Part 17

“Rakehell Rockhurst—Rakehell! And I smote Lionel Ratcliffe on the mouth for daring to couple the name to yours—!” Then, on a fierce revulsion of feeling, he caught the pale hand close to him and kissed it passionately. “Wherefore tell me this? Father, as I have ever known you, so must I ever love and honour you.”

“The Rakehell—” repeated the Lord Constable; and once more, out of the very pain of his avowal, came harshness into his tone—“that was my name in men’s mouths. His Majesty had another, a kinder one, for me; he called me in jest his merry Rockhurst. You have been reared in ripe veneration of the King’s Grace; yet, had you known life by my side (as once you yearned), you would have learned that the one name and the other meant, in Whitehall, at least, the same thing. Rakehell—aye, I may have had black perdition in my heart many a time; yet believe this, Harry, that when like Lucifer I fell, I sinned like Lucifer with pride, arrogance, recklessness, what you will—never with baseness. Merry, my good liege called me. To find me so mad, yet see me wear so grave a face, it gave him a spur to laughter. Merry? Nay; he loved me, in chief, because in his sad heart he knew mine. Both sad hearts, sickened of life. Forever striving to find a blossom in the dust, a jest in the weary round, to taste of a fruit that was not ashes on the tongue. And there you have the secret of my life and his.… Then came Diana.”

“Ah, hush, my lord!” Harry rose from his seat, in violent agitation, and stood a second, pressing his hands against his breast. “With me, you know, wounds heal slowly,” he went on, striving to speak calmly. “Do not touch upon that hurt, lest the bleeding begin afresh.”

The father rose, too, followed his son to the parapet, and, again laying a hand upon his shoulder, compelled his attention. The splendour of the sunset pageant had faded, and with it all beauty from the sky. Only the glow, the gloom, the belching smoke remained.

“I knew her ere ever you did,” said the Lord Constable, his eye fixed as upon an inner vision, fair and fresh and pure. “Aye, you never knew it. She spoke not of it again, nor did I; for you had come between us!… She entered into my life one winter’s night; and across the snow I set her again on her sheltered way, knowing what I was—and seeing what she was. But from the instant of our parting (’twas all in the snow, lad, and above us a sky of stars; scarce I touched her hand; not a word exchanged but a God be wi’ ye), from that instant she was never from my thoughts—She, the might-have-been, the one woman for me! Aye, you stare, your grave father! Your old father! I was a strong man, then, and life ran potent in my veins. Dost remember how I met her again, in the Peacock Walk at home, and you prating of your love for her, with beardless lip?”

“Oh, father, father, father!” cried the poor lad. “For God’s sake!… You are all I have left!”

“Hush! Look on these white hairs, sign among so many that life has done with me. Nay, I know full well I am not old in years, scarce double thine own; but the vital spring is dying. Listen, Harry, you are a man; I have a trust to lay upon you. Since that terrible dawn, when, crying out, ‘Diana’s dead!’ you fell, bleeding of your old wound, into swoon upon swoon, and thereafter into mortal sickness, you know her name has never passed your lips nor mine. It was better, in sooth, you should believe her dead.”

The young man caught at the parapet behind him for support; and the sweat broke on the father’s brow as he looked at him. There was a tense silence. Then, fiercely, Harry Rockhurst said:—

“Now, my lord, you must speak!”

* * * * *

A moment longer Rockhurst kept silence. Curious reversal of the wheel of fate! Here stood he, who had always been as a god to his son, now as one in the dock before his judge. He, Rockhurst, whose will the King himself could not bend, ordered to speech; and because of his own just mind, just through all injustice wrought, unresentful—aye, submissive. The moment of agony of a little while ago had passed.

Already it seemed to him the things of life were receding so quickly that he looked on them from afar. Passion had gone from his voice as he spoke; only a mighty sadness was left.

