SHOWING STORM WITHIN AND WITHOUT
There are some who seem to be destined always to keep on top as the
wheel of life revolves; no matter how others may suffer from the law of
its relentless motion.
My Lady Kilcroney (still in the minds of those who had first known her
in her brilliant widowhood “Incomparable Bellairs!”) might be counted
among the rare ones who are thus miraculously favoured.
Beauty, wit, charm, wealth, rank and the irresistible dash of the born
leader she had already possessed; now she had attained to Court favour:
she was Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Charlotte! It is scarcely necessary
to add that she had become a power in the world; should she choose to
exercise her influence on behalf of anyone clever and virtuous enough
to profit of it, that person’s fortune might be regarded as safe.
So do great planets, following their allotted orbits, carry in their
wake lesser stars that bask and shine in a reflected light!
In the instance of Miss Pamela Pounce the luminary thus lifted into
prominence, possessed a very considerable power of shining on her own
account; and, once her position in the hemisphere assured, she required
no borrowed brilliancy.
In other words, my Lady Kilcroney’s recommendation obtained for Pamela
Pounce a new start in life. Madame Mirabel, exceedingly dissatisfied
with her head milliner, aware that Madame Eglantine of Paris was
growing sleek on the very cream of her rightful British custom, and
being moreover much struck with Pamela’s genteel appearance, her manner
and her aptitude, was all readiness to oblige so distinguished a client
as my Lady Kilcroney, and give the young woman a trial.
Before the autumn of her disastrous summer had waned, the younger Miss
Pounce found herself firmly established in the very position which had
been the object of her wildest dream. She was head of the millinery
department of the great Bond Street mantua maker.
Like her unexpected patroness, it might seem that her cup of happiness
was full. But there is no factor in the calculations of existence so
easily forgotten as that most important item of all; the human heart.
Pamela, in making her courageous plan of life, had forgotten to reckon
with her heart!
And this tiresome, irresponsible, uncontrollable organ began to trouble
her exceedingly. In those hours of leisure when she was not concocting
delightful schemes for the breaking of other people’s hearts--for every
one knows what a killing hat will do--she found herself considerably
inconvenienced by the peculiar conduct of her own.
Said Miss Polly Popple, of the millinery department, to Miss Clara
Smithson, the book-keeper:
“You mark my words, my dear, there’s something up with that young woman
Pounce! She’ll be getting herself into a regular scandal with that
dashing young spark of hers! And if she ain’t got something on her
conscience already ... I don’t know the signs!”
Miss Smithson leant forward, wheezing heavily.
“Providence ain’t always unjust, Polly,” she said, “and people do come
by their rights, no matter how many viscountesses is against them!”
“Ah,” said Polly, swelling her fine bust, and looking at herself in the
fly-blown glass which hung over the chimney in the little room at the
back of the Bond Street shop where she was sitting, after hours, with
her friend. “That was a bit of jobbery, that was! There isn’t one in
the establishment, I do believe, that wasn’t struck all of a heap when
they heard that a strange young female was put into old Mrs. Dodder’s
place instead of me, which the next in rank is always, by law, you
might say, entitled to. Lady Kilcroney being that prodigious in the
fashion--not that I was ever one to admire her; give me breeding!--and
Madame Mirabel being so set on cutting out Madame Eglantine--not that
she ever will, and you mark my words, for London ain’t Paris, I say,
and that I’ll maintain, and you may talk yourself blue in the face,
Clara, and you won’t alter that! If it hadn’t been for that put-up job,
’tis I’d have been head of the millinery here this moment.”
Miss Polly Popple’s case was clear, but Miss Smithson’s reasons for
disliking Pamela were perhaps more abstruse. She talked big of the
claims of friendship, of her sympathy for Miss Popple, and also
of a “rising within her,” which with her was an infallible sign
of “something fishy” in somebody else. But the truth was that the
new-comer’s radiant youth, her success, her spirit of enterprise, had
started the base passion of envy in Miss Smithson’s withered breast;
a passion the more prejudicial that it flourishes entirely outside
the pale of reason! She listened very greedily, therefore, to Miss
Popple’s rapid exposition of her suspicions. Between gossip, malice,
and inventiveness, the new head milliner’s character seemed indeed in a
parlous condition when Miss Popple concluded.
That wheezing breath of Miss Smithson’s was drawn with ever-increased
intensity.
“Walking with the young gentleman late of an evening in the Green Park!
Upon my word! If it had been you that had seen her last night, now,
Miss Popple dear, instead of that poor foundling of a Mary Jane, which
Madame Mirabel was saying only yesterday could scarce be trusted to
match a skein of blue silk, I’d go to Madame Mirabel this minute with
it, I would, being so to speak, a cousin----”
“Beware what you does, Miss Smithson, you’ll ruin all. Give her rope.”
“Rope, Miss Popple?”
“Rope to hang herself with,” said Miss Popple vindictively. “That’s in
a manner of speaking. Plain, she’ll give herself away or he’ll give her
away,” she had an ill-natured giggle, “so as we give them time. It’s
his game to give her away, a devil-may-care hand, some young buck who
only wants to have her at his mercy, just for his fun. Wasn’t he after
her here--open--three afternoons out of last week?”
“After her here?” Miss Smithson again repeated her friend’s last words.
She was exceedingly shocked.
“Why, mercy to goodness,” she went on in horrified tones: “Ain’t it the
rule of the house? No male belongings is allowed after the young ladies
here if they were grandfathers itself. And they churchwardens.”
