rides past village greens, marking how the
little children tumble and are merry there.
So my lord Marquess rode and Mr. Fox with him, for two days at least.
In the dewy morning they set forth and travelled between green
hedgerows and through pretty tiny villages, talking pleasantly, as old
friends will talk, for to the day of his old preceptor's peaceful dying
years later at Camylott, the Marquess (who was then a Duke) loved and
treated him as a companion and friend, not as a poor underling Chaplain
who must rise from table as if dismissed by the course of sweetmeats
when it appeared. For refreshments they drew rein at noon before some
roadside inn whose eager host spread before them his very best, and
himself waited upon them in awful joy. When the sun set, one manservant
rode on before to prepare for their entertainment for the night, and
when they cantered up to the hostelry, they found the whole
establishment waiting to receive and do them honour, landlord and
landlady bowing and curtseying on the threshold, maidservants peeping
from behind doors and through upper windows, and loiterers from the
village hanging about ready to pull forelocks or bob curtseys, as their
sex demanded.
"'Tis my lord Marquess of Roxholm, the great Duke of Osmonde's heir,"
they would hear it whispered. "He has come back from the wars covered
with wounds and now rides to pay his respects to their Graces, his
parents, at Camylott Tower."
'Twas a pleasant journey; Roxholm always remembered and often spoke of
it in after years, for his thought was that in setting out upon it he
had begun to journey towards that which Fate, it seemed, had ordained
that he should reach--though through dark nights and stormy days--at
last.
'Twas on the morning of the fourth day there befel them a strange
adventure, and one which had near ended in dark tragedy for one human
being at least.
The horse his lordship rode was a beautiful fiery creature, and
sometimes from sheer pleasure in his spirit, his master would spur him
to a wild gallop in which he went like the wind's self, showing a joy
in the excitement of it which was beauteous to behold. When this fourth
morning they had been but about an hour upon the road, Roxholm gave to
the creature's glossy neck the touch which was the signal 'twas his
delight to answer.
"Watch him shoot forward like an arrow from a bow," my lord said to Mr.
Fox, and the next instant was yards away.
He flew like the wind, his hoofs scarce seeming to touch the earth as
he sped forward, my lord sitting like a Centaur, his face aglow with
pleasure, even Mr. Fox's soberer animal taking fire somewhat and
putting himself at a gallop, his rider's elderly blood quickening with
his.
One side of the road they were upon was higher than the other and
covered with a wood, and as Mr. Fox followed at some distance he beheld
a parlous sight. At a turn in the way, down the bank, there rushed a
woman, a frantic figure, hair flying, garments disordered, and with a
shriek flung herself full length upon the earth before my lord
Marquess's horse, as if with the intent that the iron hoofs should dash
out her brains as they struck ground again. Mr. Fox broke forth into a
cry of horror, but even as it left his lips he beheld a wondrous thing,
indeed, though 'twas one which brought his heart into his throat. The
excited beast's fore parts were jerked upward so high that he seemed to
rear till he stood almost straight upon his hind legs, his fore feet
beating the air; then, by some marvel of strength and skill, his body
was wheeled round and his hoofs struck earth at safe distance from the
prostrate woman's head.
My lord sprang from his back and stood a moment soothing his trembling,
the animal snorting and panting, the foam flying from his nostrils in
his terror at a thing which his friend and master had never done to him
before. The two loved each other, and in Roxholm's heart there was a
sort of rage that he should have been forced to inflict upon him so
harsh a shock.
The woman dragged herself half up from the white dust on which she had
lain. She was shuddering convulsively, her long hair was hanging about
her, her eyes wild and anguished, and her lips shivering more than
trembling.
"Oh, God! Oh, God!" she wailed, and then let herself drop again and
writhed, clutching at the white dust with her hands.
"Are you mad?" said Roxholm, sternly, "or only in some hysteric fury?
Would you have your brains dashed out?"