“It was even to speak, Harry, that I kept thee by me here. Know, then, that until the night of Lady Chillingburgh’s death,—the night which found Diana without a shelter,—in my daily intercourse with your promised bride the father was ever stronger in me than the man. Aye, and when her brother fled from the plague-stricken house and there was none but me to protect her (for her kinsman Lionel was, as thou hast good cause to know, my poor wounded boy, no guardian for thy bride) ’twas as a father I cared for her all through the livelong night as we wandered, vainly seeking a refuge. I brought her at length to my house, and went forth to seek the means of conveying her home. That was even the very morning of your arrival. Alack, nor horse nor man could fugitive then find in the waste of the doomed city! I came back to her.… Oh, my son, before you judge me, remember: men knew not what they did those terrible days. Question any who passed through them. Staid citizens became drunken reprobates, greybeards rioted horribly with the madness of youth, priests denied their God—”

“But Diana, Diana—”

“Aye, Diana! I deemed Fate itself had given her to me. The madness of the horror about me had turned my brain. Madness of my love for her, of my long self-denial! I would have wedded her, even that hour. But she, she had yielded her troth to thee … to thy father she gave her scorn! At that most cursed moment thy voice rose from the street, thou, my son whom I deemed far away, in the heart of the country! I would have killed her rather than yield her. Remember, I was mad. I thrust her from thy sight into an inner room. Ah, God, in that room!”

“In that room?”

“The plague lay in wait for her.”

“The plague—”

“Unknown to me one lay there, a woman who had crept in, sick—to die!”

Harry gave a deep groan, covered his face with his hands, and fell upon the bench.

“Whilst I lay raving, did she die of the plague, there, in your room? O my Diana!”

“My son, I know not. When I sought for her she was gone, vanished. The window was opened into the garden. The woman lay dead upon the bed.”

Harry sprang to his feet, clapped his hands together in a sudden agony of joy, more dreadful at that moment than all his sorrow to the father’s eyes.

“She escaped? She may be living yet! There is mercy in heaven!”

“No mercy for such as I—nor for thee, being my son. For my moment’s madness, what retribution! Harry, this whole long year I have looked for her, night and day. There is not a corner of the town we have not scoured, old Chitterley and myself. Aye, that was the mystery you fretted not to share!”

Harry looked at his father speechlessly, with fierce dry eyes.

“Alas!” Rockhurst went on stonily, “she must even be dead, stricken by the contagion—fallen at the street corner perchance, swept into the common pit as so many others! And yet, if she were not dead—There is not a burning house I pass but I fear she may be in the flames. Food is as ashes, drink as gall upon my tongue. And now, with the presage of death upon me, I lay the hideous burden upon thee, my son, my innocent son!”

He stretched his hand. But, drawing back, the latter turned a red glance upon him.

“And you let me believe her dead that morning—that morning! I could have saved her!” He flung his arms in the air and shook them; a terrible menace on his face.

“God!” he called, “God—!”

Rockhurst gave a loud cry:—

“My son, do not curse your father!”

The young man’s arms dropped by his side. He looked at the bent white head, at the countenance worn, wan, patient; then he cast himself upon his father’s breast, sobbing:—

“God help us all!”

Night was falling apace. Father and son sat together over the supper table. The meal, such as it was, was over; each had made a pretence at eating, lest he add to the other’s burden. In silence Harry’s eyes ever sought his father, striving to reconcile the man he had known and reverenced above all manhood with the man who had harmed him to the shattering of his life. Yet he could now find nothing in his heart but a deeper tenderness. Nay, as he gazed at the noble silvered head, the countenance, beautiful, diaphanous, it was with no jot of reverence abated, rather a kind of awe added to a climbing apprehension. His own words of that terrible moment of revelation rang in his ears as a tolling bell: “_Father! You are all I have left!_”

At last he rose and went restlessly to the open window. When he looked up, there was the pure sky overhead with a star or two, very peaceful; and when he looked forth between the towers, there raged the flames, yonder hung the murk the blacker for the fire lurid below. It seemed an image of his own life.’

“At least there can be peace,” he told himself.

* * * * *

The door opened behind him; he heard Chitterley’s shuffling feet, and next the quavering voice; but, lost in his contemplation, he never turned his head.

“Harry!” came Lord Rockhurst’s voice of a sudden.

The young man leaped at his tone. Rockhurst thrust a crumpled sheet into his hand.

“Read it, Harry! A messenger has brought it, hotfoot, and is gone as he came.”

As he spoke, the Lord Constable strode to the door.

“Ho there!” he called to the sentinel in the passage. “Call out the guard! Have the assembly sounded!”