“Oh, tush, Smithson,” interrupted Polly contemptuously. “Of course my
sly young beau comes dangling in with some lady friend, to help her to
choose a hat--_by way of_--” Polly winked. “Toosday, it was Mrs. Lafone
as brought him, or, to be correct, he brought her, which, knowing the
minx as I do--I refers here to Mrs. Lafone--’tis my intimate conviction
’tis he will pay for that there hat! But, as you knows, Miss Smithson,
and none better, ladies’ morals ain’t our concern, thanks be, so long
as we keeps our own respectable.”
Miss Smithson admitted this regrettable truth with a doleful sigh.
Polly took another pull at the brew of hot spiced beer which they had
concocted for their comfort this cold December night, and proceeded:
“Thursday, if Mr. Stafford doesn’t bring him along all innocent! He,
with his handsome lady on his arm, up from Windsor for the day, to buy
her a stylish head for a Christmas present. And, ‘What are you doing,
looking in at a hat-shop window, Bellairs,’ says he, laughing and
joking (’tis his way, my dear, a very agreeable gentleman!) ‘Gad,’
says he, ‘you’ve not got a wife to run you up bills! Your chinkers goes
hopping out on hosses and dice and cards, and what not! Selfish fellows
you bachelors are!’ And Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, bowing to Mr. Stafford
and declaring he only wished he had other people’s luck--and indeed,
Miss Smithson, Mrs. Stafford is a real beauty!--but all the while, my
dear, who is he looking at and ogling and taking occasion to whisper
to--but Miss Pounce, if you please! And if I didn’t see the way her
kerchief lace was quivering with the palpitation of her heart, and her
hands shaking as she took down heads for Mrs. Stafford and held them up
for her--well, my name’s not Popple.”
Miss Smithson leant over the sulky coal fire and lifted the saucepan
from the hob to refill her glass. Her own hands shook. That Pamela was
a disgrace and would bring discredit on the whole house of Mirabel! She
felt it in her bones.
“You may say so, dear.” As her friend drank, Polly Popple tendered her
own tumbler for replenishment, murmuring parenthetically, however:
(“Not a drop more, love. I never did hold with stimulants, only you
were so pressing and it is a foggy night, I won’t deny, and a drop of
cordial, a mere medical precaution, so to speak)--you may say so,” the
slighted young lady of the bonnet department took up her theme with
fresh gusto. “And you’d say so a million times more if you had seen
them to-day. For Mr. Jocelyn comes in with my Lady Kilcroney--and oh!
the bold brazenness of it!--there he stands behind my Lady’s chair
and Pounce--La! I declare I’d have been sorry for her if she wasn’t
what she is, the baggage--red and white and not knowing where to put
her eyes with him signalling to her. Yes, and if he did not thrust a
letter into her hand as I went out, you may set me down a liar. And her
stuffing it into her kerchief under my very nose!”
“Don’t, dear, don’t,” moaned Miss Smithson, beating the air with her
bony hand. Then, after a long pause, during which she seemed to be
painfully bringing her virginal mind to confront the awful pictures
just presented to it, she went on acridly: “There’ll be a bust up. When
a girl comes to that _pint_ of disreputableness things is bound to
happen. It can’t go on like this--you mark my words.”
Now, strangely enough, barring the inexactitude of the premise, such a
conclusion had just formed itself in Pamela’s own mind.
It could not go on. Something was bound to happen. She had saved the
life of Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs; and he had demonstrated his gratitude by
promptly falling head over heels in love with her. So far, so good; or
rather, so far, so bad, where a dashing young gentleman of expensive
habits, small principle and remarkable fascination and a young person
of the working classes are concerned. For the mischief of it was she
had fallen in love with him. Poor Pamela, with her high spirit, her
clear brain and her strong courage, to be betrayed by a heart as
vulnerable as any silly girl’s of the lot! She was clear-sighted enough
to know that, stripped of the golden glamour, the path of her romance
led to a very ugly gulf. She despised herself for her weakness. She
had no illusions on the quality of the attachment offered to her by
Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, but, as the short December days dropped away
to Christmas, she found, growing within her, a dangerous new self; a
reckless creature who cried: _The Devil might take the consequences; a
girl was young but once; you found your fate, and had to clasp him or
lose him; the one man you could love, and him only, or go wanting to
your grave!_
“I know it’s death and destruction some time,” said Pamela to herself,
sitting hugging her knees in the neat little chamber in Shepherd
Street, where she lodged with a most respectable widow woman who had
once seen better times, “but isn’t it death and destruction anyhow and
at once if I have to give him up?”
She re-read the letter he had slipped into her hand--the audacious
fellow--a few hours ago at Madame Mirabel’s.
“_It must be yes or no, my darling lovely girl._”
My darling, lovely girl. That was what his eyes were always saying, and
oh! it was sweet!
It must be yes or no! She told herself that if she couldn’t say yes,
it was still more impossible to say no. Backwards and forwards she
struggled with the insolvable problem, till her tallow candle expired
with a great stench, and she was left in darkness and misery. Worn out
with her long day she fell at last asleep, to be wakened by the call of
a cock in Shepherd’s Market. Perhaps it was this farmyard cry which,
weaving into her consciousness, had made her dream so strongly of the
old place at home. When she woke she could hardly believe she was not
in the billowing four-poster in the great attic, with pretty Sister
Susie asleep beside her.
Again the cold, foggy, bleak London morning was rent by the crow of the
cock. Then Pamela knew where she was, and she knew something else, too.