She flung out her arms, tearing at the earth still and grinding her
teeth.
"Yes--dashed out!" she cried; "all likeness beaten from my face that
none might know it again. For that I threw myself before you."
The Marquess gave his horse to the servant, who had ridden to him, and
made a sign both to him and Mr. Fox that they ride a little forward.
He bent over the girl (for she was more girl than woman, being scarce
eighteen) and put his hand on her shoulder.
"Get up, Mistress," he said. "Rise and strive to calm yourself."
Suddenly his voice had taken a tone which had that in its depths no
creature in pain would not understand and answer to. His keen eye had
seen a thing which wrung his heart, it seeming to tell so plainly all
the cruel story.
"Come, poor creature," he said, "let me help you to your feet."
He put his strong arm about her body, and lifted her as if she had been
a child, and finding she was so trembling that she had not strength to
support herself, he even carried her to the grass and laid her down
upon it. She had a lovely gipsy face which should have been brilliant
with beauty, but was wild and wan and dragged with horrid woe. Her
great roe's eyes stared at him through big, welling tears of agony.
"_You_ look like some young lord!" she cried. "_You_ have a beautiful
face and a sweet voice. Any woman would believe you if you swore a
thing! What are women to do! Are you a villain, too--are you a villain,
too?"
"No," answered he, looking at her straight. "No, I am not."
"All men are!" she broke forth, wildly. "They lie to us--they trick
us--they swear to us--and kneel and pray--and then"--tossing up her
arms with a cry that was a shriek--"they make _us_ kneel--and
laugh--laugh--and laugh at us!"
She threw herself upon the grass and rolled about, plucking at her
flesh as if she had indeed gone mad.
"But for you," she sobbed, "it would be over now, and your horse's
hoofs had stamped me out. And now 'tis to do again--for I will do it
yet."
"Nay, you will not, Mistress," he said, in a still voice, "for your
child's sake."
He thought, indeed, she would go mad then: she so writhed and beat
herself, that he blamed himself for his words, and knelt by her,
restraining her hands.
"'Tis for its sake I would kill myself, and have my face beaten into
the bloody dust. I would kill it--kill it--kill it--more than I would
kill myself!"
"Nay, you would not, poor soul," he said, "if you were not distraught."
"But I am distraught," she wailed; "and there is naught but death for
both of us."
'Twas a strange situation for a young man to find himself in, watching
by the roadside the hysteric frenzy of a maddened girl; but as he had
been unconscious on the day he stood, an unclad man, giving the aid
that would save a life, so he thought now of naught but the agony he
saw in this poor creature's awful eyes and heard in her strangled
cries. It mattered naught to him that any passing would have thought
themselves gazing upon a scene in a strange story.
There was a little clear stream near, and he went and brought her
water, making her drink it and bathe the dust-stains from her face and
hands, and the gentle authority with which he made her do these simple
things seemed somehow to somewhat calm her madness. She looked up at
him staring, and with long, sobbing breaths.
"Who--are you?" she asked, helplessly.
"I am the Marquess of Roxholm," he answered, "and I ride to my father's
house at Camylott; but I cannot leave you until I know you are safe."
"Safe!" she said. "I safe!" and she clasped her hands about her knees
as she sat, wringing her fingers together. "You do not ask me who I
am," she added.
"I need not know your name to do you service," he answered. "But I must
ask you where you would go--to rest."
"To Death--from which you have plucked me!" was her reply, and she
dropped her head against her held-up knees and broke forth sobbing
again. "I tell you there is naught else. If your horse had beat my face
into the dust, none would have known where I lay at last. Five days
have I walked and my very clothes I changed with a gipsy woman. None
would have known." Suddenly she looked up with shame and terror in her
eyes, the blood flaming in her face. She involuntarily clutched at his
sleeve as if in her horror she must confide even to this stranger.