His voice rang out, clarion clear. Harry, holding the paper, stared, astounded; the old fire had come back to his father’s eye, the old life to his step; under the very whiteness of his locks his face looked young again.

“Read, lad, read!” ordered Rockhurst, “and be in readiness.”

His step was already clanking down the stone stairs ere his son, hurrying to the window, could read the sheet in the waning light. Then a great cry broke from the young man: “Diana! Diana!”

“My lord” (so ran the hasty writing on the note), “the convent of St. Helen’s, Bishopgate, within where my kinswoman, Madam Anastasia Bedingfield, has given me shelter, though none of her faith, is even now attacked by the rabble; and we are in parlous danger. Send succour, as you still remember poor Diana!”

From below was heard the roll of drum; then the tramp of feet and the clank of firelock. And over all the Lord Constable’s voice:—

“Steady, lads, and haste. We’ve urgent work to-night!”

Hurriedly Harry set out to join them. His knees trembled as he went. He thought, in the confusion of his mind: My father goeth like a young man again to the rescue, and I like an old one. What will happen between us when we see Diana again?

III

THE LAST COMMAND

Ten frightened ladies, of various ages and comeliness, were gathered round the Mother Abbess in the great stone refectory of St. Helen’s House. Queen Catherine’s convent—removed since the subsidence of the great sickness from its original home in St. Martin’s Lane—was thus far outside the track of the fire, yet the “Blue Nuns” jostled one another like so many frightened children, each in the endeavour to get the closer to the large, firm comfort of her presence. Adown the long table, between the platters of untouched food, burned the four candles in high brazen candlesticks, scantily illumining the room.

The atmosphere was oppressively close, for all the windows were shuttered and barred. And, save for the whimpering of some of the nuns, the mouthing prayerful whispers of others, there was a heavy stillness within, in contrast to the sounds that beat round the walls without: the voice of a mob in a fury.

A husky roar it was, that grew and fell like the waves of the sea. Anon a deep shout or a shrill cry, a shot or a clang, pierced high; anon the thunder of blows at the main doors, echoing through the old house.

As a knock angrier than the rest shook the very foundations, the women raised a wail. Madam Anastasia, the Abbess, looked round them, a certain twist of humour belying the sternness of her face.

“O mother, mother!” shrilly lamented the youngest novice, “shall we all be murdered?”

“Well, and what of that?” quoth the stout daughter of the Bedingfields. “Do we not lay down our lives, in taking convent vows?—Fie, child, Mary Veronica!” Her steady tones began to dominate the thin plaints. “And you, clamouring as you were, but a week ago, to be one of the faithful virgins! Daughters, is this our faith? And, besides, are we not under her Majesty’s special protection, and help sent for? To the chapel with ye, and sing complines. Tut! Have I given permission to break the rules? ’Tis past the hour. Off with ye!”

She rose, hustling them with gestures of her great hanging sleeves, in good-humoured yet irresistible authority. Not one attempted protest, though the smallest novice halted on the threshold to fling a supplicating look which begged piteously for the shelter of the motherly skirts. But the kind steel-grey eye was relentless; and, shivering, the neophyte pattered after her sisters.

Madam Anastasia watched them depart with a shrug of her ample shoulders. Then as she stood, in deep reflection, by the open door, hearkening to the increasing menace, there came the faint tinkle of the chapel bell; and thereafter the uplifted voices of her nuns chanting, dismally enough, but yet sufficiently in unison. She nodded to herself, with a shrewd smile, and was about to gather her long blue skirts together, preparatory to a survey of the defences, when there came the sound of steps along the flags and the figure of the convent guest moved into her view. The Abbess’s face brightened.

“Hither, child!” she beckoned, as Mistress Diana Harcourt, bowing her veiled head, was about to pass on to the chapel.

The young woman approached, flinging back the folds from her face. Against the black filmy frame, her hair, even in the dimness of the corridor, took marvellous brightness as of copper and gold. Her countenance shone with a pearl-like fairness; it was wan, as by long vigils; sad were her eyes, as though from secret tears; but serenity enveloped her as fragrance does the rose.

Her kinswoman surveyed her an instant with favour. Then she plunged into her huge hanging pocket.