That other self which had got into her must not be listened to on any
account. It must indeed be stamped out of existence with the utmost
promptitude.
Now Pamela was considerably wiser than most young women in her
position. She took a sensible resolution.
“I’ll go to Mrs. Mirabel this very morning,” she decided, “and ask for
a Christmas holiday. She won’t refuse me, being the good-natured soul
she is, and me so useful to her. And once I get home and feel mother’s
arms about me--there! I know I’ll be all right. I needn’t be afraid of
myself any more.”
* * * * *
Pamela Pounce took seat in the Dover coach. She was in a sedate
flutter, an admirably dignified bustle. She knew to the fraction of an
inch the amount of space to which she was entitled, and she possessed
herself of it determinedly. She had, besides her own agreeable person,
divers bandboxes and loose parcels to place, and this she did with
an amiable assurance that put protest to the blush, and set other
passengers’ pretensions in a gross light. When her arrangements were
concluded she heaved a sigh, presented a vague smile, and lay back,
her hands folded, to survey the other travellers at leisure. She was
herself better worth looking at than any of the coach-load, which
contained a foreign couple, one or two of the usual bagmen on the
road to France, a Dover shopkeeper, a farmer’s wife, and an elderly
gentleman of delicate and serious mien, who drew an old calf-bound
volume from a shabby bag, and fixed large gold-mounted spectacles upon
his high, transparent nose with all the air of one prepared with solace
for the journey.
But as he sat exactly opposite Miss Pamela Pounce, his shrewd, cold
eyes wandered ever and anon from the print to fix itself upon her, as
though--which was indeed the fact--he were puzzled in what category
to place her. It was obvious to Sir Edward Cheveral, who, though
impoverished, was himself a gentleman of the first water, that the
ambulent nymph in front of him was not of his class, perfect as was the
fit of her grey riding coat, refined and reposeful as were the hands
in their long grey gloves, tasteful in its coquettishness as was the
grey riding toque, set on chestnut curls, and suitably as these curling
tresses, unpowdered, were smoothed away to be tied with a wide black
ribbon at the back of the long proud throat.
In the first instance, no young person of family with such claims
to distinction as her elaborate travelling gear pointed to, would
be voyaging in the public coach unattended; in the second, in her
quiet ease, and the full yet not immodest assurance of her glance,
the manners of one accustomed to fight the world for herself were
very obvious; in the third, there was an indefinable lack of the
never-to-be-mistaken stamp of breeding.
“For all your clever counterfeit, my good girl,” reflected Sir Everard,
“you haven’t the ring of the guinea gold.”
Yet he reproached himself for the accusation. Here was, after all, no
counterfeit; very good metal of its kind. “Fine yellow brass,” thought
he with a chuckle. “All in a good sense, my dear.”
What was she? From whence and whither speeding? Not an actress. That
fresh, close-textured skin had never known paint on its flower-like
surface. The cheeks were not even rouged; indeed, after the flush of
bustle, the colour of them was now settling back in a curious ivory
pallor, which went well with the ardent hair. No fine lady’s young
woman; every movement had betrayed conscious independence. A shop-girl?
The wife of some small merchant? Nay, ’twas the impersonation of maiden
liberty, and what shop-girl could encompass such a wealth and detail of
modishness?
She caught his gaze upon her, leaned forward and smiled. He had already
noticed that her smile was rather dazzling. He quite blinked to find it
addressed to himself.
“I trust, sir,” said she, “my bandboxes do not incommode you?”
“By no means, madam,” answered he civilly; and moved his long, thin
legs back a further fraction beneath the seat.
“I haven’t been home,” said she, “for four years, and luggage do grow
when one has five young sisters at home, sir, and presents run to hats.”
“To hats?” he repeated, with that interested air that obviates the
audacity of a question.
“Along, sir,” said Miss Pounce, and her smile broadened, “with me being
in the millinery business.”
She drew herself up with a very pretty and, to his mind, becoming
pride.
“A business,” he said, “which I take it, madam, is in a flourishing
condition.”
“You may say so, sir.” Her pride increased. “Since Miss Pamela
Pounce--that’s me!--has been made head of the department, Madame
Mirabel can scarce execute the vast number of orders.”
“Upon my word!” He had removed his spectacles, and was smiling on her
in his turn in a kindly, detached, faintly satiric way. “I trust Madame
What’s-Her-Name recognises her debt to you?”
The head milliner gave her curls ever so slight a toss.
“Well, sir, she wouldn’t like to lose me. She knows I’m worth my weight
in gold to her.”
His glance flickered over her comely proportions. Tall, generously
made, he had called her a nymph. “Goddess would have been the better
appellation,” murmured he.
“Well, ’tis a comfort to an old man like myself to meet one so youthful
to whom work is proving both fruitful and blessed.”
Miss Pamela Pounce didn’t need any old gentleman to commend her. She
knew the value of work, and who better? And if it was blessed to her,
why she took good care that it should be. And, as to content with her
lot--sure, if she hadn’t been, she wasn’t a fool, she’d have picked out
another for herself.
“’Tis some old clergyman,” she thought, and laughed. “He’ll scarce know
what a hat means. Clergyman’s wives and daughters in the country would
give any woman of taste bad dreams for a fortnight. There was Mrs. Prue
Stafford. Had she not still to learn that to wear pink and blue with
such cheeks as she had was positive vulgar? And she married to the
finest of fine gentlemen.”