"They had begun to look at me--and whisper," she said. "And one day a
girl who hated me laughed outright as I passed--though I strove to bear
myself so straightly--and I heard her mock me. 'Pride cometh first,'
she said, 'and then the fall. _She_ hath fallen far.'"
She looked so young and piteous that Roxholm felt a mist pass before
his eyes.
"Poor child!" he said; "poor child!"
"I was proud," she cried. "It was my sin. They taunted me that he was a
gentleman and meant me ill, and it angered me--poor fool--and I held my
head higher. He told me he had writ for his Chaplain to come and wed us
in secret. He called me 'my lady' and told me what his pride in me
would be when we went to the town." She put her hands up to her working
throat as if somewhat strangled her, and the awful look came back into
her widened eyes. "In but a little while he went away," she
gasped--"and when he came back, and I went to meet him in the dark and
fell weeping upon his breast, he pushed me back and looked at me, and
curled his lip laughing, and turned away! Oh, John!--John Oxon!" she
cried out, "God laughs at women--why shouldst not thou?" and her
paroxysm began again.
At high noon a wagoner whose cart was loaded with hay drove into the
rick yard of a decent farm-house some hours' journey from the turn in
the road where my lord Marquess had been so strangely checked in his
gallop. An elderly gentleman in Chaplain's garb and bands rode by the
rough conveyance, and on a bed made in the hay a woman lay and groaned
in mortal anguish.
The good woman of the house this reverend gentleman saw alone and had
discourse with, paying her certain moneys for the trouble she would be
put to by the charge he commanded to her, himself accompanying her when
she went out to the wagon to care for its wretched burden.
Throughout the night she watched by her patient's bedside, but as day
dawned she left it for a moment to call the Chaplain to come quickly,
he having remained in the house that he might be at hand if need should
be, in accordance with his patron's wishes.
"'Tis over, and she is dying," said the good woman. "I fear she hath
not her wits, poor soul. All night she hath cried one name, and lies
and moans it still."
Mr. Fox followed her into a little cleanly, raftered chamber. He knelt
by the bedside and spoke gently to the girl who lay upon the white
pillows, her deathly face more white than the clean, coarse linen.
'Twas true she did not see him, but lay staring at the wall's bareness,
her lips moving as she muttered the name she had shrieked and wailed
at intervals throughout the hours. "John--Oh, John Oxon!" he could
barely hear, "God laughs at us--why should not such as thou?"
And when the sun rose she lay stiff and dead, with a dead child in her
rigid arm; and Mr. Fox rode slowly back with a grave countenance, to
join his lord and patron at the village inn, and tell him all was
over.
_CHAPTER XI_
"_It Might Have Been--It Might Have Been!_"
The heavenly summer weeks he passed with his beloved parents at
Camylott before they set forth on their journey to the Continent
remained a sweet memory in the mind of the young Marquess so long as he
lived, and was cherished by him most tenderly. In those lovely June
days he spent his hours with his father and mother as he had spent them
as a child, and in that greater intimacy and closer communion which
comes to a son with riper years, if the situation is not reversed and
his maturity has not drifted away from such fondness. Both the Duke and
Duchess were filled with such noble pride in him and he with such noble
love of them. All they had hoped for in him he had given them, all his
manly heart longed for they bestowed upon him--tenderness,
companionship, sympathy in all he did or dreamed of doing.
After his leave of absence it was his intention to rejoin his Grace of
Marlborough on the Continent for a period, since his great friend had
so desired, but later he would return and give up his career of arms to
devote himself to the interests of his country in other ways, and of
this his mother was particularly glad, feeling all a woman's fears for
his safety and all her soft dread of the horrors of war.
"I would not have shown you my heart when you went away from England,
Gerald," she said. "'Twould not have been brave and just to do so since
'twas your desire to go. But no woman's heart can lie light in her
breast when her son is in peril every hour--and I could not bear to
think," her violet eyes growing softly dark, "that my son in winning
glory might rob other mothers of their joy."
