CHAPTER VIII.

FOREBODINGS.

If ever a marriage was performed amidst extraordinary surroundings, it was that second marriage which Symson was now conducting, or rather the third that morning, since already a happy couple had been united before Beau Bufton and Anne Pottle had been joined together. A marriage this (between an actual heiress in a small way and an officer of Rich's Dragoons) hurried through by Symson after he had muttered, "Nigh midday, nigh midday, quick! or there will be no ceremony," while, from without, and from the neighbourhood of the porch, there came cries and jeers--these being from some idlers who had gathered outside--the hoarse voice of Bufton hurling imprecations, and the deeper one of Lewis Granger bidding him hold his peace. And once, a shriek--from Ariadne.

For, as Geoffrey Barry, with contempt in his cold voice, and contempt, too, upon his handsome features, had calmly presented the Beau to the real Ariadne Thorne, the other had become almost beside himself--had, indeed, exhibited so awful a picture of a man transformed by rage and despair as to appal all those who looked upon him, various as their characters and experiences of life were.

"You!" he cried. "You!" addressing Sir Geoffrey, his features distorted, his lower jaw working horribly above that monstrous chin, "You in it, too! You beggarly sailor! You! You!" Then, before any could suspect to what length his fury would carry him, he had wrenched the dress sword he carried by his side from out its sheath, and would have made a pass at the other--indeed, did half do so. But, swift as lightning, that pass was thwarted--by two people! By his newly made wife, who seized his arm even as he would have plunged the blade into Sir Geoffrey's breast, she being aided by Lewis Granger, who, with his hat, which he still carried in his hand, although they were by now outside the church, struck it up--he knocking it from out his hand, so that it fell clattering on the stones at his feet.

"Madman! Fool!" Granger whispered in his ear, "do you wish to finish your morning's work with murder? To end your days at Tyburn?" Then, turning to one of the friends of overnight, he said: "For God's sake help me to get him into the coach. He is mad."

Somehow it was done; in some way the deluded rogue was pushed and hustled into the carriage which had brought him in triumph from the spot where he had met Mrs. Pottle and Anne, and half-delirious with rage, Bufton was borne away. Yet not before he had shrieked such awful objurgations, such curses and blasphemies on the heads of all around him, including Ariadne and her lover, combined with such terrible threats of vengeance, that more than one of the women present stopped their ears.

"Now," said Geoffrey, "now, let us begone, too. Come, Ariadne, I will take you home."

Then he turned to Mrs. Pottle and Anne--who stood close by her mother's side--and bade them also return to the house in Westminster.

"Yet, my poor girl," he said to the latter, "I fear it is but coals of fire you have heaped on your own head. Your revenge for your sister's wrongs has been terrible, nay, supreme; but at what a price to you! What a price! You have closed the door against your own happiness for ever."

"I care not," Anne said. "Care not at all. When her body--poor little Kate's body--was taken from out the river--oh, mother! you remember--I swore that if ever the chance came, I would avenge her. Ah! Sir Geoffrey, Sir Geoffrey, if you had known how she besought him to fulfil his promise--to marry her--to make her an honest woman--then--you--would not----"

"I am not surprised," Geoffrey Barry answered, "knowing all, as I do now, from Miss Thorne. Yet, I fear you have paid too dearly for it."

"She would do it, Sir Jaffray," Mrs. Pottle moaned between her sobs. "She would do it, though I told her there was no call. Oh! why, why, should that monster have had two of my daughters for his victims? One of whom he undone and drove to her death, the other who can never be no honest man's wife now."

"At least," said Ariadne, "you know, Rebecca, that never will she want for aught. You know that, and you, too, Anne. Now, let us hasten to Cowley Street and away from this horrid place."

Perhaps it need scarcely be set down here that overnight, when the meeting between Ariadne and her lover had taken place, all had been explained and made clear to the latter. Indeed the girl had more than once, during the passage of that fortnight since he had parted with her at Fawnshawe Manor, resolved to write to him telling everything, only, on each occasion, her pride had stepped in. "For," she had whispered to herself, again and again, "if he loves me, as he has said so oft, then surely he cannot doubt. He was enraged at the time, deeming, in truth, that that vile fop and knave could have come in search of none but me. But, surely, reflection must convince him it was not so. Surely--surely." And then, still stirred by womanly pride, she determined that she would put the depth of his love to the test. She would summon him to her side, and, if he came, would tell him all. But she was impelled to send that summons without delay, when there reached her ears the terrible rumour that his frigate was to proceed to join the squadron of Admiral Boscawen.

Then he had come, and she had told him all, with the result which has been described.

"And so," he said now, as they sat in the parlour wherein she had yesterday listened so eagerly and with beating heart for that coming, "I should not have been sent for, only it was thought I might be off and away to the West Indies. That is it, eh?" and, from where they sat side by side on the great couch, he stroked her hair.

"No," she answered, softly, "you would have been sent for anyhow, only, perhaps, that news hastened the despatch of my message," and she looked fondly at him. "You doubted me, sir," she continued, "you know you did, and you had to be punished."

"What could I think? I heard you say those fateful words to Mrs. Pottle: 'Then he has seen him.'" Then, he added, "But, still, after what we have witnessed this morning, I wish it had not been. I wish that you had not let it happen."

"Oh, Geoffrey!" she cried, "do not reproach me, do not be angry with me. Anne was so resolute, so determined. She loved that little sister whom he ruined and drove to her death; loved her fondly. I remember after it had happened last year, when the poor child drowned herself after he cast her off, that Anne was demented. Do you know, she meditated tracking him in the streets and pistolling him with her own hands, until I persuaded her to desist from such a crime?"