Sir Everard folded his spectacles, put them carefully into his breast
pocket, and closed his Virgil. Here was an opportunity of studying
a--to him--hitherto quite unknown branch of humanity, after an
unexpectedly pleasant fashion. The girl pleased him. He had called her
brass and humoured the simile. A shining, solid composition of metal
that took a handsome polish and showed itself boldly for what it was.
He liked her for her spring of youth, her frank pride of her trade,
for having no petty nonsense nor poor pretentiousness to pass for what
she was not. He liked her brave independence. There was, he thought, a
better modesty in her quiet certainty than any prudish airs and graces
could have lent her.
“’Twould be a presuming fellow,” he mused, “that would dare to try his
gallant ways with such an one, and if he did, I would back my young
milliner to teach him a lesson.”
She told him how she had, so to speak, graduated in Paris, which
accounted, thought he, for a taste that was scarcely indigenous. And
her home was between Canterbury and Dover, and she, brought up till
seventeen on the farm, the eldest of eleven. Then he knew whence she
had drawn that sap of splendid vigour; a hardy flower of English soil.
And the chief of his many prides being that he was an Englishman, he
was still better content.
She would alight, she told him, at “The Rose” at Canterbury, where she
would lie the night. And father would fetch her in the morning; for
’twas mortal cold across the downs on a winter’s evening, and ’twas a
long drive for the mare even in good weather.
“Bravo,” said he. “I, too, halt at ‘The Rose,’ I am glad to know that
I shall have such good company. May I sit beside you at supper in the
eating-room, my dear young lady?”
“Oh, you’re vastly obliging, sir!” said Pamela Pounce, and a faint pink
crept, like the colour of a shell, into her smooth, pale cheek, for she
had a good eye for a gentleman, and she knew that she was honoured.
Her tongue ran on gaily, and he listened with a gentle air of courtesy
and an interest which in truth was not assumed.
In spite of her sophisticated manner her chatter was very artless. It
was a revelation of a character which had remained curiously untouched
by the world. The busy mart in which she lived had cast none of its
dust upon her soul.
Dear, to be sure, how prodigious joyful they would be at home to see
her back!
“Four years, sir, think on it! I was but a child when I left them,
and now I’m a woman!” ’Twas like, indeed, that none would recognise
her again, should they just happen to meet, accidental like. She half
wished she could have walked in upon them and taken them by surprise.
But then: “Father, sir, would ha’ lost the pleasure of coming to fetch
me,” and her mother might have been vexed. “Mother’s very house-proud,
sir. She’d want to have things pretty for me, and bake cakes and that.”
And they’d all be looking out for her on the house step. Just to think
of their dear faces fair turned her silly. She blinked away a tear and
gave her bright smile. But as he smiled back it was with a certain
melancholy. The farmer with his eleven children--poor, struggling
fellow!--the hardworked mother, the good, industrious child, returning
home with her hands full of gifts, blessed in her honest toil for them,
were they not all about to taste joys from which he had deliberately
cut himself off in his fastidious isolation? He had scarcely ever
regretted his chosen solitariness. His beautiful old shabby home, set
in the loneliness of the snowy park, the wood fire in the library in
the company of a favourite book, the ministrations of a couple of
well-drilled servants, an austere silence, a harmonious communion
with the high spirits of the dead; that was the Christmas to which
he himself had looked forward with complacency. Now he wondered; his
heart contracted with a most unusual sense of pain; had he lost the
best in life? If he had had a daughter by his shoulder with a white,
pure forehead such as this girl had, and had seen her eyes fire with
love, heard her voice tremble at the thought of meeting him, her old
father, would not that have brought him a sweetness finer than the most
exquisite page in Virgil?
The day, which had opened blue and gold, with a high wind and clear
sunshine, began to gather threatening clouds by the time the posting
station was reached; and the “Dover High-Flyer” plunged away again into
a snow squall with all the speed of its fresh horses.
“We are like to have a seasonable Christmas,” quoth Sir Everard, and
was pleased to note that, while the rest of the company grumbled and
complained, the fine specimen of young womanhood opposite to him
produced a warm shawl from a bundle, tucked it round her knees, and
offered him the other end, declaring, with a smile, that she was as
warm as a toast, and that she did love a white Christmas.
They all dined at Rochester, and had hot punch, of which Miss Pounce
partook with enthusiasm, but in very discreet measure.
Conversation flagged on this, their last, stage. The snoring of the
foreign pair who, having tied their heads up in terrible coloured
handkerchiefs, leant against each other and gave themselves up to
repose with much the same animal abandonment as that with which they
had gobbled the beef-steak pie and gulped the hot rum of the “Bull
Inn” at Rochester; the sighing fidgets of the farmer’s wife, and the
grunts of her neighbour, the Dover tradesman, each time they jarred him
from a fitful somnolence, alone broke the inner silence. Without, the
multiple rhythm of the horses hoofs and the varying answer of the road
to the wheels--now the scrunch of cobble stones, now the slushy whisper
of the snow-filled rut, now the whirring ring of a well-metalled
stretch--formed a monotonous whole which lulled to silence those who
could not sleep.
Sir Everard saw, by the shifting flicker of the lamps, how pensiveness
gathered on the bright face opposite him. Once or twice the girl raised
a finger to the corner of her eyelid as if to press back a rising tear;
sighs lifted her bosom.
