Part 12
She had started back from Jeffray with all the soft, glamourish light gone from her face, her eyes growing hard and fierce under her black brows. With a significant gesture she turned and climbed into one of the ruined windows, and, parting the ivy that hung in masses about the jambs, looked out over the grass-land towards the abbey pools. A man was standing under a willow with his back towards the ruins. He was busy recharging his gun, and watching his spaniel that was swimming out to recover the bird that had fallen into the water. Bess watched him a moment with her eyes sullen and full of hatred. Surely some devil must have persuaded the unconscious Dan to trudge down to the abbey ponds that evening.
Springing down again, she ran back to Jeffray, her red petticoat swinging about her slim, strong ankles.
“It is Dan,” she said, in a whisper, looking hard at Richard.
“Confound the fellow!”
Bess’s eyes gleamed sympathetically.
“You must go, Mr. Jeffray.”
“Go?”
“If Dan found you with me—”
Richard’s smooth face grew wondrous grim for the moment.
“I am not afraid of your cousin, Bess,” he said.
“Ah, you do not know Dan; he has the temper of a devil.”
Richard was looking at her very earnestly.
“Perhaps you are right, Bess,” he answered. “There is no reason why we should betray our trysting-place to him. What shall you do?”
“Oh, I can hide and wait till Dan has gone. He will never suspect that I am here. And when—”
She hesitated, and swayed nearer to Richard as they walked towards his horse.
“When?” he echoed.
“Shall we meet here again?”
“Thursday.”
“Three days!”
“It cannot be before.”
She smiled mysteriously and looked at Richard with the same alluring light shining in her eyes. How red and mischievous her lips looked! Jeffray conceived a great thirst for them, but hung back as though his honor shackled him. They were both a little shy of each other, looking long into each other’s eyes and breathing rapidly. Then they heard Dan’s voice calling to his dog, and Jeffray, mounting his horse, smiled at the girl and rode out from the ruins. Bess stood watching him with her bosom rising and falling and her face aglow.
Richard overtook Dan Grimshaw at the ford, and gave him “good-day” as he splashed through the water. The forester’s ugly face clouded as he recognized Jeffray. He touched his fur cap surlily, and appeared puzzled to know what business the Squire of Rodenham had in Pevensel. Jeffray, gathering that Bess was safe, pricked up his horse and took the path through the woods.
XVIII
Shakespeare’s Romeo lost his reason in a night, and, however illogical the intoxications of youth may seem, they are of finer gold than the cold-tempered alloys of age.
Jeffray rode through the woods that evening, and heard the birds singing in the thickets, and saw the gloom creeping up over the mysterious hills, the gray sky cracking in the west to let through the red and molten lava of the setting sun. Thrush challenged thrush on many a glimmering spire, blackbirds piped it mellowly, linnets twittered in the gorse. Soon the plaintive chiding of the wryneck would be heard amid the meadows and the thickets. The wild woods seemed full of sound, of all the joyous outpourings of life, the massed chantings of the forest choristers. The gorse glimmered, wind-flowers shivered in the shade, the cuckoo-flower was unfolding its finials of lilac and white. Overhead the great trees breathed and murmured, tossing their hands to the setting sun.
Jeffray’s whole soul was filled with melancholy delight. Was not this black-haired Bess akin to all this beauty, this starting forth of colors, this uprushing of sound? The light in her eyes, surely it had set his soul on fire. And the sweet scent of her clothes, like hay on a June morning, should he forget it to the day of his death?
He slept but little that night, tossing to and fro—and thinking of Bess. Even when he slept he dreamed of her, and waking—seemed to catch her face looking out at him from the gloom. Ever and again, with a rallying of his loyalty to Jilian, he strove to put the thought of the girl out of his head. It was but the old battle betwixt nature and the sentimental but very jealous ordinances of civilization. On the one hand, romance pleaded, on the other, prosaic proprieties of life propounded the doctrine of peace and respectable monotony.
Richard came from his bedroom feeling feverish and heavy about the eyes next morning. It was but a just judgment on the physical part of him, he imagined, for the emotional debauch of yesterday. He ate his breakfast in solitude, staring morosely out of the window, and watching the clouds move across the sky. Depression had followed on exaltation, and he was moved to regard the passion of yesterday in a somewhat more stern and moral light. No, he would not meet Bess on Thursday. If she were in trouble she could come to him at Rodenham and he would help her. Heavens, if his escapade came to Miss Jilian’s ears there would be excitement enough for him in the home of the Hardacres! He would go and see Jilian that very morning. Her presence would chasten him and enable him to realize more acutely the disloyalty of his attraction towards poor Bess.
