I UNDERGO AN ORDEAL; I PLAY WITH A FIRE.
I SUPPOSE something must have altered in my face in my effort to
conceal the strange emotion that I suffered. For a soft look crept in
his eye, and he said in that rich voice that had impressed me in the
stable on the first night of our acquaintancy,
“My Lady Barbara, I have not hurt you? If once I pained my benefactress
I could ne’er forgive myself.”
“N-n-no,” I stammered, for to be quite plain his tenderness played a
greater havoc with me than his strength.
“I believe I have,” he says, and a tear was in his voice, and such a
deal of heaven in his look that I could not meet it, and had to gaze
upon the ground.
“N-n-no,” I stammered, and hated him for being a beggar and a fugitive,
and Mrs. Polly Emblem for being in the room. And not less did I hate
myself for being weak enough to forget my training and my sphere of
life.
“Captain,” I sighed, in the voice of spring among the trees, “destroy
that blue document of treason and dishonour, and all shall be forgiven
you.”
“My faith, I will destroy it!” he cried, with a fire smouldering in
him, “and oh, my dearest lady, how good you are! How magnanimous!”
Our whimsical rehearsal of a play had carried us both into a stern
earnestness it seemed; but I being the better schooled in deception and
the social arts, was the quicker of recovery.
“Magnanimous!” I flashed out at him, and curled my lip in scorn, “you
impudent young fool! Do you suppose that anything a beggar with bare
elbows, whose mansion is the pillory, and whose carriage is the cart,
can contrive to do or say will touch in any way my Lady Barbara, the
toast of the Prince of Wales? You presumptuous rogue, to hear you talk
one would think you at least a lord-in-waiting, or a minister of the
Crown.”
“Then you are not hurt?” he did persist.
“Hurt,” I laughed, “if I am bitten with a fly, I am not hurt, though
perchance I am annoyed.”
“You are annoyed, madam?” he persisted still.
“You can call it annoyance, you little fly,” I said.
“Then let me crave your pardon for it,” he implored, and the humility
was so delightful he did it with that sure I could not say which was
the most appealing--his meekness, his softness, or his insolence. By
good luck the supper bell here intervened between us and our feelings;
a few final touches from the maid, and we were tripping down the
staircase to the Ordeal in the dining-room. The chamber was bright-lit;
the dowager was already there, and the Earl, my papa, was momentarily
expected. Let me confess to being feverish, and in a twitter of the
nerves. One mishap, and all was over. But Miss Prue was the perfection
of address; withstood the glare of the candelabra without a twitch;
talked to the dowager with the confidential light and charming
silliness of a girl; carried herself with the queenly ease of one born
to overcome; played her fan often and superbly; laughed archly with her
shoulders in the female way, either “doated” on a thing, else thought
it “horrid,” and slightly patronised my aunt and me as one of equal
breed, but as superior in her youth, and infinitely more so in her
charms.
The vivacious creature was retailing to the dowager in her engaging
fashion the foibles and private history, now for the first time
published, of that “Old cat the Marchioness of Meux,” when my foolish
heart sprang in my throat, for the door was softly opened, and the
Earl, my papa, smirkingly minced in.
I plunged headlong into the Ordeal. Sweeping up on the instant to
his lordship, I saluted him with a great appearance of delight and
eagerness, and sang out then:
“So happy that you’ve come, my lord; I am dying to present you to
my dear Prue Canticle, the very Prue I love so, the dearest Prue in
Christendom!”
His old lordship could not get a word in ere I had led him to the
lovely minx who was entertaining my aunt the dowager in such a shocking
manner. Mon père put on his glasses with the most killing simper,
quizzed the handsome dog with high-bred insolence, and said:
“My _dear_ being, how _do_ you do?”
The old gentleman bowed till you might have heard his gout creak.
Miss Prue flashed her eyes straight through him, and replied in a tone
whose affectation was by no means inferior to his own:
“My lord of Long Acre! My emotion overcomes me.”