“Ah!” thought the old philosopher, “the goddess of modes is not so
fancy free as I had thought. Here, truly, are all the signs of a
gentle love tale. Perhaps the young man in the counting-house, or some
sprightly haberdasher, who sees Miss pass to her work, and would fain
capture for his own counter a face so fair and charming.”
Sir Everard felt very old and stiff by the time Canterbury was reached,
and half regretted his suggestion to his travelling companion, to
continue their comradeship at supper. He thought it might have better
become his years and aching bones to retire into a feather bed with a
basin of gruel. Far indeed was he from guessing the singular emotions
into which his old age was destined to be plunged that evening.
* * * * *
A fine room with a four-poster, no less indeed than the chamber which
went by the name of “Great Queen Anne,” this was what the landlord
proposed to allot to Sir Everard. A chimney you couldn’t beat in the
kingdom for drawing, mine host averred, and a fire there this minute;
agreeable to Sir Everard’s obliging communication. And what could he do
for Miss?
Sir Everard was a little shocked to hear Miss Pounce enter upon a brisk
bargain for an attic, and hesitatingly began a courteous offer of his
own apartment, when she interrupted him with the valiant good sense
which he had already had cause to admire in her.
“Not at all, sir! ’Tis what suits my station--so long as the sheets
are clean and there’s a good bolt to the door; you’ll promise me that,
Mr. Landlord? And if you can’t spare a warming pan, sure a hot brick
will do vastly well. And now, sir, give me time to see my bandboxes in
safety, and I’m for supper.”
Even as she spoke she started. Her eye became fixed, her lips fell open
upon a gasp of amazement. The healthy white bloom of her countenance
turned to deathly pallor, and then a tide of blood rushed crimsoning to
her forehead. Beholding this evidence of strong emotion, it scarcely
needed the sight that met Sir Everard’s glance as he followed the
direction of her eyes to confirm his instant conclusion. The young man,
of course! Stay, the young man is a gentleman--poor nymph! Here then
were joy, and fear, confusion, the warning of conscience, and artless
passion, all mixed together.
The young gentleman advanced; a fine buck, of the very kind, thought
Sir Everard, who took an instantaneous dislike to him, to turn the
head of any girl beneath him in station, whom he might honour with his
conquering regard. There was a black and white handsomeness about his
chiselled countenance; all the powder in the world could not disguise
that those jet eyebrows were matched with a raven spring of hair.
With a smile, a dilation of nostrils, a swagger of broad shoulders,
a leisurely step of high-booted legs, he came forward out of the
tap-room. No surprise on his side: my gentleman had planned the meeting.
“La, Mr. Bellairs!” Pamela Pounce exclaimed, and her voice trembled.
Then she rallied, and strove to pursue with lightness, “who ever would
have thought of seeing you here?”
He took her hand and lifted it to his lips with an exaggerated
courtesy, as if he mocked himself for it the while.
“Why, did I not guess rightly, my dear, you would be spending a lonely
evening here on your way home?”
“Oh, Mr. Bellairs!”
He kept her hand in his, to draw her apart. Sir Everard, gazing at
them, his chin sunk in his muffler, with severe, sad eyes, saw how
she swayed towards him, as she went into the window recess, as if
her very soul floated on the music of his voice. He watched them
whisper ardently together, and then she went by him like a tornado,
picking up her bandboxes as she passed, quite oblivious of his
presence, or of anything, apparently, save the young rascal, so Sir
Everard apostrophised him, who stood gazing after her with the same
insufferable smile; the smile of the easy conqueror.
Sir Everard never had had a high opinion of women. Life had given him
no reason to indulge in illusions. But now all his condemnation was for
the man. The strong, self-reliant creature who had faced him all those
weary hours with such unalterable good humour, such a candid outlook,
such a pleasant acceptance of her own position that it was the next
thing to high breeding, what was this Captain Lothario planning to make
of her? And how, since he had found her already so hard to win that he
must travel to Canterbury for the purpose, did she now thus readily
yield herself to his plucking hand? Ay, the villain had struck at some
peril point in the life of her soul. The child was tired after her long
journey; tired too, perhaps, by the mental conflict from which her
integrity had hitherto emerged triumphant. A sudden assault had found
the fortress unprepared. ’Twas the old story!
Sir Everard went wearily to his room. The thought of the feather bed
and the gruel, of a selfish withdrawal from further association with
what was like to end in sordid tragedy tempted him perhaps, but he did
not yield to it. The girl’s smile haunted him. It had been so brightly
innocent; and he was haunted, too, by the last memory of her face,
stricken with astonishment, quivering with joy. However she might fall,
it would not be through light-mindedness. The folly, the misery, was
deep rooted in her poor heart.
He made a careful toilet, and went down the slippery oak stairs,
leaning on his gold-headed cane, looking a very great personage
indeed, delicately austere and nobly haughty.
Alas! Pamela never so much as lifted her radiant head when he came
into the eating-room. She was seated beside her gallant at the end of
the table in close conversation--that whispered, blushing, laughing,
sighing conversation of lovers--and if the roof had fallen over them,
Sir Everard thought, the two would scarce have noticed it, so absorbed
were they in each other.
The young man had ordered champagne, and the girl’s glass was filled,
but the bubbling wine had barely been touched. Another intoxication,
more deadly and more sure, was working through her veins. The old
philosopher, seeing her condition, resigned for the moment all thought
of interference, and sat down to his bottle of claret and bowl of broth.