Probably Miss Hardacre was puzzled by her betrothed’s melancholy as they walked on the terrace that day with Jilian’s two spaniels playing about her feet. The lady’s quick wits were soon at work to discover the meaning of her dear Richard’s moodiness. Had she been oversharp with him concerning poor Mary Sugg? Jeffray smiled at her with genuine candor, and confessed that the parson’s daughter had nothing to do with his depression. He was vexed with a headache; so much Miss Hardacre could cajole from him, and it was enough to enable her to be sympathetic.
“La, Richard,” she confessed, regarding him very gravely, “you look quite feverish and ill. Would you like to lie down in the house? Quiet, Tib! Down Tobe! your master has a headache. Drat the dogs; how noisy they are, to be sure!”
Miss Hardacre flicked her handkerchief at the spaniels, who, imagining that the lady was challenging them to a game, yapped and growled with greater vigor.
“Deuce take the dogs!”
Richard had his hand to his head.
“Don’t vex yourself, Jilian,” he said, “it is nothing, I thank you.”
“You look very white, Richard.”
“It is the megrims—perhaps—”
Some sudden suspicion seemed to seize upon Miss Hardacre’s heart. She looked at her betrothed keenly, with an anxious hardening of her eyes and mouth.
“Richard?”
“Yes, dear—”
“Have you been in Rodenham village?”
Jeffray stared at her questioningly.
“Not for a week,” he said.
“Supposing it should be—Oh—horrible! My head is in a whirl.”
Jeffray flushed up as though Jilian had suddenly discovered all that was in his heart.
“I do not understand you, Jilian,” he said.
Miss Hardacre had drawn a little apart from Jeffray, and was waving her scented handkerchief under her nose.
“Supposing you are sickening for the small-pox, Richard,” she said.
“Jilian!”
“You look very feverish. No, please do not come too near me.”
“Am I so terrible to look at?”
“Oh, Richard, I am sure I am about to faint.”
Jeffray had grown pale of a sudden. Was there anything prophetic in Miss Hardacre’s words, or was it his own fancy that made him feel chilly about the heart? He drew away from his betrothed, put his hand to his forehead, and felt that it was hot and moist.
He glanced at Jilian, who was walking unsteadily with her eyes half closed, the spaniels still yapping at her heels.
“Certainly I feel feverish,” he confessed; “shall I give you my arm, Jilian? No. Perhaps I had better keep away from you.”
Miss Hardacre’s face had gone an ashy yellow behind the blushes that still bloomed upon her cheeks.
“Richard,” she said, “go home at once and send for Surgeon Stott, from Rookhurst. It is not safe for you to remain near me.”
Jeffray was gazing at her searchingly, wondering how much she loved him since her first thoughts seemed for herself.
“I think you are right,” he said, slowly.
Jilian still played with her handkerchief, and appeared tormented by the conflicting emotions in her heart. It was proper for her to display some tenderness towards her betrothed, yet she was in mortal fear of the disease that might be lurking in his very breath.
“Richard, mon cher, if anything should happen, I—I will come and nurse you.”
Jeffray reddened and looked somewhat ashamed.
“I could not let you imperil yourself,” he retorted, with much feeling.
Miss Hardacre wavered, and held out her hands to him pathetically. She was sorry for the lad, and yet her terror overcame her pity.
“Go home, Richard,” she said. “No, you must not kiss me. It may be nothing but a fear, but—I am afraid of you to-day.”
And Jeffray, feeling strangely humbled, bowed and left her on the terrace.
The sense of feverishness increased on Richard as he rode homeward through wild, alluring Pevensel. The blood was drumming in his brain; his eyes were hot, his mouth parched and dry with the March wind and the dust. Even the motion of his horse made him sweat, and there was a dull ache across his loins. How different his mood from that which had torched him through the wilds but yesterday!