Mine overcame me also. For she dared to whip out a dainty handkerchief
of cambric with the device “B. G.” woven into a monogram upon one
corner. This she flirted and coquetted a quarter of a minute, but
contrived to play her saucy eyes behind it in such a style as implied
that she was not one half so youthful as she looked. His lordship was
delighted, but the dowager grew as wintry as her locks, and endeavoured
to arrange our places at the table in such a way that Miss Prue and he
should be severely kept apart. My papa, however, was much too early
a sort of bird to be out-manœuvred thus. Being a trifle deaf,
’twas not unnatural that he should utterly ignore the dispositions of
my aunt. The inference was, of course, that he had not heard them.
Therefore Miss Prue and he were somehow seated side by side, and
conducted an amiable conversation, not in the mere language of the
lips alone, but in the more ardent one of glances. The waistcoat of his
lordship grew sigh-deranged, and mighty soon. Every time she fretted up
her eyebrows, he paid her a compliment upon ’em; sometimes she repaid
him with a repartee, sometimes provoked him to another by a pouting
dimple in her mouth. The glass went often to his lips, and the lady was
astute enough to encourage his industry without assisting in it.
“Barbara,” my aunt whispered, with a severity that made me shiver, “I
am afraid your Miss Canticle is a minx.”
“My dear aunt!” says I.
“Barbara, I said a minx,” the dowager resumed. “The way she hath set
her cap at his lordship is disgraceful.”
“Set her cap?” I repeated, in deep perplexity, “my dear aunt, I do not
know the phrase, and at least it must be provincial.”
“Coquets, then,” says my aunt, more sternly than before.
“Coquets?” says I; “really, aunt, I am at a loss.”
“Barbara, she is flirtish,” pursued my aunt, who, as I have said
already, was a dreadful engine when once she was set in motion.
“That means, my dearest aunt,” says I, with a simplicity wonderful to
hear, “one who attempts to trifle with the affections of another, does
it not?”
At the word affections I blushed divinely. Yes, I know I did, for
I was seated opposite a mirror (which I generally am) and noted the
coming of the modest roses with an infinity of pride.
“Precisely, Barbara,” says my aunt.
“Then I am sure, dear aunt,” says I, with some enjoyment, “that you are
under a misapprehension in this matter. How possibly could I admit a
person of that character so near my bosom?”
“But surely,” says my aunt, a very stickler for the mode, “a low-necked
gown at supper-time should be _de rigeur_. The one your Miss Canticle
is wearing is decidedly _de trop_.”
“’Tis not altogether _décolleté_,” says I, with a reflective air, “but
then, you see, dear aunt, her physician says her chest’s so delicate
that at informal gatherings or in the country it behoves her to protect
it.”
“Dear me,” says my aunt, “I should not have thought it now. She doth
not appear a particularly delicate or fragile kind of flower.”
“Appearances are deceptive,” says I, with a solemnity that padded out
my wisdom.
“They are,” says my aunt. There was a significance hidden somewhere in
her voice that made me quail. “For I do observe that there is a special
robustness about her appetite that would not suggest much delicacy in
anything.”
I shot a look across at the wretched Prue, and saw quite enough to
justify my aunt. The manner in which that young person was partaking of
a woodcock at the same instant as she was leading on my lord was most
astounding. Before or since I have not seen a girl eat like it.
“Oh, I am a cruel, horrid thing,” says I to my aunt. “To think of that
poor child having come a journey, and being several hours in this
house, and I not to have offered her a morsel till just now.”
“Barbara,” says my aunt to me, and sweetly, “in your absence from my
tea-table I entreated her to partake of muffins and bohea. She had
the goodness to reply that she had no partiality for sops, as she was
neither a baby nor a bird.”
“La, that’s my Prue,” cries I, laughing out aloud; “she is the dearest,
originalest creature. Oh, the quaint girl! sure I can see her saying
that with a merry twinkling sort of look!”
“Similar to the one she is now displaying to his lordship,” says my
aunt.
“Well, scarcely,” I replied, “her expression would be rather drier
and more contained than that. And oh, dear aunt! I had better tell
you that this madcap, Prue, takes a particular delight in surprising
and disconcerting those who are insufficiently acquainted with her
character.”
“She very well succeeds,” my aunt said. “Yet, my dear, I must confess
that you astound me. Her letters are perfect piety; they paint her as
the soul of modesty, and quite marvellously correct. I should have
judged her to be a highly genteel person.”
“On the strength of her epistles, I should also,” I replied, “but then
I know my wicked, roguish Prue. That reverential tone she uses in them
is another of her freaks, you see, dear aunt.”