Hardly, however, had he broken his hot roll, than the room was invaded
by fresh arrivals; a young woman, wrapped in furs, conducted by a
gentleman who had not removed his travelling coat, and kept his hat
pressed on his brows; a personage who entered with an intolerable
arrogance as if the place belonged to him, who ordered champagne and
supper for the lady, and fresh horses for his coach, in a voice which
rang like the crack of a whip. He could not wait; the servers must
bustle. A guinea each to the ostlers if they harnessed within ten
minutes. “And, hark ye, sirrah, a bottle of your best Sillery, and----”
“Surely I know this autocratic fellow,” thought Sir Everard, and as the
traveller drew his companion with an imperative sweep of his arm about
her, to the end of the table opposite to that at which Mr. Bellairs and
his Dulcinea were seated. “My Lord Sanquhar!” cried Sir Everard, “by
all that’s outrageous! And who in the name of pity is his victim now?”
That the two were lovers, of a stage considerably more advanced than
the poor milliner and her Beau, was obvious to the onlooker, and as
my Lord Sanquhar now tore his hat from his head, to dash the snow that
covered it into the fire, where it hissed and spluttered like a curse,
the young woman who accompanied him let herself fall on to the settle
and turned a look of darkling challenge, of brooding suspicion, into
the room.
She was clad in the most sumptuous garments. There was a bloom of royal
purple against the tawny clouds of her sables. There was a fire of ruby
at her throat, caught up and repeated at each ear, as if deep gouts of
a lover’s blood had taken to themselves flame for her adorning. But
the countenance she turned upon the room was, Sir Everard thought,
so striking, that all this splendour seemed its natural attribute;
striking with a Spanish beauty, a richness and depth of colour, with
flashing orbs, high nostrils, and scarlet lips.
“Good Heavens!” Sir Everard mused, “where has he picked the jade?
Victim? Nay, ’tis the kind that keeps a knife in her stocking and will
whip it out and under your rib, and make an end of you with less ado
than another will shed a tear. My Lord Sanquhar will have to look out
for himself. Illicit love is a dangerously charged atmosphere in which
to handle live gunpowder.”
The “Dover High-Flyer” had only dropped two of its passengers at “The
Rose,” and the landlord was free to attend to his imperious guest.
He himself served my Lord Sanquhar’s champagne, and with bent back
received his “pishs” and “pshaws” on the dearth of proper entertainment
for the lady. She wanted fresh fruit, and there was none. She asked for
chocolate, and pettishly refused to touch it. One sniff was enough. All
her desires and denials she communicated in a guttural undertone to her
companion, who translated them into oaths.
Sir Everard, who had had but a poor appetite, was now, his broth bowl
pushed on one side, dipping bits of roll into his wine after a foreign
fashion, and watching the while the two sets of lovers at the further
end of the room. He noticed, not without some satisfaction, that
constraint had fallen upon the ardent Bellairs and his fair milliner.
The colour on the young man’s face fluctuated. He bit his lip and shot
doubtful looks of question from the blatant couple to the downcast
countenance of his companion, who had grown very pale, scarcely spoke,
and seemed now and again as if she was struggling with tears.
A clatter of hoofs, the clang of a bell, and a shout from the door
announced another guest, a solitary horseman, it seemed. The landlord,
who was just entering the room with a plate of dried plums in the hope
of tempting the appetite of the capricious lady--he had scented my
Lord’s quality with unerring nose--here thrust the dish into the hands
of a waiter and turned back to receive the newcomer. He had left the
door open behind him and all could hear the passionate explosion of a
hoarse voice in the hall.
The dark little lady on the settle by the fire sprang to her feet, and
stood, tense. Her companion gave a swift frowning look of surprise. Sir
Everard, gazing upon her also, drew a quick breath. “By the immortal
gods,” said he to himself, “the drama is coming swifter than one could
have imagined.” And, indeed, what the ancient quiet inn was destined to
hold for the next ten minutes in the way of human passion, conflict,
and tragedy, might happily be never as much as guessed at in the
lifetime of most men.
The landlord, his wig awry, his features discomposed, puffing and
blustering, was vainly endeavouring to prevent the ingress of a
small thick-set man, who though wrapped in a cloak and carrying some
considerable burden, which he kept hidden under its folds, contrived by
a single violent thrust of his shoulder, to send him spinning out of
the way. The intruder advanced then at a headlong run, brought himself
up short, flung back his cloak, and with the same gesture his hat, and
stood revealed, swarthy, grizzled, livid, panting through dilated
nostrils, glaring upon the woman by the settle. There was a great
flare of colour on his broad chest, where, wound in a scarlet shawl, a
little child of about two, with a head of curls of that dark copper hue
destined to turn black with years, lay placidly asleep; the curve of a
plump apricot cheek was all that was visible of its face.
“Good heavens,” said Sir Everard, and at the sight of the sleeping
innocence, something in his old heart began to lament.
There was a moment’s extraordinary silence, broken only by the
breathing of the man with the child, which hissed through his set teeth
like the strokes of a saw. Then my Lord Sanquhar laughed.
The man leaped as if he had been struck. A torrent of words broke from
him--guttural, fierce, intolerably anguished. Sir Everard knew a little
Spanish.
The unfortunate was pleading: “Come back, come back! I will forgive
all. Come back, Dolores, you cannot leave us. You cannot leave the
little one. Come back in the name of God, in the name of His Holy
Mother. _Madre di Dios_, look at her! You cannot leave that! Ah!
unhappy one, you want gold and jewels. Was not our love your treasure?
Is not our child a pearl? Look at her!”