The forest itself seemed to grow full of fantasies before him, like some weird etching of Albrecht Durer’s. The trees towered, waxing grotesque and even threatening as they poured down in places upon the road. The mutterings of the wind were intensified in his ears, the lights and shadows of the landscape exaggerated. Continually he fancied that he saw a figure in a red cloak flitting amid the crowded trunks of the trees. The feverish thought haunted him that Bess was flying to Rodenham for fear of Dan. What if he had had the fever in his blood and had given it to the girl in the abbey yesterday? The thought of her proud and handsome face scarred by the ravages of disease made him shiver and feel cold at the heart. Poor Jilian also might take it from him, nor did he wonder that she had shrunk away in fear.
Coming to the lowlands, and seeing the pasture lands and fields russet and green under the blue, he uncovered his head and let the wind play about his forehead. The lodge gates were open, and even as Jeffray came up the road at a walk, Dr. Sugg’s stout figure came out from the shadows of the yews that hid the drive. Richard rallied himself and steadied his wits as the rector halted in the road to speak to him. They had not met since Jeffray had excused himself by letter from receiving Mary Sugg at the priory.
“Good-day, Mr. Richard.”
“Good-day, sir, I want to speak with you.”
The parson was looking at Jeffray curiously, screwing up his eyes, wrinkles running across his forehead.
“What news have you for me?”
“Bad, sir, bad. George Gogg’s wench has the small-pox to a certainty. Gogg’s in bed himself. Old Sturtevant and two more have sickened.”
Jeffray winced perceptibly, and gazed with some uneasiness at the rector.
“I am sorry about Mary,” he said.
“Don’t mention it, sir,” quoth Dr. Sugg, stolidly.
“The Lady Letitia is nervous, very nervous, sir, and, to be frank with you, Miss Hardacre, my betrothed—”
The rector’s eyes twinkled as he broke in upon Jeffray’s apologies.
“Do not vex yourself, sir,” he said. “I understand the matter perfectly. May I remark, Mr. Jeffray, that you look far from well yourself.”
Richard stared in Dr. Sugg’s red and kindly face.
“I—sir?”
“You look feverish—uncommon feverish. I hope you are not going to be bedded, sir. How are you feeling, eh?”
Richard forced a smile and wiped his forehead.
“Rather hot in the head, Sugg, and stiff about the back.”
The rector’s air of concern deepened. He screwed up his eyes still more and cocked his broad head seriously at Jeffray.
“Shall I tell Stott to ride up to the priory to-morrow, sir? He will be in the village.”
“I am much obliged to you, doctor.”
“Forewarned—forearmed, Mr. Jeffray. I trust, though, it is nothing serious with you. My girl Mary’s all right as yet. I’ll send Stott on to you to-morrow.”
XIX
The Lady Letitia sat before the fire in the red parlor with a copy of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ lying upon her lap. In the fender lay a bundle of feathers which the old lady was burning, having heard that the smoke therefrom was very efficacious in the preventing of fevers. Very cross and querulous she felt, and very cross she looked as she sat there burning the feathers and taking snuff from time to time, for the Lady Letitia was not a woman fitted to play the Dorcas or to take pleasure in ministering to the sick. Pain, disease, and poverty were things she dreaded and detested as vulgar intruders, marring the polite gayeties of life.
Hence she had shown no little impatience that morning when Peter Gladden had announced the fact that Mr. Richard was indisposed and would keep his bed. Gladden, bearer of cocoa and shaving-water, had found his master looking flushed and feverish, with dry lips and heavy eyes, and complaining of sickness and headache and sharp pain in the small of the back. Jeffray would not have the curtains drawn, for the sunlight seemed to intensify his feeling of nausea and the feverish throbbing in his head. He had ordered Gladden to send a groom down to Rodenham village to insure Surgeon Stott’s calling that day.
As the Lady Letitia sat burning her feathers and muttering to herself in the red parlor, Peter Gladden’s black-coated figure appeared in the doorway, his colorless face imperturbable as ever. The dowager glanced at the butler irritably over her shoulder, and asked him, sharply, what he wanted.
“Surgeon Stott, madam, requests the honor of speaking with you.”
“What’s the man want with me, Gladden?”
“It concerns Mr. Richard, madam.”
The Lady Letitia scowled—and straightened her cap.
“Tell the man to come in, Gladden,” she said. “Tell him to remain by the door. Of course his clothes reek of the small-pox.”