Alas! this straw was altogether too much for the poor indignant camel.
“Barbara!” says my aunt, “I desire you to forego in the future all
intercourse with this--this person.”
Meantime Miss Prue and my papa, the Earl, were becoming perilously
intimate. There was a stream of brimming wine-pledging wit that flowed
between them, very entrancing and alluring, to a favourite toast, who
sat outside the pale of it talking to her aunt.
What a pair they made, this old beau masquerading as a young one, and
this nameless, tattered beggar masquerading as his mistress! And life
or death was the stake for which he, poor lad, played. I could not bear
to think of his position. It turned my bosom cold. But how consummate
was his game! With what genius and spirit did he conduct it! And I
think I never saw such courage, for it must have called for a higher
fortitude than any of the battlefield. Looking on this pair in the
wonder of my heart I was far too fired in the brave lad’s cause, not
to mention the urgence of my own, to once forget the Captain fretting
solitary in his bonds. Therefore I remembered that my hour for action
was at hand.
After the meal, I waited till this trio were seated at the cards; then
having lent Prue a sufficiency of money to enable her to play, I told
my aunt that I proposed to go and cheer the Captain in his solitude.
The unhappy wretch was greatly as I had left him. He was perhaps a
little gaunter from his fretfulness. But his knee was not easier, nor
his heart more peaceable.
“Captain,” I announced myself as sweetly as could be, “I know you to be
mortal dull in this extremity. Therefore if I can I am come to cheer
you in it. And I have a deal of compassion for you.”
The Captain could not quite conceal his look of pleasure, and, reading
it, I took the tone and speech I had used to be exceeding pat to the
occasion.
“How good of you, my Lady Barbara,” says he, with a gratefulness I knew
to be sincere, “to think of me in my affliction; nay, how good of you
to think of me at all.”
At first I was confounded that a man so shrewd and piercing in his
mind as Captain Grantley, should be so disarmed with my simple airs,
and be so unsuspicious of a motive for them. But then a lover is very
jealous of himself, and if the object of his adoration tells him to his
face that she sometimes thinks about him, and proves the same by her
presence at his side, he is so anxious to believe her that he the more
readily persuades himself of her veracity. Besides, Beauty makes the
wise man credulous. Sure it is hard to disbelieve her, else her amorous
fibs and her sighing insincerities ne’er would have slain so many of
the great figures of the histories. Even the Antonys must meet their
Cleopatras.
“Ah, dear lady,” says the Captain, with a sparkle in his manly features
that became them very well, “the prospect that your presence brings
makes me almost happy in my accident. A bitter wintry night, a rosy
fire, a bottle of wine, and a lively conversation with one whose beauty
is the rival of her mind--surely this is the heart’s desire?”
He prayed me to seat myself beside the blaze. I did this, for I
thought the place was favourable, as by the position of the lamp it
threw my figure in the shade. Do not think I feared to compete with
the braveries of light; but I hold that the tints of it should be
harmonised with the tones and feelings of the players. In the theatre
they are careful not to burn blue fire at a love scene. And to-night as
I was not to attempt a victorious entry of the Captain’s heart with a
pageant of smiles, and a flashing magnificence of eye, the glow must be
tempered to the mood of tenderness, and sympathy, and mild solicitude.
I was deeply anxious for his leg. I could never blame myself too much.
Should I ever be forgiven it?
I was forgiven now, he told me, and when I asked him in what manner,
his answer was:
“All my animosity is slain by your sweet, kind sighs, my dearest lady.”
Here was a sufficient gallantry, I thought, and noted, too, that a
special warmth was come into his tone. There was a bottle and a glass
against his elbow, and he drained a bumper to my eyes, while I sat
listening to the whistling of the wind.
’Twas a wild night of the late November. You could hear the branches
rock before the gale: the cold groanings of the blast among the crazy
walls and chimneys, its shriekings in the open park, the sounds
that fluttered strangely from the ivy, and, most of all, the sudden
comings of the rain and hail as it crashed upon the window-panes. It
stirred the fire up and made the flames leap, and contrived, as I bent
across the hearth to do this, to restore a detached curl to its right
condition on my brow.