In singular contrast to the unrestrained violence of his outburst, the
manner in which he held out the child was pure tender. The little one
woke, stared about her with devouring black eyes of amazement, caught
sight of the standing woman’s face and cried, joyfully beating the air
with minute dusky hands, “Mamma, mamma!”
At this a sob burst from the unhappy father, so deep and tortured it
was as if it rent him.
“Dolores, our little girl, she calls you ‘Mamma, mamma!’ Call again my
angel! ‘Mamma, mamma!’”
He went down on his knees and held out the babe, and as he did so she
wailed.
The mother, meanwhile, stood, insolent lids half closed, red lips
thrust forward, tapping the floor with impatient foot, the embodiment
of cruel disdain.
At her child’s cry she stuffed her fingers into her ears with savage
gesture, stamped, and flung a raging glance at her lover as one who
said, “How long am I to endure this?”
He answered it by the movement of a beckoning finger, which brought her
to his side. Then he cast a gold piece on the table, clapped his hat on
his head, and together they moved towards the door.
“Ah! By the blessed saints!”
The Spaniard in a bound was before them. He shook the screaming infant
in their faces as if it had been a weapon.
“I swear this shall not be. I swear that I shall kill you and your
paramour and the child and myself rather than that this shall be.”
It was here that Pamela caught the little one from him. He was perhaps
too far gone in passion to notice the action; perhaps he was glad to
have his hands free for his fierce purpose--anyhow, he relaxed his
hold. And the girl, clasping the baby in her arms, hushing it and
soothing it, ran with it to the further end of the room. Sir Everard
had also risen and Bellairs had started forward. But it would have
been as easy to baulk a wild cat of its leap as to arrest the betrayed
husband in his spring upon his betrayer.
No one ever quite knew how it happened. There was the flash of a knife,
an oath, and my Lord Sanquhar’s “Damn you, you would have it!” and the
explosion of a pistol.
The Spaniard fell without a groan, right across the doorway. Sir
Everard and Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs both knew that he was a dead man
before he touched the ground.
“You are witness all,” said my Lord Sanquhar, “that this was in
self-defence.”
The woman cast a backward glance into the room. Her rich bloom had
faded. She was white, but with a palpitating whiteness as of fire at
its intensest, and the gaze of her great eyes was as fire too. Almost
red they shone, repeating the blood fires of the rubies. Then she gave
herself to Lord Sanquhar’s embrace, and together they rushed out into
the night.
“Odds my life!” said Mr. Bellairs, looking up at Sir Everard. He had
flung himself on one knee beside the stricken man, and was going
through the vain parade of seeking for a pulse which he knew no longer
beat. “Did you see that, sir?”
“He lifted her across her husband’s very body! He lifted her right
across the body?” said Sir Everard, in a hushed voice of disgust.
“Lifted her? Sir, she jumped!”
Pamela kept the child’s face turned against her breast with a loving
hand, and as she rocked and soothed, she herself wept as if her heart
would break.
Through the doors, cast open to the night, the roar of a new snow wind
hurtled in upon them. There followed a sudden clamour of voices, as
the host endeavoured to arrest my lord’s departure and was borne down,
well-nigh annihilated, from his path; the crackling shout of my lord’s
orders; the plunge and clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. It seemed as if
the blood-guilty pair had gone on the wings of the storm, and that the
very elements cried after them as they went.
* * * * *
Sir Everard, as the most responsible witness, assisted the landlord in
the preliminary investigation of magistrate and constable. He took a
certain grim pleasure in furnishing Lord Sanquhar’s name, and trusted
the nobleman might be summoned to answer for his action. Even if
acquittal were a foregone conclusion, to a reputation already tarnished
this incident was not likely to add a lustre. By the quality of the
murdered man’s clothes, the massive gold of his watch-chain, the signet
ring on his dead hand, it was judged that he was a merchant of the
better class, and that the unfortunate incident would probably make
some stir among his compatriots.
The cold and stiffening body which had been so short a while before
pulsing with agony and passion, was laid in the harness-room of the
inn, covered with a white sheet. Scarce ten yards away the grey horse
that had borne its rider on the wild race to death was placidly
munching its corn, the sweat not yet dry on its flanks.
When Sir Everard returned to the eating-room he found Pamela still on
the settle, the child asleep on her lap. On the board beside her a
half-finished bowl of bread and milk showed that she had been occupied
with the worse than motherless babe, while he had attended to the last
concerns of its doomed father. On the other side of the hearth, one
elbow propped on the high mantelshelf, stood Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs. The
old man’s entrance had evidently interrupted a conversation between the
two lovers, of an interest so vital that both the faces now turned upon
him were stamped with fierce emotion.
Sir Everard removed a chair from before the table and sat down on it
facing the fire, and for a space no one spoke.
Pamela had cast the scarlet shawl across one shoulder so as to shade
the child’s head from the light. Her hand patted and her knees swayed,
rocking the infant sleeper.
“Poor little creature!” said Sir Everard at last.
The girl gave him a quick glance.
“I’ll keep her to-night. I’ve told the landlord I would, and I’d keep
her always if I could.”
“’Tis a generous thought,” said the old gentleman, with a faint smile
for the magnanimous impractibilities of youth, and as he smiled he was
aware that Mr. Bellairs snapped his fingers and jerked his foot on the
edge of irritable outburst.
Suddenly Pamela began to sob quickly under her breath; turned her head
aside so that her tears should not fall on the little placid face.
“I’ve been a wicked girl! A wicked girl!”