The butler disappeared with a cynical twinkle in his eyes, and turned to where Mr. Stott was standing with his broad back to the hall fire. The surgeon and Mr. Gladden looked at each other with a certain comical flash of sympathy. Stott was a florid and well-complexioned person who wore a blue coat, a scratch wig, brown riding-breeches, and top-boots. The surgeon did not cultivate the town graces and delicacies of “the faculty.” He had to ride through mud and ford streams, dive into hovels where gowns and periwigs would have been a nuisance and the pomposities of the profession more than ridiculous.
The dowager scrutinized Mr. Stott from top to toe with an air of aristocratic insolence as he bowed himself into the red parlor. She scanned his muddy boots, noticed the bourgeois redness of his face and hands, and desired him, with some hauteur, not to approach too near her chair. Surgeon Stott’s humorous mouth twitched expressively. He inhaled the odors of lavender and burned feathers, and seated himself, with the amiable docility of a philosopher, near the door.
The Lady Letitia had cocked her beak at him commandingly.
“Well, sir, what is your business with me?”
“I have come to speak to you about Mr. Jeffray, madam.”
The dowager caught a solemn twinkle in the man’s vulgar, blue eyes; the suave curve of his clean-shaven mouth seemed to suggest that the surgeon possessed a strong sense of humor. The Lady Letitia’s dignity increased. She did not exist to amuse muddy apothecaries peddling boluses in provincial towns. She, to whom the great Dr. Billinghurst, of London, would listen for an hour, was not to be smiled at by this rustic blue-bottle.
“You are the apothecary from Rookhurst, sir, I believe?”
“Surgeon, madam.”
“A member of the company?”
“I claim that distinction.”
The Lady Letitia’s face expressed surprise. Her manner suggested to Mr. Stott that he had not impressed her with any great degree of authority in the art of healing.
“We thought we would have your opinion, sir,” she explained, “as a temporary satisfaction. Should my nephew show signs of serious indisposition, we shall send for a responsible physician to attend him. Now, sir, will you oblige me with your candid opinion as to Mr. Jeffray’s health.”
Surgeon Stott was watching the old lady with grim curiosity. She was a distinct study in aristocratic arrogance with her air of condescending patronage, and her detestable old face painted and powdered to the very complexion of her vanity.
“If you care to consider my opinion, madam—”
“Well, sir?”
“I may state that Mr. Jeffray is sickening with the small-pox.”
“What!”
The Lady Letitia perked up like a frightened hen, much to Surgeon Stott’s inward satisfaction.
“That is my diagnosis, madam,” he said. “I have bled Mr. Jeffray of ten ounces, and ordered him to be sponged with tepid water. One of the grooms is to ride back with me to Rookhurst for the physic. There will be a fever mixture and a bolus. Can I oblige your ladyship in any way?”
The dowager plied her handkerchief and strove to recover her disturbed dignity. Richard with the small-pox! How deplorably vexatious, not to say—inconsiderate—her nephew’s illness appeared! Meanwhile, Surgeon Stott had risen. He bowed to the dowager till his tight riding-breeches creaked, and seemed not a little amused at the old lady’s fluster.
“With your kind permission, madam,” he said, “I will call again to-morrow. Your ladyship may even need my humble attention.”
The dowager bridled at the insinuation.
“Call by all means,” she retorted, “but I shall have transferred myself to some locality where I can obtain trustworthy advice.”
When Mr. Stott had gone, the dowager pealed the bell, and almost squealed at Gladden when his emotionless face appeared at the door.
“Send Parsons to me at once, and order Betsy to pack my boxes.”
Peter Gladden bowed, smiled curiously, and departed. At the end of three minutes Parsons, the Lady Letitia’s confidential man, a thin, circumspect individual with a prim mouth and a long nose, marched in to receive his mistress’s orders.
“Parsons, we must leave Rodenham at once. Have the coach ready by one, and order Betsy to pack my trunks. Can we make Tunbridge Wells before dusk?”
Parsons bowed, and apologized for the roads—in that they had the bad taste to be execrably heavy.
“Drat the roads,” quoth the old lady, in a fine fume. “No decent folk should venture into this abominable wilderness. Where can we bait for the night, Parsons?”
“We can find a good inn at Grinstead, madam.”