In their rides and talks together he would relate to his father the
story of his campaign, describe to him the brilliant exploits of the
great Duke, whom he had seen in his most magnificent hours, as only
those who fought by his side had seen him; but with her Grace he did
not dwell upon such things, knowing she would not be the happier for
hearing of them. With her he would walk through the park, sauntering
down the avenue beneath the oak-trees, or over the green sward to visit
the deer, who knew the sound of her sweet voice, it seemed, and hearing
it as she approached would lift their delicate heads and come towards
her to be caressed and fed, welcoming her with the dewy lustrousness of
their big timorous dark eyes, even the shyest does and little fawns
nibbling from her fair and gentle hand, and following her softly a few
paces when she turned away. Together she and Roxholm would wander
through all the dear places he had loved in his childish years--into
the rose gardens, which were a riot of beauty and marvellous colours
and the pride and joy of the head gardener, who lived for and among
them, as indeed they were the pride of those who worked under his
command, not a man or boy of them knowing any such pleasure as to see
her Grace walk through their labyrinths of bloom with my lord Marquess,
each of them rejoicing in the loveliness on every side and gathering
the fairest blossoms as they went, until sometimes they carried away
with them rich sheaves of crimson and pink and white and yellow. They
loved the high-walled kitchen garden, too, and often visited it,
spreading delight there among its gardeners by praising its fine
growths, plucking the fruit and gathering nosegays of the old-fashioned
flowers which bordered the beds of sober vegetables--sweet peas and
Canterbury bells, wall-flowers, sweetwilliams, yellow musk, and
pansies, making, her Grace said, the prettiest nosegay in the world.
Then they would loiter through the village and make visits to old men
and women sitting in the sun, to young mothers with babies in their
arms and little mites playing about their feet.
"And you never enter a cottage door, mother," said Roxholm in his young
manhood's pride and joy in her, "but it seems that the sun begins to
shine through the little window, and if there is a caged bird hanging
there it begins to twitter and sing. I cannot find a lady like
you"--bending his knee and kissing her white fingers in gay caress.
"Indeed, if I could I should bring her home to you to Camylott--and old
Rowe might ring his bells until he lost his breath."
"Do you know," she answered, "what your father said to me the first
morning I lay in my bed with you in my arm--old Rowe was ringing the
bells as if he would go wild. I remember the joyful pealing of them as
it floated across the park to come through my open window. We were so
proud and full of happiness, and thought you so beautiful--and you are,
Gerald, yet; so you are yet," with the prettiest smile, "and your
father said of you, 'He will grow to be a noble gentleman and wed a
noble lady; and they will be as we have been--as we have been,
beloved,' and we kissed each other with blissful tears in our eyes, and
you moved in my arm, and there was a tiny, new-born smile on your
little face."
"Dear one!" he said, kissing her hand more gravely; "dear one, God
grant such sweetness may come to me--for indeed I want to love some
woman dearly," and the warm blood mounted to his cheek.
Often in their tender confidences they spoke of this fair one who was
to crown his happy life, and one day, having returned from a brief
visit in another county, as they sat together in the evening she broke
forth with a little sigh in her sweet voice.
"Ah, Gerald," she said, "I saw in Gloucestershire the loveliest strange
creature--so lovely and so strange that she gave me an ache in the
heart."
"And why, sweet one?" he asked.
"Because I think she must be the most splendid beauteous thing in all
the world--and she has been so ill used by Fate. How could the poor
child save herself from ill? Her mother died when she was born; her
father is a wicked blasphemous rioter. He has so brought her up that
she has known no woman all her life, but has been his pastime and toy.
From her babyhood she has been taught naught but evil. She is so strong
and beautiful and wild that she is the talk of all the country. But,
ah, Gerald, the look in her great eyes--her red young mouth--her
wonderfulness! My heart stood still to see her. She hurt me so."