“A stormy night and wintry”--I shivered as I spoke--“and that poor lad,
that fugitive, hiding in it for his life.”
While I uttered this, I could so clearly see the shaking trees and
the wind-swept wolds cuddling together in the cold that I think the
wildness of the elements was echoed in my voice.
“Madam,” says the Captain, turning on me a solemn, weary face that was
full of instant sadness, “you and I do ill to be together. Madam, I
have my duty to perform, and as that duty is cruelly opposed to your
desires and must prejudice your peace, Madam, I ask you how I can
possibly perform it if you sit there so friendly in the kindness of
your heart? Madam, you forget that when the best is said of me I am but
a man, and, maybe, not a very strong one, and that so long as you sit
there by the fire to cheer me in my pain, I am in the presence of a
divinity whose look it is the law.”
“You wish me to withdraw, sir?” says I, regretfully and meekly; and,
though I was never better complimented, I pretended to be hurt.
Therefore, I rose suddenly upon his words.
“The King’s commission would be safer,” he replied.
“I know it would,” says I, “and by that token am I going to stay. A
rebel, Captain, snaps her fingers at the King.”
Thereupon I as suddenly sat down. But none the less I admitted the
prudence and foresight of the Captain; also thought his situation was a
pretty one. He knew the weakness of his heart and the imminence of his
duty, and that in my humble person he had found a most determined enemy
to both. He was in my toils, indeed, nor must I loose a single bond ere
the pressure had been applied, and his will had been bent to my devices.
Therefore, with gentle smiles I played him. Tender was my interest in
his mental state and physical; deplored as deeply his splintered limb
as his heart’s disturbance; and wore an ingenious air of sympathy, both
for him and for myself, that I should have unwittingly conferred such
pain upon an unoffending gentleman.
“My dear Captain, had I only known,” says I, “I would neither have
bestowed a pistol on a prisoner nor a glance upon yourself.”
“I cannot say which has wrought the greater havoc,” says the Captain,
lifting up his painful face.
“Sir, you can, I think,” says I, gazing at him with my brightest eyes.
He admitted the witchery of them, for he laughed and dropped his own.
“True,” he sighed. “God help me!”
“This is no particular season for your prayers,” I answered, softly,
and sighed much the same as he. “Am I so much a devil then, or to be
avoided like one? Had you been a brother I could not deplore your
accident more tenderly.”
“No, no; not that,” says he.
“Perhaps, sir, you will explain?” says I, in full enjoyment of his
uneasiness.
“I am afraid of liking you too well,” he rejoined, with the soldier’s
bluntness. The prisoner’s escape, I ought to tell you, had killed the
fop.
“That all?” I exclaimed in sweet surprise. “Dear, dear! liking me too
well--how singular!”
“Alas, too well!” he echoed, with a great appearance of high feeling,
“for would you have me false to the King and to myself?”
“Oh, politics!” I laughed, but noted that damp beads were come upon the
Captain’s forehead. “And my dearest man,” I added, “you behold in me
the most harmless being--I that cannot suffer a rebel to be hanged--the
most artless, harmless creature I assure you.”
Poor wretch! I saw him wriggle in his bonds. ’Twas a very futile
effort, as now I had drawn the cords so tight about him that he was
laid submissive as a sheep. To-night, I think, a marble statue could
not have resisted the appealing brightness of my eyes. They never
were more cordial, more alluring, more perilous to the soul of man.
Therefore, in one short hour the Captain was undone. His resolution
was being gradually beaten, as I could plainly tell, and I felt grim
satisfaction stiffen me, as I settled myself cosily within the warmth,
and prepared a reception for my prey.
I have said that it was a loud night of winter, and the wind crying
from the east; now screaming in the chimneys, now rattling the panels
and the casements, now calling with its ghostly voices away there in
the wood. It was a night for adventure, and Captain Grantley fortified
himself with wine, because he was about to embark on one, and that the
most perilous.
The Captain’s fair companion was wonderfully kind. He noted it, and
took it as a confirmation of his late opinions. Now and then she was
something more than kind, and on the strength of that he toasted her,
while she hinted that she was not displeased. Presently she drew her
chair ten inches nearer to him, and soon tongues and hearts were most
harmoniously flowing. Outside, the wind was ever rising, and sometimes
it cast gusts of smoke down the wide chimney, and as it poured into the
room the lady would shiver with sweet exaggeration and denounce the
horrid north.