“This letter, flung in through a window, tied to a stone; I had nigh forgotten it! ’Tis addressed to you. Had you been of my flock, ’twas my duty to have read it.”

Diana glanced at the superscription, announced coldly that it was from their kinsman, Lionel Ratcliffe, and proceeded to burst the seal. But the colour welled to her pale cheeks, and she gave a cry of indignation as she read:—

“A man’s patience is not eternal. You have forbidden me sight of you, this month past. My offence—the constancy of my love! You will not, so you tell me, out of your papist cage. Yester-eve our kinswoman threatened me that you would change your religion and take the vows. You have reckoned without me, without the anger of the people. ’Tis the cry that the papists have fired London; I care not, false or true. But no papist shall help to rob me of you! Here is my chance, and I shall seize it. I saved you once, in spite of yourself; now, Diana, I shall save you again from yourself. Have no fear, though every stone in the walls that keep you from me be laid low, no harm shall come to you. I shall be there, and with friends. So you are warned; be wise, bid our obstinate old Coz Anastasia yield you peacefully, unbar the doors, facilitate the search for the papers we come to seek, and I will even do still what may be done for her safety and that of all her silly pack.

“If this findeth you open to reason, see that she hang a white cloth from the window over the porch, and soon after unbar the gate. And leave the rest to your faithful and ever-loving cousin,

“LIONEL RATCLIFFE.”

* * * * *

“And he of our blood! Shame!” cried the Abbess, with hot cheeks.

“Mother,” said Diana, and her lip trembled in spite of her brave tone, “had you not best yield, even as he says? Alack! ’tis by bringing peril on you I repay your shelter!”

“Yield you up? A pretty thought! I would rather we all perished together ’neath the stones of the old house. Yield and facilitate, forsooth! Nay, we will even hold the place bolt and bar. An our message have reached the Tower, ’twill go hard with us if the gates do not stand till succour comes. How, hand thee over to yon infamous wretch, who useth the extremity of the city, the blind folly of the mob, the helplessness of a poor house of gentlewomen, to the furthering of his own base purposes! As for my threat that you would take the vows,”—she gave a dry chuckle,—“I’ve overshot the mark, it seems. I deemed to show thee as out of reach of his pursuit. Well, ’tis ill talking when so much is a-doing. Hark ye at that, ’tis the fiercest onslaught yet. Get thee to the chapel. I must to the outer hall.”

“Nay,” quoth Diana, “I go with you.”

The two kinswomen looked at each other for a second with a mutual pride; then, without further word, they went together to the great outer hall, reverberating now to its vaulted roof as hammer strokes fell upon the iron-studded door.

The stolid, elderly red-headed porter came forth from a deep embrasure,—where he had been philosophically, it seemed, listening to the progress of the attack,—and with a hand on each arm drew them in their turn into the shelter out of reach of stone and shots.

“Will the door hold, think you, Bindon?” asked his reverend mistress, briskly.

“Aye,” quoth Bindon, “good iron, stout oak!—So they lay not gunpowder.”

“And so they do, what then?”

Bindon lifted his hand in slight but expressive gesture. Then his small eye rolled from the old face to the young.

“Eh, but ye be two brave women—not a blanch, not a squeak!”

“Sho!” said the Abbess, with a tolerant smile. “And why should I fear death? Have I not been dead these forty years?”

“And why should I fear death,” said Diana’s young voice, “since life has naught left for me?”

“I hope you’ll not be taken at your word, ladies,” said Bindon, with the familiarity of long service. “Nay, look you, I’m none so ready myself! But,” he went on, “I like not this pause without: there may be gunpowder in it. And by your leave, I’ll creep round to the lookout. Eh, ’tis time the guards should arrive, in faith!”

As his burly figure had moved out of sight, Madam Anastasia turned with some asperity:—

“Indeed, Mistress Harcourt, I marvel at you! Life nothing left for you, forsooth? Tut, tut! Is not the best part of it before you? What have you done with your good youth, answer me that—not even borne a soul to God’s service?”

“Why, mother,” Diana exclaimed, and the tears sprang to her eyes. “Do you know my history, and chide me? Oh, I am dead, and this is my tomb. And truly, ’tis best so; since, when I lived in the world, I brought—God knows unwittingly—dire sorrow on two noble hearts that loved me.”