“Let it be Grinstead, then. And Parsons, see that Gladden and the servants have their vails; a guinea will do for the wenches; here is my purse. And see to your pistols, Parsons; this beggarly slough is full of smugglers and footpads.”
The suave and obsequious Parsons left to prepare his mistress’s departure. The Lady Letitia, still unduly distressed, hobbled up to her bedroom by the back stairs, so that she should not pass her nephew’s door. The guineas Richard had loaned to her were sewn up in a leather bag under her hoop. Miss Betsy was flinging gowns, petticoats, and underclothing into the trunks, being no less eager than the Lady Letitia to flee the house that the pest had entered. The room was littered with scarves, pomade-boxes, pins, ribbons, jewelry, gowns, stockings, and shoes. The dowager stood leaning on her stick, scolding and directing the girl as she hurried the multifarious articles into the trunks.
The old lady did not attempt to conceal either her nervousness or her annoyance from her maid.
“Drat the small-pox,” she said, with feeling; “one would think that the devil had the sowing of the pest. Confusion, wench, what are you doing with that green silk sack? Don’t crush it up as though it were dirty linen. Yes. I have told Parsons that we must make Grinstead before dusk.”
Miss Betsy sat back on her heels as she knelt beside the largest trunk, and glanced round at the hundred and one articles littering the floor.
“Poor Mr. Richard!” she said.
“What’s that you’re saying?”
“It does seem mean, ma’am, that we should be running away and leaving him alone.”
“Betsy,” quoth the dowager, curtly, “you’re a fool.”
“La, ma’am!”
“What good can we do by staying here, hey? You should be grateful that I have the moral courage to go.”
Before she departed the Lady Letitia wrote an affectionate note to her nephew, addressing him as “Mon beau Richard, mon cher neveu,” praying for his speedy recovery, and explaining that nothing but the extreme delicacy of her health persuaded her to leave him at such a crisis. Shortly after noon the dowager’s coach rolled away from the priory porch, with Peter Gladden bowing stiffly on the threshold, and staring a contemptuous farewell at Mr. Parsons on the back seat, who was looking to his pistols. Richard, half delirious in his room above, heard the grinding of the wheels and the rattling of the harness. He understood dimly that his aunt was deserting him with his guineas under her petticoat. And thus the small-pox drove the old lady out of Rodenham, and the sick man was left to Peter Gladden and Surgeon Stott.
XX
It was on the night of Tuesday that Isaac came to Ursula’s cottage and seated himself on the oak settle before the fire. Old Ursula was in the ingle-nook with a pile of stockings in her lap, Bess on a stool beside the fender, her hands clasped about her knees, her eyes full of the thought of Jeffray. She had opened the door to the patriarch, greeted him somewhat sullenly, and shot the bolts after him for fear that Dan should be lurking outside the cottage. Isaac Grimshaw’s smooth face suggested that he was in the most sociable of moods. He persuaded his sister to brew a bowl of rum punch, and, drawing out a short pipe and a tobacco-box from the tail-pocket of his coat, sat smoking before the fire. Bess, on her stool, was watching the old man suspiciously, and wondering what thoughts were passing in his mind. She always distrusted Isaac’s good-humor, and preferred a frown from him to a smile.
Isaac began to prattle on all manner of matters, poking fun at old Ursula and looking as simple and jolly an old fellow as ever sniffed the odors of lemon and rum, cloves and cinnamon. He talked of Rookhurst Fair, and promised to buy a bunch of ribbons for Ursula, and a pair of red shoes for her to wear on May-day.
Bess grew very mistrustful of the old man’s mood as he sat there shaking his silvery hair in the firelight, thrusting out his lower lip, and watching her with his keen, gray eyes. She would take none of his punch, though he pressed her often, noticing that Ursula was growing drowsy after she had drunk of it more than once. She felt instinctively that there was something false in the old man’s hilarity. Often Bess fancied that Isaac was listening for some sound he intended that she should not hear. She concealed her suspicions from him, humored his gayety, and kept her wits alert lest there might be treachery afoot against herself. Isaac still ladled out the punch, winking at Bess as old Ursula waxed sleepy in the ingle-nook. He began to tell the women of Rookhurst Fair in the old days, when he could handle a cudgel with any youngster in the country. His shrill yet melodious voice flowed on without ceasing, as though he were endeavoring to drown the silence with a perpetual plash of words.