"Yet now," said Geoffrey, with unconscious humour, "she has married him."

"That thought came to her when she found out that he was at Tunbridge intent on pursuing me. His valet told her that his master was there to obtain the hand of Miss Thorne, the heiress, if possible--the man not knowing that she was in attendance on me--and that decided her. She vows she would have done it even though he had not ruined her sister, as a punishment for his presumption in aspiring to me."

"Yet if he knew this poor girl through her waiting at Vauxhall and Ranelagh for Anne, how is it he should not know Anne herself?"

"It was not surprising. Anne always sang and danced arrayed in some fantastic costume, sometimes as Arlequina with a vizard, another time as a Turkish dancing girl, and, as often as not, as a shepherdess with white wig and patches. And he persuaded the poor child, poor little Kate, to say nothing to her more worldly sister, nor ever to let them come into contact."

"It is a deadly vengeance, as deadly to her as to him. Yet, I vow, he at least deserves to suffer from it. But how could she ever think of, how devise, it?"

For a moment Ariadne paused; so that it seemed to him that there was something which she had not told even now. It appeared that she had not divulged all of the plot. For Ariadne whispered now, or almost whispered, "She had a helpmate, a confederate. A man----"

"A man!" Geoffrey exclaimed. "A man! Surely not young Lord John Dallas--he who arrived at the end of the marriage--when it was too late! He who exposed her?"

"Nay; instead, one whom he has deeply injured and wronged almost as much as he wronged and ruined her sister. Whose life he blasted----"

"Ariadne! who is he?"

"The man who pretends to serve him as his creature, his hireling. He who stood by his side at the marriage; his best man."

"Great God! what duplicity, what vengeance! How has Bufton wronged any man so much that the other should do this thing? Forgive me, Ariadne, I would not say aught to wound you, nor aught against your sex, but--but--such vengeance is a woman's, not a man's."

"Yet I do think the scheme was more his than hers. Oh, Geoffrey!" she cried, suddenly, "I am terrified; terrified at what has happened, and doubly terrified at what will, I fear, happen yet. Oh! why, why, did I let it continue? Yet Geoffrey, upon my honour as a woman, I did not know all; had I done so before we came to London, I would have striven to prevent it. But, now, I fear----"

"Fear what?"

"Something worse that remains behind. For she laughs--she laughed but now when we returned here after that terrible scene, and when she was upstairs with me--laughs and says that, if she is truly tied to him by the laws, yet it will not be for long. She says, too, that the other man has not finished his business yet."

"What has this man, this Bufton, done to him, then? Surely he had no sister to be betrayed also. What can it be?"

"That she does not know, or swears she does not. But that they have met before, that he helped her to plan this scheme, I feel assured. Oh, Geoffrey, how can we put an end to further mischief?"

"Pity 'tis that it was ever begun. And, though I say it not unkindly, that you ever countenanced it."

"Nay, nay!" Ariadne cried, "misjudge me not; I never knew what was being done until the last moment. You must believe that, Geoffrey, or--or--there is no happiness in store for us. I never heard that they had met at Tunbridge, and that he was deceived into thinking she was Ariadne Thorne. I never knew, until a quarter of an hour before you came on that night, that he had been in the lime-tree avenue. And I should not have known it then but by an accident."

"An accident?"

"Yes. I was awaiting you as ever, was wondering why you were late, when I saw--it was easy enough to distinguish in the glow of the sunset--a scarlet coat in the avenue. And then--then--Anne came in hurriedly a little later, with her cloak and hood on."

"The hood I saw lying there. The one I thought you had worn, and which made me doubly suspicious."

"The same. She removed it from her head while talking to me, and, laying it down, forgot it. I asked her who the man could be who was wearing that scarlet coat, and then she told me all, or, at least, almost all. But, knowing you were coming, and wishing to tell her mother who was heart and soul in this scheme of vengeance, she left me and forgot that hood."

"Thank Heaven!" Sir Geoffrey said, "that you knew so little; as well as that you had no part in the plot. Knave, vagabond as the fellow is, I should not have liked my Ariadne to have had part in hoodwinking him."

And the girl seeing, understanding by his words, that he believed her, was happy.

After this they were silent a little while, though each was thinking, in a different way, upon the same thing. He, of what a thousand pities it was that a brave girl such as Anne Pottle should have ruined her future to obtain revenge; she, of what the future might bring--a future that, she could scarcely have told why, she dreaded and looked forward to with extreme fear.

"There are two persons," she whispered now, unconsciously drawing a little closer to her lover's arm even as she did so, "two persons whom, if he had the power to injure, he would. Geoffrey, you know those two?"

"You and I, sweetheart, is't not so? Well, what can he do--this discredited, ruined rogue? What! We shall be man and wife soon now, since there is no truth in the report that I take my ship to join Boscawen; since, too, it seems likely that she and I are doomed to inaction. Ah! if Admiral Hawke could but bring the French to action nearer home and I might be with him. Then--then--there would be a bright future before me."

As he spoke of their being man and wife the girl's heart gave a great leap. Surely, she thought, he must know how much she, too, desired that; and still, as thus she thought, she drew closer to him. But, even as she did so, she whispered:

"How that man can injure you or me I know not, my own. Yet--yet--I saw his face to-day, saw the look, the hideous look of rage and spite, he cast at you--and--oh! oh! my love," she wailed, "I fear, I fear."

"Fear nothing," he whispered back. "Fear nothing. He is a broken, bankrupt knave, and I am a king's officer; while you are to be my wife. He is harmless."