“Hush!” cried Mr. Bellairs, and flung out his hand.
“No, sir; I won’t be silent!”
“But, good God, my dear, need you drag this stranger into our intimate
concerns?”
“He’s no stranger to me, Mr. Bellairs. We travelled down in the coach
together, and he couldn’t have been more civil to me if I’d been a
lady born; no, nor kinder if he’d been my father. Oh, sir, I don’t
know your name, but I know by the pitying way you looked at me that
you understood what dreadful danger I was in and how--” again she
sobbed--“how ready I was to yield to it! He wanted me to go to Paris
with him. He did, indeed! He wanted his love to be my all-in-all, and
nothing else was to matter. I’ve been a wicked girl! I listened to him.
I never would listen to him before--not when he spoke like that--but
to-night I did. Heaven forgive me! What took me?”
“Confound!” said Mr. Bellairs.
He wheeled away from the sight of her weeping, clutched the mantelpiece
with both hands, and dropped his head on them.
“Well, ’tis all over now.”
Sir Everard spoke uneasily. This openness upon a subject so delicate
was painful to him, but Pamela had the yearning to relieve herself by
confession.
“Oh, sir, how could I do it? I don’t know myself. I swear when I look
back ’tis as if I had not been myself at all. Something came into
me--so rash, so desperate! ’Twas as if nothing mattered but just his
love, our love. And then--then--when those two came in I saw our sin as
it was. Oh, heavens! Oh, Heaven forgive me! Murder and every evil was
there. Would I not have been just as cruel, done just as horrid murder?
When the truth came out, would my father and mother and my own dear
loves at home, waiting for me so fond and so trusting, and so proud
of their poor, silly Pam, ever have held up their heads again? Oh,
base, base! I would have murdered them for my pleasure. And that love,
what was it? The thing that those two looked at each other, something
vile, something that brought contamination even just to see go between
them. Did he and I look at each other like that? It turned me sick even
to think on, even before--before that poor, poor man came in! Heaven
forgive me! Heaven strike those two in their bad hearts! Oh, sir, did
you look at her when she stared back upon us, that woman? I suppose
there was beauty in her face; I suppose he who went with her thought
her handsome airs worth the cruelty and the blood and the crime on
his soul. But to me she was ugly, all ugly, with the ugliness of her
sin----”
She broke off, bit her quivering lip, and stared fixedly before her;
an expression of horror on her countenance as if she still beheld the
ugliness of which she spoke.
Mr. Bellairs straightened himself and snapped his fingers again.
“Tall talk, my dear,” he began; and then broke off, dropped his eyes
under Sir Everard’s stern gaze, and stood abashed. Then: “Perhaps
you’re right,” he said in an altered, strangled voice; and dashed from
the room as if driven.
Pamela started, glanced after him, and then wiped her wet cheeks with
the end of the baby’s shawl.
“Let him go,” she said.
“You’re a brave girl.”
“Oh no, sir! Only so grateful, so wonderfully saved, so ashamed. Oh,
this little creature against my breast--must I not feel it--think of
it--if I had had my foolish way I should never have been worthy to hold
such a lovely, lovely little dear in my arms again.”
* * * * *
Sir Everard insisted on lighting Pamela to her attic chamber. She went
up before him with a step so elastic, in spite of the burden of the
child in her arms, that she had to wait for him on every landing; which
she did with a return of her bright amiability and even a flicker of
its former radiance in her smile. Each time she halted she rocked the
baby, swaying from foot to foot, murmuring under her breath a crooning
song which the old man thought very sweet; so sweet indeed, that, with
a swing of memory’s pendulum it brought him back to his own childhood’s
days and the tender face of his mother, long dead--a mother who had
never been old like him.
On the threshold of her poor room they parted. She spared him her right
hand for a second from its motherly caressing and patting of the child
which she bore with such ease on her left arm. He bowed over it as if
it had been his queen’s.
When he went down to the flaming hearth which justified the landlord’s
boast, he sat long by it.
He, who had hitherto lived apart in a world of books, found his mind
obsessed by the thought of the frightful passions of humanity as they
had this night played themselves out before him.
The whole scene reproduced itself in his tired brain with the colours
of life; Lord Sanquhar’s sardonic, pale, haughty face, the rich
vividness, the unblessed allurement, the cruel beauty of the unfaithful
wife; the Spaniard’s agony; the irredeemable tragedy of that picture of
the father with the child; then the dead face.
“Heaven strike their bad hearts!” had cried Pamela in her honest
revulsion. Could God ever forgive those who had sent forth the soul of
their victim so charged with fury and despair that even death could
bring no peace to his brow?
And then he thought of Pamela’s face as he had last seen it--pale,
tear-stained, but with the old luminous innocence. And, after all, he
thought, there had come good out of the evil.
“The providence of God is over us all,” he thought with gratitude,
as he rose stiffly to seek that feather bed, where there was small
likelihood of sleep that night for him.
He heard the call of a coach horn beyond, in the night, and immediately
afterwards the mighty clatter of the four sets of hoofs and the rush of
the wheels in the streets. He went to his window, opened it, and looked
out.
The up coach from Dover, pausing only to drop a single passenger. Stay,
to take up a passenger, too. Sir Everard recognised the swing of the
shoulders, the tall, alert frame, the indefinable swagger, even though
muffled in the many-caped travelling coat.
Young Bellairs was not going to Paris with a fair companion!
“Thank Heaven!” said Sir Everard.