The Abbess thrust her hands impatiently up her big sleeves.

“Tush, child! Shouldst have made thy choice boldly. And he whom you had left of the two would be no worse off than now. This shilly-shally likes me not. In a convent, and no nun! A lovely, free woman, and no wife! Either wed or pray, say I. Nay, my dear, though I threatened your cousin with it, I have known it long: your vocation is not with us! With the blessing of God, I’ll yet give the house a feast on the day of Mistress Harcourt’s wedding with my Lord Rockhurst’s son!”

The renewal of clamour without, the report of a musket, the shattering of a few more panes of glass in the high windows, all but drowned the valiant woman’s words. Yet Diana had caught the drift of them, and clasped the stout shoulders in sudden embrace.

“Wedding! ’Tis more like we feast with death this day!”

“Why, then, ’tis the best feast of all,” cried the Abbess, petulantly.

There came three measured, emphatic blows upon the door. Then, above the loud, continuous howl of the mob, a ringing call:—

“Stand back, there within, stand back for your lives! We now blow your door in.—Stand back!”

“’Tis Cousin Lionel’s voice,” whispered Diana, with white lips.

“Sho!” returned the old lady, with great contempt. She caught Diana by the shoulder and dragged her to the entrance of the passage, where she paused, panting, being somewhat weighty for such swift movements. Bindon, trailing a musket, clattered in their rear.

“Aye, truly,” she said to him, “I begin to think this may be the end. Tut! Where lag those sluggard guards? Sho! Here now come my silly children!—Well, well, Sister Magdalen, my pastoral staff! So we have visitors we shall receive in state.”

She took the crook from the hands of the nun; then, waving back the community, terrified now even to speechlessness:—

“Back to your stalls, daughters! Shame on you! Shall not the shepherd come when he pleases, and shall he find the sheep dispersed?”

She rang her staff threateningly on the flags, and the fluttering bevy fled back to the chapel. “Sheep, indeed—poor things!” chuckled the Abbess.

She was chuckling still when the thud of the explosion came.

It seemed to lift the stone house about them, to make the solid flags heave under their feet. For one instant Diana deemed that they all had been blown in pieces as well as the convent; and, opening her eyes after a reeling moment, was considerably astonished to find herself whole and sound. Before her, in stout equilibrium, was the Abbess, jubilantly chanting a psalm; beside her, Bindon on one knee, poising his firelock. The words he was breathing were not those of prayer.

There was a burst of wailing from the chapel within. Through the porch a wall of white smoke rolled up in swirls.

“They’ve made the breach; the door is down,” said Bindon, superfluously.

The vapour parted. Three men were seen cautiously advancing; beyond them, confusedly, in the ragged breach, Diana caught a glimpse of the street and a crowd of begrimed faces, in brutal exultation, brutal lust of destruction. Ravening as wild beasts behind bars, something yet seemed to hold them back. The next instant, as she recognised Lionel, she knew whose power at once excited and restrained the mob. Waving his sword, he advanced, scarce a fold out of place in his handsome suit, plumed hat on his head, the red curls of his great wig hanging ordered on either side of the long, pale face.

Their eyes met; she saw the gleam in his, and her heart turned sick. The two that strode behind him were dark-visaged, sinister enough, yet had something of the same air, as of men decorously carrying through a necessary act of violence.

Lionel Ratcliffe halted a pace in front of his old kinswoman and swept an ironical bow. There was no flinching of shame in him as he met the stern challenge of her eye.

“Out of my way, madam,” he cried. “I’m not here to deal with you. You’ve not chosen to take my warning; take your lot. My business is with my cousin here, whom you unlawfully detain.—Diana, I have seen to your safety.”

He made an almost imperceptible gesture of his hand as he concluded. The two men darted forward. Hideous confusion instantly sprang up. Diana remembered (and afterward it was with tender laughter) seeing the Mother Abbess strike out right lustily with her pastoral staff; to such good purpose, indeed, that Lionel’s sword was snapped at mid-blade as he tried to parry her blow. At the same instant there was a deafening report in her ear: Bindon had loosed his musket. The foremost of Ratcliffe’s attendants threw up his arms and fell forward. Then she felt herself grasped, and knew the hated touch.