“Had she quite regretted her journey to the north?”
“Yes, but for one circumstance.”
“And what was that, if she would deign to forgive his importunity?”
“She had met a soldier at her country-house.”
It was not delicate, it was characteristic, it was the sort of thing
only my Lady Barbara could say; but Captain Grantley would have burnt
his leg rather than it should have been unsaid. This was but the first
of many speeches that astonished and delighted him. To-night the lady
was never more certain of herself, nor was the Captain ever less so.
Inch by inch the unwilling victim was lured to his doom.
Presently a servant brought in his supper on a tray that gleamed with
damask and silver dishes. Under her ladyship’s permission he ate
and drank, but every minute his gaze was straying to his dangerous
companion, whose little shoes were toasting on the hearth. Many moments
of that depressing day his mind had been for her. Some bright, brave
gesture jumped up from his bosom to his eyes; a word, a smile, a
tone, her charming indignation, her lovely anger against himself and
politics, her frank impertinence, her amazing candour, and above all,
her apartness from the common herd of women--elegant but featureless.
To be explicit, that was how she held poor man. A woman quite unlike
her sisters, yet as feminine as anything that ever fibbed and trailed
a petticoat. The lords of creation mostly deign to take us women to
themselves the moment they can be persuaded that they have caught an
entirely new variety. The principle is similar to the one we work
upon when we wear a new brocade, or the newest hat with feathers on.
If one meets Mrs. Araminta flaunting in the same, one pulls it off
and promptly, and bestows it on one’s maid. And had my Lady Barbara
reminded Captain Grantley, though never so remotely, of the worthy
lady of his friend, Major Blunder of the Blues, or of any other female
whatsoever, he would have seen her at the devil rather than he would
have wooed her, and callow Cornet Johnson could have had her for the
asking. But a certain originality of artifice grafted on a spontaneity
of nature, and Bab Gossiter contrived to be just herself, and not to
be mistaken for any other creature, and was coveted accordingly by the
vanity of every bachelor in the town of London.
Thus with Captain Grantley. In his time the dear man had had a large
experience of women. Some, maybe, he had seen more statuesque, more
goddesslike, more rigidly and correctly beautiful, yet never one quite
so much herself, so entirely herself, so open yet so elusive, so quick,
so captivating. As the evening went, as the board was cleared, and the
Captain’s words grew warmer, their talk competed in its energy with the
animated winds that struck the windows.
“Now, sir, tell me of these barbarous politics,” she commanded, like
one who only knows obedience.
“Nay, dear lady, tell me of your own,” says he.
Strange how she was fired by his words! He saw her colour glow and
burn, and the lamps in her eyes were lit.
“My father is my politics,” says she.
The Captain could not have recoiled more palpably had a live coal
cracked out of the blaze and dropped upon his hand.
“Ha!” he breathed, “your father!”
“Sir, they will imprison him; and when they do they will imprison this
very heart of mine. Perhaps, sir, you never knew a father, perhaps
you never loved a father, perhaps you never saw a father’s honourable
silver hairs. Sir, they will imprison him; and when they do, life will
be all empty to me.” The lady fell into a sudden weeping. The sobs
shook her as a reed. And though she fought with all her handkerchief
against the slow but certain tears they crept down to her powder, and
so gravely furrowed it that afterwards she shrank the farther in the
shade.
But through a convenient interval of cambric this distressed daughter
intently marked the Captain’s face. The good man had been long
apprenticed to the sword and to the world, but sure the lady’s agonies
did move him.
“Tell me,” he said, “what I can do? What is my power? I am but a
servant of the King. Madam, do you think it is my pleasure to put you
in such pain? Madam, I am but a menial, a tool. I am not the law by
which you suffer, and if I were, do you suppose I would not let it
spare you?” There was a fine indignant sternness in the man that made
the lady tremble. Yet she exulted, too, for Captain Grantley was
steadily ripening to the deed exacted of him. In confidence, however,
I had better tell you that this incorrigible Bab Gossiter, like the
naughty child she was, was playing with a fire, and in the sequel which
she is pledged to presently set forth, you shall be told how badly that
fire burnt the lovely, heedless fool.